ChristianKl comments on Rationality Quotes May 2016 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: bbleeker 06 May 2016 03:15PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (46)
Tags: quotes

Comments (46)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DanArmak 07 May 2016 06:32:50PM 2 points [-]

Culturally there's a sense that asking a Western doctor to use a checklist means to assumes that he's not smart enough to do the right thing. I don't think that exists to the same extend in China.

Before germ theory Western doctors refused to wash their hands because they didn't see the point of cleanness as a value.

Checklists are known to be very helpful with certain things, even if the relevant profession (e.g. doctors) don't always widely recognize this. On the other hand, why should I wash my hands if you can't give me a reason for cleanliness, neither theoretical (germ theory) nor empirical (it reduces disease incidence)?

Ideally, we should value checklists and rituals as a tool, but also require there to be good reasons for rituals, and trust that those who institute or choose the rituals know what they're doing. We should also be open to changing rituals, sometimes quickly, as new evidence comes in.

Maybe Eastern traditions achieve a better social balance than Western ones on this matter; I wouldn't know.

I think you can describe me easily a system II heuristic that you use to decide when to check more. I don't think you can easily describe how you feel the emotion of surprise that exists on a system I level. Transfering triggers of the emotion of surprise from one person to another is hard.

I think everyone agrees on this. Humans can't fully learn new behaviors just through abstract knowledge without practice.

I would say it's because the relevant professors see issues of algorithm design as higher status than asking themselves when programmers should recheck their code. It seems no Computer Science professor took the time to setup a study to test whether teaching programmers to be faster at typing increases their programming output. That's because the mathematical knowledge get's seen as more pure and more worthy. It has to do with the kind of the knowledge that's valued.

I would say it's because most CS professors don't really care about programming, and certainly not about typing speed. Programming isn't computer science! CS is a branch of applied math. The professors don't care about misallocation of intellectual resources across different fields, because they've already chosen their own field. You'd see the same problems if electrical engineers all studied physics instead, and picked up all the missing knowledge outside of formal education.

There are dedicated software engineering majors, some of them are even good (or at least better at teaching to program than CS ones), but numerically they produce far fewer graduates.

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 May 2016 09:31:42PM -1 points [-]

On the other hand, why should I wash my hands if you can't give me a reason for cleanliness, neither theoretical (germ theory) nor empirical (it reduces disease incidence)?

At the time where the hand washing conflict happened there wasn't much of evidence-based medicine.

Today there is some evidence for checklists improving medical outcomes but they don't get easily adopted.

I think there's decent evidence that combining hypnosis and anesthetic drugs is an improvement over just using anesthetic drugs.

I think everyone agrees on this. Humans can't fully learn new behaviors just through abstract knowledge without practice.

I think the ability to be suprised by the right things is reasonably called knowledge and not only behavior.

There are dedicated software engineering majors, some of them are even good (or at least better at teaching to program than CS ones), but numerically they produce far fewer graduates.

According to Google some of their programmers are 10x as productive as the average. Can a decidated software engineering major teach the knowledge to be required to reach that level reliably? I don't think so. I don't think it even get's 2x.

Is there any software engineering major that tested whether they produce better programmers if they also teach typing? I don't think so.

Comment author: WalterL 10 May 2016 05:53:37PM 2 points [-]

I'm a programmer, and the only part of college that was useful in my field was the freshman "intro to coding" courses. Six months in I was able to do the job I was hired for out of college.

College is a racket.

Comment author: DanArmak 08 May 2016 11:42:32AM *  2 points [-]

At the time where the hand washing conflict happened there wasn't much of evidence-based medicine. Today there is some evidence for checklists improving medical outcomes but they don't get easily adopted. I think there's decent evidence that combining hypnosis and anesthetic drugs is an improvement over just using anesthetic drugs.

This is all true, but it's a rather far jump from here to 'and a culture permeated by Eastern philosophy handles this better, controlling for the myriad unrelated differences, and accounting for whatever advantages Western philosophy may or may not have.'

I think the ability to be suprised by the right things is reasonably called knowledge and not only behavior.

I agree.

According to Google some of their programmers are 10x as productive as the average.

Google hires programmers who are already 10x as productive as the average. It doesn't hire average programmers and train them to be 10x as productive using checklists or anything else. Maybe it hires programmers 9x as productive as the average and then helps them improve, but that's a lot harder to measure than a whole order of magnitude improvement.

Can a decidated software engineering major teach the knowledge to be required to reach that level reliably? I don't think so. I don't think it even get's 2x.

If you're asking whether there exist two different institutions with software engineering majors, where the graduates of one are 2x as good as those of the other, or 2x better than the industry average, then the answer is clearly yes.

If you're asking the same, but want to control for incoming freshman quality (i.e. measure the actual improvement due to teaching), then you hit the problem that there are no RCTs and there's no control group (other than those who don't go to college at all). There's also no way to make two test groups of college students not learn anything 'on the side' from the Internet or from their friends, or to do so in the same way. So it's really hard to measure anything on the scale of a whole major.

Lots of people have measured interventions on the scale of a single course. Some of them may help (like typing); in fact I hope some of them do help, otherwise the whole major would only give you credentials. I'm not disputing this, but I also don't see the relation between there being some useful skills that aren't explicit knowledge (in this case they're motor skills everyone has explicit knowledge about) and a grand difference between societal or philosophical differences.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit