In order to do a better job putting together my thoughts and knowledge on the subject, I precommitted myself to giving a presentation on learning. My specific goal for the presentation is to inform audience members about how humans actually learn and teach them how to leverage this knowledge to...
Related to: Akrasia as a collective action problem and Self-empathy as a source of "willpower". The Less Wrong community has discussed negotiating with one's conflicting sub-agents as a method to defeat akrasia and other forms of dynamic inconsistency, with some mix of reactions about how possible or effective that strategy...
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181 It needn't take more than 10 minutes to play, though it might if you nail-bite about your choices. I'm curious about the LW response, although I might be underwhelmed by lack of interest.
I certainly hope that I'm not confused about my word choice. I write compilers for a living, so I might be in trouble if I don't understand elementary terms.
In all seriousness, my use of the word "scope" was imprecise, because the phenomenon I'm describing is more general than that. I don't know of a better term though, so I don't regret my choice. Perhaps you can help? Students that I've seen have difficulty with variable substitution seem to have difficulty with static scoping as well, and vice versa. To me they feel like different parts of the same confusion.
In a related note, I once took some of my students aside who where... (read more)
A little. As your income increases, I expect your consumption to become more expensive in monetary terms, but as your business grows I expect the value of your time to increase and for your consumption patterns to become less expensive in terms of time. College is very expensive in terms of time.
I'm not saying this is a bad choice, but it is one that surprises me. I'm still interested in the answers to my questions. Do you intend to sell your start-up, have it run itself, or abandon it? It seems like those options cover the gamut (I might consider requiring < 40 hours a week of your time to be "running itself"; if you're quite dedicated, you could probably fit being a full-time student in even with the start-up taking 40+ hours of your time, making that an alternative option).
My post didn't indicate this, but the most common source of scope is functions; calling a function starts a new scope that ends when the function returns. Especially in this case, it does often make sense to use the same variable name:
posterior = ApplyBayes(prior, evidence)
...
function ApplyBayes(prior, evidence) = { ... }
Will have prior=prior, evidence=evidence, and is a good naming scheme. But in most languages, modifying 'evidence' in the function won't affect the value of 'evidence' outside the scope of the function. This sometimes becomes confusing to students when the function above gets called like so:
posterior = ApplyBayes(prior, evidence1)
posterior = ApplyBayes(posterior, evidence2)
posterior = ApplyBayes(posterior, evidence3)
Because their previous model relied on the names being... (read more)
...going back to school to study computer science (if my start-up succeeds before then).
That's amusing. Usually I would say the value of the founder being present is much higher for a successful company than one that has failed. I would actually expect my freedom to pursue other avenues diminish as my success in my current avenue grows.
Do you mean that your start-up, if successful, will pretty much run itself? Or that if it hasn't succeeded /yet/, then you will feel obligated to stay and keep working on it?
Of all my flaws, I currently consider my bias to thought (and study, research, etc.) over action my greatest. I suspect that LessWrong attracts many (a disproportionate number of) such people.
Not too long ago, I lost a week of work and was able to recompose it in the space of an afternoon. It wasn't the same line-for-line, but it was the same design and probably even used the same names for most things, and was roughly 10k LOC. So if I had recent or substantial experience, I can see expecting a 10x speedup in execution. That's pretty specific though; I don't think I have ever had the need to write something that was substantially similar to anything else I'd ever written.
Domain experience is vital, of course. If you have to spend all your time wading through header files to find out what... (read more)
I don't know about you, but I can't recall 10k LOC from experience even if I had previously written something before; seeing someone produce that much in the space of three hours is phenomenal, especially when I realize that I probably would have required two or three times as much code to do the same thing on my first attempt. If by "reciting from experience" you mean that they have practiced using the kinds of abstractions they employ many times before, then I agree that they're skilled because of that practice; I still don't think it's a level of mastery that I will ever attain.
In my opinion, almost all of that 50% (that drop out) could program, to some extent, if sufficiently motivated.
A great deal of Computer Science students (half? more than half?) love programming and hit a wall when they come to the theoretical side of computer science. Many of them force themselves through it, graduate, and become successful programmers. Many switch majors to Information Technology, and for better or for worse will end up doing mostly system administration work for their career. Some switch majors entirely, and become engineers. I actually think we do ourselves a disservice by failing to segment Computer Science from Software Engineering; a distinction made at very few institutions, and when made, often to the detriment of Software Engineers, regrettably.
So to answer your question; of the 50% that drop out, I think most end up as sub-par programmers, but 80% of that 50% "have programming gear", to the extent that such a thing exists.
I've taught courses at various levels, and in introductory courses (where there's no guarantee anyone has seen source code of any form before), I've been again and again horrified by students months into the course who "tell" the computer to do something. For instance, in a C program, they might write a comment to the computer instructing it to remember the value of a variable and print it if it changed. "Wishful" programming, as it were.
In fact, I might describe that as the key difference between the people who clearly would never take another programming course, and those that might---wishful thinking. Some never understood their own code and seemed to write it... (read more)
In order to do a better job putting together my thoughts and knowledge on the subject, I precommitted myself to giving a presentation on learning. My specific goal for the presentation is to inform audience members about how humans actually learn and teach them how to leverage this knowledge to efficiently learn and maintain factual and procedural knowledge and create desired habits.
I will be focusing a little on background neuroscience, borrowing especially from A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation. I will heavily discuss spaced repetition, and I will also talk about the relevance of System 1 and System 2 thinking. I will not be talking about research, or about... (read 177 more words →)
Related to: Akrasia as a collective action problem and Self-empathy as a source of "willpower".
The Less Wrong community has discussed negotiating with one's conflicting sub-agents as a method to defeat akrasia and other forms of dynamic inconsistency, with some mix of reactions about how possible or effective that strategy can be. This article presents a successful example in my life, though it is probably an extreme outlier for a number of reasons.
I have been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. It is one of the most significant challenges in my life, and certainly the one with the most dire implications. I can be fairly well modeled as three major sub-agents1:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181
It needn't take more than 10 minutes to play, though it might if you nail-bite about your choices. I'm curious about the LW response, although I might be underwhelmed by lack of interest.
Indeed, I misinterpreted you in multiple ways. My model went something like "Jayson_Virissimo is currently working 60-80 hours a week on his start-up. Once it exceeds ramen-profitability, he intends to scale back his efforts to become a full-time student." How very foolish of me!