Music seems to be one of those things where an uneducated person can still have a good time – Beethoven’s Fifth is nifty, even if you have no idea of Primary Theme or Key Change. The educated person can perceive depths that the naif cannot, but the naif can still like what he hears.
For a new example, I don’t comprehend basketball. My eye sees only random chaos. Guys running left…now they’re running right…now they all stop… It’s like watching an ant-hill. No meaningful pattern at all. Yet to people who know the game, there is definitely a great deal of meaningful organization to it. It isn’t random at all.
Unlike Beethoven, basketball seems much harder to appreciate at an absolutely naive level.
Another example, although possibly fictional: there was a story I read once (can’t remember title or author) where one guy was trying to teach another guy to shoot quail (or grouse, or pheasant, or duck…) Anyway, the new guy couldn’t comprehend having to lead the target! He kept arguing that it was stupid to aim where the bird wasn’t. It only made sense to hm to aim where the bird was.
The concept of beats is way easier to get when you learn music. The fundamental problem with trying to learn beats with <your favorite song> is that in most cases they have things like syncopation, held notes, and harmonies that throw you off. When you learn to play the flute and you play eight gazillion different pieces of warmup music over the years, you develop a sense for the stuff.
There are people that complain that other people are dense, because the first person keeps asking the same question over and over. The person complaining keeps giving the same answer over and over. Somebody needs to rephrase something in the conversation. The second person complaining doesn’t realize they are like the first person they are complaining about.
Unlike most of the examples described, I’ve never directly encountered this since it would never come up in day to day life, but something that baffles me is the supposed fact that 70% of women fail Piaget’s water level test.
The idea is that the subject is shown a picture of a tilted glass, and asked to draw the line where the water would settle were it to be filled. I cannot get how it’s not obvious that the water line would be perpendicular to the direction of gravity, i.e. parallel to the ground assuming no slope. I get that people may struggle to articulate that concept, but I still intuitively grasp immediately what it looks like, I can see the water in my head move as the glass tilts.
But, if the link below is to be believed, not only do 40% of the population (10% of men and 70% of women) not get it, the blogger has anecdotal experience that programmers, regardless of gender, tend to always get it.
Now I’ve seen the description: so the plastic is thicker on the bottom and the recording medium is closer to the top - but it’s still recorded and played back from the bottom. Isn’t it?
I think you’re missing the point. Yes, it’s read from the bottom, but the bottom is a thick (in a relative sense) sheet of plastic. If that plastic is scratched, then the laser will bend and read erroneous data, but you can just shave off a couple nanometers of plastic and the CD will play like new. The actual grooves that encode the data are closer to the label, so if you scratch through the label, you may actually alter the shape of the groove which will irreparably damage the data itself.
I know a woman who found it remarkable that most people seemed capable of determining whether an address was odd or even virtually instantly. When she first asked me about this, I was confused at how anyone who wasn’t plainly mentally challenged could find this impressive.
It turns out she had never learned or understood that it only required looking at the last digit.
Yeah, I know it’s genetic. My husband likes to point out that I’m a mutant whenever the subject comes up. He cannot for the life of him understand why I am not amused by this. I’ll leave my thoughts on that as an exercise for the reader.
Marginal tax rates. I talked to a guy recently who was concerned about making a higher income because it would put him in a higher tax bracket and he thought that would reduce his net.
This was true years ago but not any more. My new furnace and A/C unit, similar to this one, has multi-stage burners and a multi-speed fan. The thermostat tells it to work harder if the difference between the actual temp and the desired temp is large.
About the thermostat thing, my mom was even worse. Say it was 100 degrees outside and the A/C was set to 70 degrees, and she felt comfortable – she would shut the A/C off because obviously it wasn’t necessary to have on because it was cool in the house, and then switch it back on again after a few hours when it started getting hot in the house. No matter how many times my dad, brother, and I explained to her that the reason it was nice and cool in the house was ~BECAUSE~ the A/C was on, and if you shut it off it WILL get hot again, she would shut it off when she decided it was so cool in the house that A/C wasn’t necessary.
I will never be able to understand how she couldn’t understand that. Maybe she had very specific brain damage.
Hypothetically perhaps. But the label is a lot harder to accidentally scratch, and you have to make a much deeper scratch there for it to cause an issue than on the other side. Is this an idea you came up with yourself? I mean I don’t doubt that the data layer is closer to the label side, but I find your conclusions about what that means in terms of handling the disc to be very dubious.
Maybe she just chills easily. The temperature that is comfortable when you are just exiting a hot environment is different than the temperature that is comfortable to stay comfortable. My AC feels GREAT when I just get home, but within an hour it gets way too chilly and I’m miserable. My thermostat isn’t great, so it’s a lot more efficient to just turn it on and off as needed.
I think there are also different AC philosophies. I dislike a constant chill. I just want the occasional blast to perk me up.
That’s perfectly understandable. My mother didn’t think like that, though (I don’t know if I explained this clearly) – she apparently thought the house was naturally that temperature and therefore you didn’t need to have the A/C on in the first place. Until you did. And then you didn’t. And then you did.
She understood that having the heat on in the winter was the reason why the house was cozy warm, but could not apply the same understanding to the A/C. It was bizarre (and infuriating).
As a non-programmer with some knowledge of very basic programming, I’ll give your example a shot; i.e. I’ll present how I would teach it to a non-programmer. It would be interesting if you didn’t use some variation of how I’d explain it, and could hint at a mental block you’re not seeing because you ‘get’ it. Of course if you did teach it this way to no avail, then we’re back where we started.
Non-programmers, let me know if I’m making sense to you or not at all.
So, in English:
*We’re going to repeat a set of instructions. i has a value of 1, as long as i remains less than 10, add 1 to i. When you’re done, print i to the screen. *
This is a baseline: do you get the concept independent of the syntax? If you don’t (and many won’t), then we move on to the concept of a loop:
Here are the rules to a rather dull game. As long as you have less than $10, you get a dollar. You start the game with $1 in your pocket. When you have $10, the game ends. Begin with $1. Since 1 < 10, you get to have a dollar. Now you have $2. Since 2 < 10, you get to have a dollar. etc. Eventually you get up to $10, and since 10 is not < 10, the game stops.
After confirming this concept is understood, I’d deal with variable assignment next. I think the reason i=1, i<=10, i++ confuses people is that we are used to the self-knowledge and holism that characterizes our own brains, and the step-by-step, modular quality of computing throws people off. We see i=1, i<=10, i++ all at once, and immediately notice contradictory definitions of i. Even trying to explain that those are step-by-step conditions and that i is variable fails because the brain still manages to think things like ‘why do I need to know if it’ll be less than 10 if I already know it’s 1?’.
So what I would propose would be to assign each step to a person:
Simon is assigned the number 1. Rachel needs to know whether the number Simon was assigned is less than 10. If it is, then Rachel lets Travis know this, and this authorizes him to add one to the number Simon was assigned. Eventually Travis learns from Rachel that Simon’s number is greater than 10, so instead of increasing Simon’s number he prints it to the screen.
Doing this in my opinion allows the person to see the loop or the function or what have you as split up into interacting yet independent parts.
One big meta “thing” that I remember from many discussions:
I will never understand why is it that when a poster points at well sourced and expert information, there is usually an opponent that gets angry at that poster, and then the angry one that used that bad information never ever demands better from the sources where he/she got that flawed information.
As a corollary of that, it is even more unfathomable that regardless if they get “burned” so often they still come back later relying **again **on the same discredited sources.
Looking for better sources or demanding explanations from the sources who got it so wrong is a thing that never seems to cross the mind of some posters.
Yes, I remember when I was about 14 and saw my first BASIC program listing, statements like X = X + 1 really mystified me. In basic algebra, you learn that a variable is something that doesn’t vary in the course of a problem. And that X cannot be equal to X + 1. I think that’s why Pascal used := for assignment.
I’d recommend the good old metaphor of boxes with labels on them.
Also, using for loops from the start seems a bit too much. We’re so used to seeing them that we don’t notice how alien the syntax is. A while loop seems much easier to understand because the assignments and end conditions are more explicit.
