tough-to-explain Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:05:57 -0700, Simon Forman wrote:

> The core abstractions of [mechanical] computation are just not that
> complicated.  You can teach them to anybody in about a half an hour,
> drunk. I have.

That's *easy*. Anyone can teach the most complicated and abstract 
principles of any topic at all drunk. What's hard is doing it sober.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/63668/confessions-of-your-worst-wtf-
moment-what-not-to-do/350267#350267

or http://tinyurl.com/lur784


You'll excuse my skepticism about all these claims about how anyone can 
program, how easy it is to teach the fundamentals of Turing Machines and 
functional programming to anybody at all. Prove it. Where are your peer-
reviewed studies demonstrating such successes on randomly chosen people, 
not self-selected motivated, higher-than-average intelligence students?

In the real world, human beings are prone to serious cognitive biases and 
errors. Our brains are buggy. Take any list of reasoning fallacies, and 
you'll find the majority of people have difficulty avoid them. The first 
struggle is to get them to even accept that they *are* fallacies, but 
even once they have intellectually accepted it, getting them to live up 
to that knowledge in practice is much, much harder.

In fact I'd go further and say that *every single person*, no matter how 
intelligent and well-educated, will fall for cognitive biases and 
fallacious reasoning on a regular basis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy




-- 
Steven