tough-to-explain Python
Steven D'Aprano
steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au
Thu Jul 9 13:20:14 EDT 2009
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
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