Learning and Teaching

“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass tells them. “But I don’t believe that. Things happen in stages.” Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. “The key thing is to force yourself through

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I will conclude with a passage from Nikola Tesla, the prolific inventor who briefly worked for Thomas Edison. He described Edison’s work habits thus:

[Edison’s] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doing

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Analytic methods are by no means the one true path to scientific enlightenment. They can be used speciously, that is to say, without empirical justification, and in many situations, they fail to produce any insight. However, more than Victor would have his readers believe, analytic methods are often an appropriate and illuminating tool for messy, “... See more

Contrast this situation to the “intuitive” understanding one is supposed to gain by playing with a Victor-style computer simulation. One might make “discoveries”, but one is never certain:

• Does this “discovery” apply to all parameter choices?


• What is the actual quantitative content of this discovery? If some relationship appears to hold — is this rel

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because analytic methods offer a fundamentally deeper understanding of phenomena than simulations do, I believe that Victor’s time would be better spent making analytic methods accessible to the average person rather than attempting to replace analytic methods wholesale with computer simulations, no matter how mesmerizing and seductive the kaleidos... See more

The thrust of Victor’s argument is as follows: the fruits of the quantitative sciences are codified in symbolic equations, which, like the rhythms of Latin poetry, are accessible to only to an elite few. It is wrong that this knowledge is restricted to a small subset of humanity (first argument), but this wrong can be corrected by creating computer... See more