Learning and Teaching

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

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“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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the kind of answers you get to your technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the difficulty of developing the answe

it isn't necessary to already be technically competent to get attention from us, it is necessary to demonstrate the kind of attitude that leads to competence — alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an active partner in developing a solution

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

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hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or... See more

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

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