Learning and Teaching

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

“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 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

sometimes you’re mentally exhausted after finishing one or more major features.

This is the time to take stock and ease off a little. Perhaps do some small tasks, sometimes known as “chores”, which are less mentally taxing, but nevertheless worthwhile. Maybe take time to pay off some technical debt.

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

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... See more

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

Remember the dictum “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”.

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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