Jimrandomh recently had the interesting observation that there might have been legitimately fewer rationalists in the world prior to the invention of programming, because it actually forces you to notice when your model is broken, form new hypotheses, and test them, all with short feedback loops.
Yeah, I have a ton of confirmation bias pushing me to agree with this (because for me the two are definitely related), but I’ll add that I also think spending a lot of time programming helped me make reductionism “a part of me” in a way it wasn’t before. There are just very few other activities where you’re forced to express what you want or a concept to something that fundamentally can only understand a limited logical vocabulary. Math is similar but I think programming makes the reductionist element more salient because of the compiler and because programming tends to involve more mundane work.
Yeah, in our office-discussion at the time I think the claim was something like “Prior to programming, Math Proofs were the best way to Get The Thing, and they were slower and the feedback less clear.”
(My sense is that programming _hasn’t_ deeply given me the thing, until perhaps recently when I started getting more intentional about deliberate debugging practice. But it definitely makes sense that programming would at least open up the possibility of gaining the skill. The main remaining question in my mind is “how much does the skill transfer, by default, if you’re not deliberately trying to transfer it?”)
Jimrandomh recently had the interesting observation that there might have been legitimately fewer rationalists in the world prior to the invention of programming, because it actually forces you to notice when your model is broken, form new hypotheses, and test them, all with short feedback loops.
Yeah, I have a ton of confirmation bias pushing me to agree with this (because for me the two are definitely related), but I’ll add that I also think spending a lot of time programming helped me make reductionism “a part of me” in a way it wasn’t before. There are just very few other activities where you’re forced to express what you want or a concept to something that fundamentally can only understand a limited logical vocabulary. Math is similar but I think programming makes the reductionist element more salient because of the compiler and because programming tends to involve more mundane work.
Yeah, in our office-discussion at the time I think the claim was something like “Prior to programming, Math Proofs were the best way to Get The Thing, and they were slower and the feedback less clear.”
(My sense is that programming _hasn’t_ deeply given me the thing, until perhaps recently when I started getting more intentional about deliberate debugging practice. But it definitely makes sense that programming would at least open up the possibility of gaining the skill. The main remaining question in my mind is “how much does the skill transfer, by default, if you’re not deliberately trying to transfer it?”)