In other words, if you look at a page of Python code and don’t get a subjective feeling that it makes sense, that does not place you in a population of “not natural computer programmers”.
Yep, it might even be the opposite—if you can look at a page of Python code without any previous programming experience and tell yourself that you understand it, you are way too much of a rationalizer to ever be any good at programming :P
Hah. In discussing the methodology of the “camel has two humps” study with a friend who’s an okay programmer, the idea came up that what they might have been measuring was overconfidence. People who are ignorant but overconfident would exhibit a consistent (but possibly wrong) model, whereas people who are ignorant and know it might hedge their bets by not answering consistently. Some courses and instructors (but not all) certainly do favor the overconfident student.
Yep, it might even be the opposite—if you can look at a page of Python code without any previous programming experience and tell yourself that you understand it, you are way too much of a rationalizer to ever be any good at programming :P
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2vb/vanity_and_ambition_in_mathematics/2scr
Hah. In discussing the methodology of the “camel has two humps” study with a friend who’s an okay programmer, the idea came up that what they might have been measuring was overconfidence. People who are ignorant but overconfident would exhibit a consistent (but possibly wrong) model, whereas people who are ignorant and know it might hedge their bets by not answering consistently. Some courses and instructors (but not all) certainly do favor the overconfident student.