I wouldn’t be surprised if thinking this way about computer programs transfers fairly well to other fields if people are reminded to think like programmers or something like that. There are certainly a disproportionate number of computer programmers on Less Wrong, right?
Certainly; I think this is a case where there are 3 types of causality going on:
Using Less Wrong makes you a better programmer. (This is pretty weak; for most programmers, there are probably other things that will improve your programming skill a hundred times faster than reading Less Wrong.)
Improving as a programmer makes you more attracted to Less Wrong.
Innate rationality aptitude makes you a better programmer and more attracted to Less Wrong. (The strongest factor.)
I am planning an article about how to use LW-ideas for debugging. However there is a meta-idea behind a lot of LW-ideas that I have not yet seen really written down and I wonder what would be the right term to use. It is roughly that in order to figure out what could cause an effect, you need to look at not only stuff but primarily on the differences between stuff. So if a bug appears in situation 1 and not in 2, don’t look at all aspects of situation 1, just the aspects that differ from situation 2. Does this have a name? It sounds very basic but I was not really doing this before, because I had the mentality that to really solve a problem I need to understand all parts of a “machine”, not just the malfunctioning ones.
I don’t think it really does… or even that it is necessarily true. The kind of issues I find tend to have a more smoother distribution. It really depends on the categorization. Is user error one category or one per module or one per function or?…
I think not, but but it may matter what is your native language. As mine is not English and programming languages are generally based on it, when I was 12 and exploring Turbo Pascal, I simply thought of it as Precise-English, while what my language tutor taught me was Sloppy-English. (I still don’t really understand on the gut level why they tend to compare programming with math! Math is Numberish and Greekletterish to me, while programming is Precise-English! Apparently I really really care how symbols look like, for some reason.) Anyway, if it is your own native language it may be far more confusing why a precise version of it exists and can be executed by a computer and maybe if you overcome that challenge that helps you. I think I would dislike it if programming languages would be based on my language because it would always confuse me that that when they call a class a class, I think of a school class. For example when I was learning assembler, I got really confused by using the term accumulator. I thought those belong into cars—we call batteries accumulators here. I got to be at least 16 years old when I finally understood that words can have multiple meanings and all of them can be correct usage, but even now at 37 I don’t exactly like it. It is untidy… but if I had to deal with that sort of challenge that could potentially make me a better problem solver.
I wouldn’t be surprised if thinking this way about computer programs transfers fairly well to other fields if people are reminded to think like programmers or something like that. There are certainly a disproportionate number of computer programmers on Less Wrong, right?
And those that aren’t computer programmers would display a disproportionate amount of aptitude if they tried.
Certainly; I think this is a case where there are 3 types of causality going on:
Using Less Wrong makes you a better programmer. (This is pretty weak; for most programmers, there are probably other things that will improve your programming skill a hundred times faster than reading Less Wrong.)
Improving as a programmer makes you more attracted to Less Wrong.
Innate rationality aptitude makes you a better programmer and more attracted to Less Wrong. (The strongest factor.)
I am planning an article about how to use LW-ideas for debugging. However there is a meta-idea behind a lot of LW-ideas that I have not yet seen really written down and I wonder what would be the right term to use. It is roughly that in order to figure out what could cause an effect, you need to look at not only stuff but primarily on the differences between stuff. So if a bug appears in situation 1 and not in 2, don’t look at all aspects of situation 1, just the aspects that differ from situation 2. Does this have a name? It sounds very basic but I was not really doing this before, because I had the mentality that to really solve a problem I need to understand all parts of a “machine”, not just the malfunctioning ones.
Does it not follow from the Pareto principle?
I don’t think it really does… or even that it is necessarily true. The kind of issues I find tend to have a more smoother distribution. It really depends on the categorization. Is user error one category or one per module or one per function or?…
I think not, but but it may matter what is your native language. As mine is not English and programming languages are generally based on it, when I was 12 and exploring Turbo Pascal, I simply thought of it as Precise-English, while what my language tutor taught me was Sloppy-English. (I still don’t really understand on the gut level why they tend to compare programming with math! Math is Numberish and Greekletterish to me, while programming is Precise-English! Apparently I really really care how symbols look like, for some reason.) Anyway, if it is your own native language it may be far more confusing why a precise version of it exists and can be executed by a computer and maybe if you overcome that challenge that helps you. I think I would dislike it if programming languages would be based on my language because it would always confuse me that that when they call a class a class, I think of a school class. For example when I was learning assembler, I got really confused by using the term accumulator. I thought those belong into cars—we call batteries accumulators here. I got to be at least 16 years old when I finally understood that words can have multiple meanings and all of them can be correct usage, but even now at 37 I don’t exactly like it. It is untidy… but if I had to deal with that sort of challenge that could potentially make me a better problem solver.