Negative Feedback

Tag: cognition

  • My brain can’t do that!

    When I was teaching computer programming to chemical engineering students I categorically denied that “I’m just not good at programming” was a valid excuse for flunking my subject. Lately I have become less sure of my position. Let’s be clear: I am quite convinced that people have varying levels of aptitiude, it’s just that I had thought that certain skills were so similar that one automatically led to the other. Chemical engineering students in their second year have already passed many mathematics courses and have shown themselves to be intelligent and able to follow the steps required to do algebra and calculus in a relatively mechanical way. Programming has always seemed entirely analogous to math for me, so I made the mistake of generalising from my experience to theirs. As any good lecturer will tell you, this is a fatal mistake.

    I am constantly fascinated by how inaccessible our brains are to ourselves. The puzzle of exactly how my brain makes the connections between formulae and computer language syntax is probably better understood by some neuroscientist somewhere than by myself. This is, of course, entirely counter-intuitive. Many people would even deny it. But the thing that concreted it for me was listening to this episode of Radiolab (which if you haven’t listened to it yet, is an entirely awesome podcast covering a wonderful array of different subjects in a wonderfully cock-eyed way). Spoiler alert: the skill displayed here is a guy who is able to run multiple symphonies simultaneously in his head. Try it. Start playing a song you know well in your head. A couple of seconds later, try starting another one by a different band. Now tell me where you are in the two different songs. If you are remotely normal you will be unable to even conceive of how to do this. The feeling I get when I try to do this makes me wonder: if we have such a clear example of a person who can do something that seems totally unrelated to skill or practice, but which normal people cannot do, who am I to say that those people in my class just couldn’t “get” programming, ever?
    The problem is that it leads to an uncomfortable end point. I cannot assume that any student who struggles simply cannot do the stuff he’s trying with – that would invalidate the entire purpose of teaching! Well, unless you ascribe to the notion that teachers are only allowing their students to reach their potential, but that’s a whole different post. Like the conundrums of free will, it appears the argument ends in a place where assuming something we know to be wrong in general (that “any student can do this”) is both easier and less risky than correctly determining who has the ability in the first place and then only focusing our attention on them.
    One good thing has come from these musings though: I find myself being much more sympathetic to the struggles my students have. And I suppose a little empathy never hurt anyone.

  • Impressions of superiority

    None of my compliments are as often or firmly rebuked as telling someone they have a natural ability for something.

    It is a quirk of our society that our sense of achievement is diminished by aptitude. We praise above all individuals who have overcome adversity in their achievement. Many view being told they have an aptitude or ability as tantamount to saying they didn’t have to overcome as much as other people would have.
    I am aware of my natural aptitudes for some activities. I had no particular difficulty learning to play the guitar and appear to understand music pretty well. My mathematical intuition is sound. I find it easy to learn new programming languages. I also have certain… challenges. I am easily distracted, I find medium-term planning difficult and my learning mode is often highly inefficient as I require a lot of background and overview before things start making sense. It has taken me a lot of time to figure out what the population average abilties in some of these areas are. I am by no means there, but I have learned enough to know which properties are high and which are low.
    The reason for listing my own abilities here is an attempt to defuse the knee-jerk reaction that I have perceived many times when you tell other people they have abilities above the norm. Many people will vehemently deny such abilities because they assume you are implying they didn’t have to work at it. It seems more acceptable to lament the lack of such abilities in others than to claim them for yourself. Many people don’t even do that – they will deny any particular variation in these abilities among people and instead end up lamenting their lack of application. I find this particularly objectionable, as the implication is often that the reason for failure is fundamentally a weak will.
    Here’s how a sample dialogue often plays out:
    Me: I have left off marking my papers again, and will have to put in a late night tonight.
    Them: Oh, I always get my marking out of the way first thing, then I feel much better.
    Me: I wish I had your well-developed work ethic and drive to completion
    Them: I don’t really have any particularly well-developed drive to completion – you can do this too.
    Me: I have tried and failed. Perhaps I am just weak-willed. But more likely I am more easily distracted than you are, or find this task more onerous than you do
    Them: How dare you imply that I don’t need to apply myself to get this stuff done!
    Unequal distribution of abilities sits poorly with the doctrine of equality (or at least equal opportunity). Even worse, it is very difficult to think of oneself as anything other than “normal”. When I lost 25 kg, I honestly did not seem any different to myself in the mirror. I can just remember seeing a lot more fat people around. When I started running, it never felt much different to run at a comfortable pace, even though that has changed radically as I trained. It’s an all-too easy trap to fall into as ones abilities develop: renormalisation. As you become more knowledgable, you just start to see more idiots. As you become less fit, you start wondering how all these people can be so active.
    This post is a bit of an impression rather than a well-though out argument. I wanted to get this down while I was still thinking about it after having discussed it at a party last night. There is much left out here: how much of these abilities are innate and how much are learned? How does practice feature into it and how well can we assess our own abilities, and what is the mechanism of self-control (in fact, what is being controlled). That will have to wait for later.