When our ancestors were attacked by animals, they needed a way to predict their behaviour to come up with a counter strategy. An effective way of doing this is to think about the animal’s intent. “It’s trying to catch me, so if I run here, it will run there” etc. Of course, humans who were good at avoiding being eaten were selected and here we are with our brains wired for modelling intent. Unfortunately, many things to not have intent. Rocks, the weather, computers are all examples of things that are not “trying” to do anything. They exist and behave according to deterministic rules. I say unfortunately, because our over-active intent modelling comes up with intent anyay. Children easily think that simple inanimate things are out to get them (or ascribe some kind of autonomy to them), but grown-ups are often caught by the same trap when they try to understand the motivations of the computers or other complex devices that they use.
Tag: education
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Understanding and intent
I am in two minds about this phenomenon. On the one hand I think that it leads to sloppy thinking, where we are ascribing thought to something that has none, or leveraging a broken model to extrapolate far outside its realm of usefulness. On the other hand, it does make things easier to understand. I think my refusal to use intent when I was teaching programming is one of the reasons my students didn’t understand what I was saying. How many times have you heard things like “So, the rock wants to fall, because it’s being pulled by gravity, but there’s this thing in the way, so it has to go around it” (perhaps only if you listen to the Naked Scientist or are an engineering educator). This is clearly wrong in the particulars: The rock has no intent, it doesn’t “know” anything about what’s in the way — it is experiencing an acceleration proportional to the resultant force acting on it, that’s about as far as it goes — but it is right in allowing someone to understand what will happen.So the riddle is this: how do I leverage this mode of thinking in myself and others to increase understanding or make explanations easier but avoid coming up with a new religion to explain the intent of rocks?