I have had a couple of moments of clarity recently, suddenly seeing how the words people use mean such very different things. Last year I realised that my approach to learning differs from most of the students in my class. I am an obsessive reader and need a lot of big picture structure with cohesive theory to understand stuff. My students are mostly experiential learners who don’t like to read and need to do problems to understand things. I skip the examples in books, they skip everything else. This means that most of my sincere attempts at teaching them would be destined to fail until I started making a concerted effort at using numbers in my examples.
The title of this post is related to another realisation. I am an integrator. I try to find application of all the knowledge I have. I don’t believe that truly useless knowledge exists, which is probably why I have such a vast store of trivia tucked away in the recesses of my mind — I’m holding out hope that it will come in useful one day. This means I have often misinterpreted what people mean when they say they “haven’t needed” a particular thing they learned in school or at university. When I say something like that I mean I couldn’t find application for it. When they say it they mean they have been able to avoid application. This seems to be a very common goal in people’s jobs; to avoid application of their knowledge as much as possible. I speak to people and they’ve come up with poorly implemented versions of what should have been Wiener filters because they’ve avoided dredging up some signal processing theory they learned a while back, or they don’t program on principle, and spend hours doing a task that could have taken them seconds to Google and write down.
Now, as I read that paragraph I can see how superior it comes off, but I am pretty sure my obsession with application has cost me a lot of time. It has definitely cost me a lot of time arguing with people over needing a particular piece of theory because I didn’t understand what they meant. To my mind, when you have a filtering problem you need a good filtering algorithm, which means you need to dredge up some filtering theory. To their mind they don’t need it if they can come up with their own implementation, and if what they come up with works ok, it’s good enough.
The take home message here is that I am trying harder to use numbers in my examples and to search for the proper semantics when people speak. Do they mean they don’t need in my sense as in applicable or need as in unavoidable or need as unavoidable?