{"id":89,"date":"2010-02-11T14:57:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T14:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2010\/02\/11\/applicable-or-unavoidable\/"},"modified":"2010-02-11T14:57:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T14:57:00","slug":"applicable-or-unavoidable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2010\/02\/applicable-or-unavoidable\/","title":{"rendered":"Applicable or unavoidable"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>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&#8217;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 &#8212; I&#8217;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 &#8220;haven&#8217;t needed&#8221; a particular thing they learned in school or at university.  When I say something like that I mean I couldn&#8217;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&#8217;s jobs; to avoid application of their knowledge as much as possible.  I speak to people and they&#8217;ve come up with poorly implemented versions of what should have been Wiener filters because they&#8217;ve avoided dredging up some signal processing theory they learned a while back, or they don&#8217;t program on principle, and spend hours doing a task that could have taken them seconds to Google and write down.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>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&#8217;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&#8217;t <i>need<\/i> it if they can come up with their own implementation, and if what they come up with works ok, it&#8217;s good enough.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>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&#8217;t need in my sense as in applicable or need as in unavoidable or need as unavoidable?<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[162,174,193,209],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-learning","tag-need","tag-semantics","tag-words"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}