I see a lot of comments asking what a fear of learning something new is. I interpret is as the fear of appearing stupid when trying to learn something new. This means, that one doesn't ask questions, doesn't take big steps in the presence of other people, the fear of failing at this new learning experience. The fear of appearing incompetent at something that one "should" already know.
I am an engineer and I particularly relate to the problem that the doctor has with having to click multiple times to order medical tests where previously only one sufficed. Also, the problem of multiple links named with very similar, thus confusing names - "chart review", "result review" etc.
I see this on a regular basis when using visual studio team services so much so that our team spends a large amount of our time dealing with the VSTS interface instead of making use of the system to do our planning quickly and efficiently. I deal with a computer all day every day and I don't find VSTS the least bit intuitive or helpful. The problem described in the article is not one that just doctors have to face.
> Why should an architect know Shakespeare and QWERTY?
Well why not? QWERTY could refer to just being able to type. An artist could possibly do well to be able to use a computer? It could also refer to the placement on old style typewriters where the type bars could get jammed if letters used often in the English language were typed in quick succession. (Myth maybe? But interesting to think about anyway for someone that is going to design things for other people to use.)
As to Shakespeare, it has been suggested that people that read fiction/literature of this sort develop empathy and makes you a "better" person.
The placement of keys in such s way that they had a low probability of jamming (whether effective or not) has heavy parallels in designing building entries and exits, planning emergency exit capacity etc. Basically if you’re planning an exit also consider human usage statistics of the connected rooms.
> The placement of keys in such s way that they had a low probability of jammin
It's highly debatable, and arguably a myth. The QWERTY design predated any potential jamming problems. Perhaps it was so foreseeing? It's really hard to believe general ergonomy was the top priority, as all the characters of the word TYPEWRITER are placed in the top row, which could have hardly happened by sheer coincidence, but was very convenient for the sake of sale presentations in the early years...
> This theory [jam avoidance] could be easily debunked for the simple reason that “er” is the fourth most common letter pairing in the English language
Argh, no. E and R are separated by D, 4, and C. It would be nice if someone writing about typewriters actually looked at one.
The bar-adjacent letter pairs, from most to least frequent¹, are MI BY CR NU HN XE HM AZ DC GB ZW VT FV SX.
I remember reading about baby name fads that were caused by names of TV characters. The one I remember is "Emma" catching on after the baby on the TV show Friends.
Your comment is very interesting. I recently took a course on Design Patterns. I sat squirming during the lectures because I didn't like what was being said, but couldn't put my finger on what exactly I disliked.
What I understand from your comment is that you dislike the Gang of four book because it renames concepts that don't need the cutesy names that they give them. Do you have a problem with the _concept_ of design patterns? Or just the names they are given? Are the concepts themselves sound and worth paying attention to?
I wrote a long rant as a response to another comment above. To quote myself:
"It reads like it was written by a clever, verbose, and 'over-eager novice."
Design patterns are a really usefull concept. The GoF book just totally botches up that concept by dwelving deep in trivial language details while missing the big picture.
Christopher Alexander's "A timeless way of building", and "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" are the books in architecture that prompted a lot of dicussion in software design circles, and from which I presume GoF got their idea of software design patterns.
What are good design patterns in software? IMO they are composed from the programming models exposed in a basic CS book like Aho and Ullman's "Foundations of Computer Science" and further developed in a books like Structure And Intrepretation of Computer Programs.
GoF is an ok anecdotal reference after those, but it really is not suitable as a didactic resource.
Peter Norvig wryly commented that 16 of the 23 pattern are either invisible or non-existent in lisp Lisp[0].
I do not like the GOF book. Some of the patterns appears sometimes in my code, but the book has never helped me to program better or helped me to think about my code. The single benefit I got from this book is that it gaves me words to explain my code to other people.
your instinctual reaction against design patterns because you may have realised that design patterns are patches over flaws in the programming language's design - they're a terrible basis to build an architecture on. There's some discussion on this idea at the C2 wiki: http://wiki.c2.com/?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatures
There is more history to this. The introduction of the law relating to making gay sex illegal "... dating back to 1861, (that was) introduced during the British rule of India (modelled on the Buggery Act of 1533) criminalised sexual activities "against the order of nature", including homosexual activities"
It is the truth for a lot of countries that were under colonial rule. Colonial powers left their mark behind in so many unfortunate ways that are just too complex for countries to deal with even today. It is simple and lazy to label something "backward".
> It is simple and lazy to label something "backward".
Couldn't agree more. Having said that, I'm not sure the "blame the colonials" is vastly better. For at least 2 reasons:
1) One of the laws the Penal Code replaced required death by stoning as a punishment (unless you were a slave in which case you were just flogged). As poor as the law was, it wasn't really replacing an enlightened legal framework.
2) Post-colonial India didn't exactly rush to replace the law. The first attempt wasn't until 2009, and that was overturned.
The simple truth is that, even supposedly liberal, countries have made these changes disappointingly recently. Personally, I'm glad this is happening but blaming others for the slow progress is somewhat disingenuous.
It is simplistic and lazy to blame the colonials for all the ills of a society too. But the slow progress in fixing something like this is not so much because of a backwards attitude. Nation building takes time. Especially when things around the world are changing fast. There is a long long way to go. And it is definitely going to take a very long time getting there. Especially because there are way too many issues that need the attention of an already strained legal system.
> Colonial powers left their mark behind in so many unfortunate ways that are just too complex for countries to deal with even today.
What does that even mean? They are free countries. No one forced India to hold onto that law. No one forces other countries to hold onto colonial era laws. If they don't change it that's their choice, their decision and their problem in the end. Not that of some long gone boogeyman.
> What does that even mean? They are free countries. No one forced India to hold onto that law. No one forces other countries to hold onto colonial era laws. If they don't change it that's their choice, their decision and their problem in the end. Not that of some long gone boogeyman.
Not so easy. Once you have a law in place you have vested interests who want to oppose any changes to the law. Either you need a dictatorship to make any changes you desire or respect democratic principles. You can't have both. Once a law was codified, albeit in a previous era, that itself becomes an excuse for vested interests to latch onto and demand that the law continue to be in place.
In my opinion, no social norms should be codified as laws as societies change and so do people. That creates more harm than good. This should serve as a lesson to all that laws should be generic in nature and not targeted towards one community/religion/caste/creed (be it either as a benefit or otherwise). This is again a by-product of Colonialism as British crown used personal laws to keep the country divided. Hopefully India fixes that next by codifying the Uniform Civil Code[1].
Since the boogeyman has been "gone", the entire region (not just India) has gone through several wars, a very messy, violent and tumultuous process of nation building. The region is not even used to existing as one nation yet. It takes time. Not making excuses for slow progress. Just trying to make the point that there isn't a magic wand to make everything all nice and shiny. It takes time. And as we see from this supreme court ruling, the intention is good and it is there.
Making a country free doesn't make it immediately free from thoughts and misconceptions that come with a colonial rule. You will still find Indians who assume every white person they see is rich, smart and attractive. For example: YouTube India is full of people viewing 'Foreigner reactions' on Indian content.
Inferiority complex among Indians is sometimes surprising.
Respectfully, it seems to me that India (and other countries in the region and maybe elsewhere) has a problem with strictly hierarchical structure, issues with accessibility and availability of resources. There is no investment in improving training for teachers. Typically, people that don't find jobs anywhere else take up teaching. Teaching is also typically a high-stress, low-paid job. It seems to have not a lot to do with language. There are more factors here.
Yes the Germans are able to get ahead cause of the use of both German and English. But it seems like lazy reasoning to suggest that this is solely the reason why they do better. How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? How about comparing the structure, the resource usage, the training for educators and managers in education and research? Surely, language is not the only difference between the two systems?
>How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system?
No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures. Hierarchical thinking is the next problem. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be a little bit of a rebel.
That's the thing about being a rebel in a hierarchical system. You really are up against much more than a "rebel" in say the U.S. would be up against.
For example, think of the adoration that American people seem to have for people that do things off the beaten path. Being ordinary is to be avoided at all costs in the U.S.
In a place like India, you are taught to conform. A hierarchy is enforced. No deviation is tolerated. (Sorry to use such dramatic language. But there is no other way to describe this system.) You don't get to do anything outside of arbitrary norms that others have drawn for you. This is too much for young and curious minds that may want to do things even a slight bit differently. The path of least resistance is to just lie down and submit to rote learning or whatever other evil the system imposes on you.
> No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures.
Rote memorization is the basis of all learning. It's actually the first step and it's at the heart of western education ( or it was until we decided to go to a silly route ).
You have to memorize the ABCs, the multiplication table, vocabulary, etc. And we used to teach kids latin and greek which required lots of memorization. Creativity and problem solving comes afterwards.
I'm against the anti-memorization movement in the US/West. It's great to memorize things and it's great to memorize things intelligently. Whether it be poems, songs, vocabulary, math theorems, code, etc.
As long as rote memorization isn't the end but the means to an end.
I see what you mean, you have to memorize the very basics. What I meant by route memorization learning culture is a bit different though.
I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me some of the problems his students could solve.
I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't solve some of them myself.
On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book. It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about 100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.
I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.
The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an algorithm.
For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class was trying to educate humans to be computers.
You might be right to the first order about language, but having a 'colonial' system is very insidious IMO.
First it means that a large fraction of the population is implicitly denied resources to develop their abilities. Second it means that people who do make it through the system (as it is) have no real incentives to stay back, neither cultural, nor fiscal, nor institutional.
Personally, none of the people I studied with/worked under ended staying in India. It's interesting that British India managed to sustain better state universities, than today.
What do you mean by a colonial system?
edited to add: I ask the question because I genuinely don't understand what you mean by it in this context. It seems to me that it might mean some sort of system that the British introduced in India that was then adopted by the Indians after Independence. But I could be missing the nuances in your argument.
From the OP: "the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations."
Hacker news is definitely more a forum than social media platform. But the temptation to collect "likes" and the resulting dopamine high is a thing on HN too.
And it has the convenient sleight of being somewhat related to work, so it can ocassionally bypass the “this is unproductive B.S.” procrastination filter.
