We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know (2016) | Hacker News Reader

We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know (2016)

avidly.lareviewofbooks.org

58 pointsseverine20 comments

I never understand these context-free posts. The domain of what could be interesting to a hacker is very broad, but shouldn't we say something?

Anyway, the actual title seems to have almost nothing to do with the meat (such as it is) of the article; the point seems to be the content of a handout distributed in class by the author, a teacher of a feminist and queer theories class, called "Some Notes On How To Ask A Good Question About Theory That Will Provoke Conversation And Further Discussion From Your Colleagues". The guidelines aren't bad overall, even if they'll probably say nothing new to any curious hacker; they're mostly just addressing "Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question" (a very important skill for everyone, hackers included), without much focus on the social-theory part of it.

method described seems very similar to Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

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I always wonder how many people follow this sort of advice, and how many hours are they spending when they do follow this advice

Adler's advice is meant to make your reading more efficient and effective, not to increase the amount of time you spend.

In fact he advocates taking just a short time to quickly size up a book, rather than make the mistake of starting to read a book only to discover halfway in that it is not a good book, or that it doesn't address what you want to know, or whatever else.

He is addressing an audience that will read large numbers of books to learn something, or in preparation for writing, etc.

Hi, I posted the link. I wouldn't call myself a hacker, I'm a reader.

I'm often in awe of the stuff I read, but I love to spark conversations by posting interesting articles.

Thanks for your input!

I quite enjoyed the read. Thank you for sharing!

I didn't mean to criticise the article, or your posting it; I just would have liked to see a word or two from you to give some context, or just further to spark the conversation.

Yeah, not quite sure what it's doing here. It's kind of a glimpse into a domain that's quite foreign to a lot of the regulars.

For us, you can sort of think of this article as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sociology is a very different approach to academics than we generally get in STEM. The things you learn are more complex and more open-ended. It's not like a science class, where the correct answer is already known and it's up to you to learn it. Even the best ideas are open to critique, because they're very preliminary.

Learning to learn in that environment felt very unfamiliar to me. I would throw up my hands on the first day in class, because it felt clearly wrong. And it was, but that didn't mean that there wasn't something to learn. The field advances by discussion, but constructing that discussion is difficult because it's potentially open-ended and very prone to being derailed.

So the article is kind of interesting on that score, if only to see what other people have to be told. Though I'm not sure it'll inspire really good discussion here, either.

I came away from the article with a completely different opinion than this, I wonder if that may be because I was reading it through a very different lens. The hacker domain tends to be deal in matters that are mostly quantitative with a relatively small number of known variables. Other fields like the social sciences, politics, religion, and life itself, are far more complex, and where much of our perceived understanding is based on unconfirmed theory, on top of which sits many additional layers of unconfirmed theory. I wonder if spending the majority of one's adult life dedicated to working within one of these domains might tend to render much of the other domain indiscernible to some degree.

Reading this through this other lens, I found all sorts of passages that I thought were very insightful and important. I wonder if we could somehow spread these cognitive capabilities throughout our societies, might some of the numerous intractable social issues we're fighting over finally move past the deadlock situation we seem to be stuck in?

Just one random excerpt I found compelling:

> One challenge is that theory is not theology, though it sometimes tries hard to be, and though students, particularly students looking for language with which to critique various forms of power, often treat it that way.

It's not just students that do this, this behavior is incredibly common in the news we consume as well as internet forums (including this one, when the topic of discussion is within a complicated social domain). So many people rest their worldview upon axioms that are simply incorrect in various ways, from objectively incorrect, to mistaking matters of opinion for matters of fact.

> So while a great deal of the work of the classroom is excavating the argument and work of the text (as I will discuss below when I talk about the form of the presentation handouts that I expect students to share with each other), the next step is to get students to interact critically with the writing, to begin to push at the limits of not only the content, but also the shape of the thinking contained within the content.

The internet and media are absolutely chock full of extremely important discussions that are severely lacking in critical thinking.

https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/what-nietzsche-really-...

When Nietzsche declared God to be dead, he seemed to be ultimately concerned that it would be replaced with Nihilism. It seems to how it has actually turned out is that we've replaced it with another religion: science and rationality. While these are both powerful forces, it seems not many people realize that they have limitations, one of which is that they currently do not even come close to encompassing the entirety of reality (strictly speaking, they make no claim to, but it seems like almost no one realizes this). To me, the end result of all this seems to be that religion has been replaced by mass delusion, at least for the time being, and I don't see many people in positions of power/influence (or anywhere, really) who appreciate the importance of this.

Although I vehemently disagree with the idea that "science and rationality … [is] another religion"—I'd be OK if we substituted 'dogma' instead—this is exactly the kind of thing that I would have liked to see when I came here, to give me some context and an idea of whether I wanted to read the post. I still think that many of the ideas, even if phrased within a socal-theory framework, don't apply just in that setting—interacting critically with anything is an important skill, soft science, hard science, or non-science—but your alternate perspective is much appreciated.

Not science and rationality themselves of course, but human's faith that they're all we need. Religions, flawed as they may be, offered some guidance that we kind of just assume will work itself out. The news seems to suggest otherwise.

>One challenge is that theory is not theology, though it sometimes tries hard to be, and though students, particularly students looking for language with which to critique various forms of power, often treat it that way.

I feel like this is something I see often where new language and ideas come out and folks who find it convient use them as a sort of unquestionable club to unleash upon the world.

I'm not sure that no matter how correct the theory is, that doing so is helpful in their cause.

Taking theory out of the classroom and into the larger world seems very difficult.

A related observation; we try to teach critical thinking but it never really gets spelled out how uncritical thinking works; so students are generally unprepared to recognise it in themselves.

Uncritical thinking isn't the same thing as stupid. It is possible to make really great decisions and achieve the preferred combination of wealth, fame and influence by thinking intelligently but uncritically.

Uncritical thinking as far as I can tell boils down to trusting authority figures. That works really well for people with a slight knack for choosing reliable authority figures. You can see it in action when people start treating learned facts as faith-based truths.

Critical thinking, IMO, has more to do with WHY you trust or mistrust authority and expertise in a particular area than whether you do.

Why? is the hyperlink of the mind -- the unifying link between domains of knowledge know-how and true understanding. It's the most important question in the world.

Truth is optimal, and why? is how you get there.

> I feel like this is something I see often where new language and ideas come out and folks who find it convient use them as a sort of unquestionable club to unleash upon the world.

This frequently irritates me too but, in cases where "new" applies (the word you used) I have a more charitable interpretation.

When I'm working on a problem there are a couple of early strategies I employ. One is to look for the poles or extrema. In debugging this might be "what if arg is null?" "What if arg is the lat element in the array?" I actually trained as a historian and the same process is used: "what if the role of the proletariat were negligible or irrelevant? Could I find an example? Could this be falsifiable"? When a theory is developing you don't even know what bounds might properly exist.

And to that last sentence, the second tool: expand the scope of the problem domain. See if using this new filter/model changes more than I expect. The mid 1990s encompassed one enormous parallel experiment of millions of people saying, "Hey, could I do this on the Web?", which was a dumb question (the right question is "would using the web make this easier to do?" But the second question was impossible to answer ahead of time without the results of a ton of experiments looking at the first question ("could I do this on the web?")

Oh wow, this is totally my jam. I love seeing this on HN because it’s a challenge to me to find analogies of how I can use this to inform my programming practice (and how I might use programming to inform my queer, feminist theory and critique)!

Here are some analogous experiences I thought of while reading:

>The work of undoing what you know, or what you think you know, is hard.

Trying to swerve around cargo culting, not getting so locked into one programming pattern

>“next step is to get students to interact critically with the writing”

One of the main reasons I love programming. Ask why one sequence of operations was applied versus another. Surface hidden complexity. To me, the exchange of code review and questions makes programming such a fun and in-depth form of collaborative writing.

> “Take notes in the margins: mess with the text. Underline, star, jot down questions.”

This mindset of interactive reading is exactly what has helped me be successful as a programmer. When I am reviewing code, I pull and try to mark it up with comments, drop in debuggers locally, snoop on variables.

> Linger over passages that are unclear or that strike you as particularly helpful or that don’t jar well with you

How I know when I’ve found a code smell, haha.

> Contextualize the writing

A good reminder for writing PR descriptions. I tend to get my note into the trees right before a PR and sometimes it’s hard to zoom out!

> “Scaffold your question with the information people need to answer it; ground your question deeper into the text itself.”

This is lovely. A nice reminder to me: before I run off and bug our senior DBA with a vague question, I should gather nearby context clues, log output, what I’ve tried, repro steps, whatever I can to support my question.

> A good discussion question reframes some of the problems of the text

Some of my fav technical mentors would ask questions to poke holes in my argument (my code), rather than telling me “X won’t work.” Their questions would inevitably cause me to dig into the why.

> If you can answer your question while you are writing it

Rubber ducking!

On charting institutional and personal knowledge: > when we pool all of our knowledge because it really makes clear the overwhelmingly rich and global resources for left thinking that are both there to be accessed and also suppressed and forgotten as origins for our current thinking.

I can think of many engineer discussions where mob diagramming what the group believes the architecture / structural history is reveals new information to folks and gaps in understanding.

This are just some of the bridges I see between this post and my daily work of writing code. Thank you for sharing this!

Color me stupid, and maybe this isn't even in my wheel-house (or near my hobby horse), but isn't it important to find out what is demonstrably true?

What good is a theory (or "theory") if it doesn't bang up against reality and have the potential to die and be forgotten? Is there some clade of humans that just regurgitate theory back and forth to each other? Or is this entertainment?

I'm probably missing something. I'm probably thinking at the wrong level of analysis. I'm lost. Help?

> Is there some clade of humans that just regurgitate theory back and forth to each other?

Oh, there are many. Go through the department of any non-applied academic field, or just turn your TV on the news. (Although one can claim the later is entertainment.)

AHHH! Yes, thank you. I knew it was familiar. I know it through my particular beef with some air-headed philosophers.

Now, not all philosophers... some of them ask very good questions and propose smart thought experiments which lead to positive change in the world.

Some of them, not so much. These talk in jargon filled circles, paint themselves into corners, shoot themselves in the feet, then drag down countless impressionable miserable children along with them into an empty revolution and drag down the collective unconscious retarding the good of civilization.

I enjoyed this article too, but it amuses me that people want to find a connection between this and programming, perhaps to unite their two tribes.

Not everything has to do with programming, nor would you want it to. Even if the article is on hacker news. Sometimes just enjoy the thing-in-itself, without drawing a connection to technology.

These connections exist, like they do between anything else in life. But that may not be the most interesting thing about the piece.

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