Intelligent readers often complain that they don’t get what I mean by “meta-rational,” and want examples.
Here are some nice ones from @JohnDCook's blog:
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in my CS courses I learned a lot about algorithms and not a whole lot about how to make large, complex, multi-layered software/hardware systems work let alone how to structure and maintain them and collaborate with others to do this work.
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we were taught a crash course in a development methodology that was considered a critique of a broken process when it was first published! (waterfall) then we were told to summarily ignore the contents of the course and instead we would be graded on a short written response test
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are microservices embodied metarationality? not sure how i feel about that.
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Hmm, I wouldn’t have made that connection… not sure what you are pointing to?
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especially as "all problems are people problems" and those are invulnerable to stack traces
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Nicely put!
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Interesting that all your examples are from an educational context. Leads me to ask two questions: 1. How do you teach meta-rational thinking/seeing/acting? 2. Whose job is it to do that?
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1. I’m trying to figure that out 2. Mine maybe?https://meaningness.com/metablog/meta-rationality-curriculum …
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Answering the question in the quote, the question the curriculum should answer is not "how should this code be organized?" but "how does this method of organizing code work?", and there should be more than one example
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Very true! There are also software engineering curricula that do teach managing vast, amorphous messes! Get a degree in software engineering instead of computer science!
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“Bring out your differential equations!” is a failure of naive rationalism.
“A feedback loop of provisional problem formulation, attempted solution, revised formulation” is meta-rational.
Intro stats books create the rationalist misunderstanding that science gets results by pushing data through a formula.
Meta-rationality requires asking what your data *mean*; and only then asking which statistical methods are relevant and why.
The CS curriculum teaches methods for solving small, well-formulated hard problems: the essence of rationality.
Mostly irrelevant to software engineering practice, which is about managing vast, amorphous messes: a major theme in meta-rationality.