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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“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.
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2016/05/15/bring-out-your-equations/ …pic.twitter.com/ornhx7ltPM
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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.
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/01/12/elementary-statistics-book/ …pic.twitter.com/VTD4rHOomD
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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.
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/ …pic.twitter.com/EFi4a8jg3J
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Replying to @Meaningness
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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Replying to @danlistensto @Meaningness
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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Replying to @danlistensto
Because university is forced to function as a credentialing machine, it mostly can only teach material that is easy to put into a standardized test
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Replying to @Meaningness
well, that's what was an interesting exception in this case. they actually threw out the standardized test because it was so useless. the short response written test they gave was idiosyncratic to the department.
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Ah, I see—I misread your previous tweet!
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