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
It’s hard to teach that stuff, partly because it is partly meta-rational, and we don’t yet have good methods for talking about (or teaching) meta-rationality
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a sympathetic grad student told me early on that the best project collaborators are the ones that reduce the SLOC count and don't check in code without tests written for it that advice was worth more than the rest of the curriculum combined
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