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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Replying to @danlistensto @Meaningness
we were asked a battery of questions regarding law and ethics that we were expected to give the standard accepted/acceptable response for/ we were then asked some questions where we were supposed to demonstrate awareness of multiple varieties of risk and cost hazards.
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the professor who taught the course was wise to what was going on with this stuff and knew better than to think he could usefully instruct total novices on a subject like that, especially given the outmoded curriculum. so he just "sanity checked" the class and let us go.
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