michael_nielsen

Here's some context for my comment. My Indian educational system put a lot of store in rote learning. Being able to memorize a large quantity of information accurately, index it well, and reproduce it accurately conferred significant advantages. »

This was reinforced in some odd ways. In high school, I participated a lot (and well) in trivia competitions (which we called "quizzes"). Here knowing facts, names, and classifications was a superpower. »

I was fortunate to go to a school that, though athletically very strong, also appreciated more cerebral pursuits. But these all reinforced the idea that the mindless, relentless hoovering up of *facts* was what mattered, and was mistaken for some kind of "learning". »

I read Feynman's "What Do You Care …" when I was about 17, and came across the story of the bird. I remember being dumbstruck by that paragraph. It conveyed something my entire educational system had failed to get me to understand (no doubt partly my fault). »

I had already suffered terribly from this obsession with naming things. I haven't talked about this before, but might as well do it now. »

I'm a really good computer scientist. I live and breathe this stuff. I'm that computational thinker who views grocery stores and shopping lists and backpacks and everything else in computational terms. But let me tell you how I nearly dropped out of CS. »

We didn't have CS in schools in India, but my mom signed me up for a summer course before 9th grade. I wasn't excited; I felt no emotion at all. Computers didn't exist in my world; and I was really passionate about physics (and, thanks to one magical teacher, chemistry). »

Unfortunately, we were on vacation the previous week, so I missed the first two days of classes (which ran for about half a day every day). So I'd missed out on a lot. I came in expecting to be somewhat lost. But it was much worse than that. »