| On the cruelty of really teaching computing scienc |
| 1 | The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the first part of this talk, in which we shall furthermore supply evidence in support of our assumption. |
| 2 | The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit. Linguists are quite familiar with the phenomenon that the meanings of words evolve over time, but also know that this is a slow and gradual process. |
| 3 | It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. |
| 4 | This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty. Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. |
| 5 | One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one's mother tongue. (Any one who has learned quantum mechanics knows what I am talking about.) Needless to say, adjusting to radical novelties is not a very popular activity, for it requires hard work. |
| 6 | For the same reason, the radical novelties themselves are unwelcome. By now, you may well ask why I have paid so much attention to and have spent so much eloquence on such a simple and obvious notion as the radical novelty. My reason is very simple: radical novelties are so disturbing that they tend to be suppressed or ignored, to the extent that even the possibility of their existence in general is more often denied than admitted. |
| 7 | On the historical evidence I shall be short. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward, was certainly aware of the fate of Galileo "and could probably have predicted the calumniation of Einstein" when he decided to suppress his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, thus leaving it to Bolyai and Lobatchewsky to receive the flak. It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. |
| 8 | One of its characteristics was that "reasoning by analogy" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today. The other thing I can not stress enough is that the fraction of the population for which gradual change seems to be all but the only paradigm of history is very large, probably much larger than you would expect. |
| 9 | Certainly when I started to observe it, their number turned out to be much larger than I had expected. For instance, the vast majority of the mathematical community has never challenged its tacit assumption that doing mathematics will remain very much the same type of mental activity it has always been: new topics will come, flourish, and go as they have done in the past, but, the human brain being what it is, our ways of teaching, learning, and understanding mathematics, of problem solving, and of mathematical discovery will remain pretty much the same. |
| 10 | Herbert Robbins clearly states why he rules out a quantum leap in mathematical ability: "Nobody is going to run 100 meters in five seconds, no matter how much is invested in training and machines. The same can be said about using the brain. The human mind is no different now from what it was five thousand years ago. And when it comes to mathematics, you must realize that this is the human mind at an extreme limit of its capacity." My comment in the margin was "so reduce the use of the brain and calculate!". |
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