[HN Gopher] On-demand learning comes at the cost of conceptual u...
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On-demand learning comes at the cost of conceptual understanding
Author : chaotically
Score : 91 points
Date : 2023-01-04 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jernesto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jernesto.com)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I like to think of this in terms of JIT and AOT for learning.
| Somethings you'll learn just-in-time and somethings you'll learn
| ahead-of-time.
|
| It's a bit too far to say one is ruining the industry. I think
| you could however argue that it is robbing people of an
| education. Most people take the extreme of only doing JIT
| learning and that makes us lazy. Some people take the extreme of
| only doing AOT learning and they get nothing done. A balance is
| definitely needed.
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/jit-and-aot-learning/
| [deleted]
| chazeon wrote:
| This sounds like someone having the privilege of getting a formal
| CS education and only CS undermining those who doesn't.
|
| The authors should really look at many interdisciplinary domains,
| where doing preliminary learning each and every one of the
| underlying subjects is not only unnecessary, but unfeasible. This
| applies for domains such as data science, computational physics,
| and many others.
|
| For most people, the reality is as simple and cold as: if you are
| not learning while doing, and doing it fast, you simply don't get
| paid/funded and will go broke.
| neilv wrote:
| I think the article might've started with something like: _The
| current practice of software development has a lot of duct-taping
| together of off-the-shelf components by people who don 't
| sufficiently understand what it's doing._
|
| There certainly are important points to be made there, and the
| article makes some of them.
|
| I didn't understand all the terminology choices and definitions.
| For example, where does Papert's theory of Constructionism fit
| into this dichotomy of "preliminary learning" vs. "on-demand
| learning"?
| hinkley wrote:
| I learned a lot of low level things starting out. As the
| abstractions piled on it became clearer and clearer that I had
| mechanical sympathy that other people did not, but the world
| changes underneath you, especially when it's all abstracted
| away anyway (how would you know if the foundations have been
| swapped out underneath you?). I got a refresher course about
| ten years ago working on embedded software, and I'm overdue for
| a booster.
|
| I'm kind of hoping that IoT or open source firmware for SOCs
| and BMCs will give people some more fodder for learning systems
| thinking concepts that are currently being buried behind giant
| frameworks and stackoverflow.
| mjklin wrote:
| "It is when we are using what we have learned that we wish we had
| studied more" - Chinese proverb
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Disappointingly, the people who need to understand this never
| will.
| codeptualize wrote:
| I would describe it differently; deep vs wide knowledge.
|
| I think having both skills is ideal; be able to quickly get
| things done, but also be able to acquire deep knowledge when
| necessary. T-shaped skills.
|
| In reality I think there is no clear divide. If you do the on
| demand thing, you'll encounter situations that require a deep
| dive or if you recognize the same patterns in different things.
| If you do new things learning is inevitable.
|
| I don't share the concerns, I think there is no shortage of
| people with super deep knowledge on many topics and I think we
| are actually getting better in using that knowledge to everyones
| benefit. I'm thinking tools like Streamlit, Supabase and Framer.
| You don't need to be a FE pro to build a simple dashboard, you
| only need basic SQL skills to create a backend, and you with just
| design skills you can make great websites.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| Seems to invent new terminology. A more traditional term for "on-
| demand" learning is "just in time" - a kind of
| epistemology."preliminary learning" aligns with the "just in
| case" epistemology of factory-style education.
| a4isms wrote:
| "Just in time" is a great expression. It resonates with me
| because there is an existing body of knowledge around doing
| things just in time to reduce waste, and I think that's a lot
| of the motivation for learning things just in time:
|
| 1. You don't invest in learning something you won't use, and;
|
| 2. Learning something you will eventually use, but not in the
| near future, has an opportunity cost: What could you be doing
| with that time and attention that will produce value now?
|
| I will make a separate comment describing what I think the
| drawbacks are, but I wanted to focus on my support for your
| preferred nomenclature.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I do like the "just-in-time" label as well.
|
| It seems like the article is lamenting the fact that many of
| these become "not in time" learning in practice.
| a4isms wrote:
| True, but having had a number of my own musings make the
| front page of HN, the author must embrace the fact that
| just because they write about Y , doesn't mean the audience
| won't pull on a thread and decide the important thing to
| discuss is actually X.
|
| :-)
| joshpicky wrote:
| Agreed, but the terminology doesn't seems to be the point. It
| makes some decent arguments about "on-demand" learning not
| being great for learning theoretical things.
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| Implicitly, on-demand is also rapid. I can look up how to use
| a library in minutes and hours. Most people don't have jobs
| where they can allocate weeks or months to learning theory
| that they didn't need before. But such situations do exist:
| employers send staff on courses, and people sign up for part
| time degrees.
| joshpicky wrote:
| As I see it learning "on-demand" is good enough for most
| programming tasks. But I agree with the blog post tat the
| situations you mentioned where a person can actually learn
| new theory and perhaps push the boundaries are increasingly
| rarer.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Putting it bluntly, on-demand learning is excellent for
| learning tools, but it sucks at learning concepts.
|
| This looks a false dichotomy to me. Concepts can be learned on
| demand as well. Talk to any professors in a theoretical STEM
| field (I assume their learning is as conceptual as one can get),
| be it maths, physics, stats, CS, or something, they would advise
| their grad students not to spend too much time reading through
| the tombs before starting research. Instead, they would ask their
| students to learn the concepts _along the way_ when doing
| research. Of course, one needs to have solid foundation to learn
| concepts quickly along the way, but it does not conflict with the
| effectiveness of learning on demand.
|
| What matters is what to learn on-demand and how.
| pphysch wrote:
| On-demand learning is popular because the general quality of
| documentation is awful due to mismatched incentives and rapid
| changes in the tech industry.
|
| Programmers quickly learn that the presence of good documentation
| cannot be relied on, and bad/outdated documentation is worse than
| no documentation.
|
| This is a very different paradigm from traditional schooling
| where almost everything is built on mostly reliable documentation
| (i.e. carefully curated textbooks).
| mikhmha wrote:
| I thrive via an "on-demand" learning approach. But to me, I use
| this approach as a way to immerse myself so I can reach a better
| conceptual understanding. I don't use tools or new skills without
| thinking about how they might work under the hood. I also spend
| lots of time relating the tools and skills I use to other things
| I've done in the past. Many times this leads me to learn about
| the abstract concepts that underpin the tools/skills I use -
| something I would not care about if it was presented to me
| without context.
|
| Here is an example. I was interested in real-time 3D graphics
| programming. How did I go about it? I followed the bare minimum
| tutorials to get OpenGL set up with C++ and then I just wrote
| code for several months, trying different things. This allowed me
| to develop my own intuition around linear algebra, geometry, 3D
| rendering, GPU pipelines, etc. I knew I wasn't doing anything
| groundbreaking, but what I found was after this experimentation I
| was able to readily digest and understand the formal approach to
| the topic. And it was out of my own interest too. I was watching
| university lectures, reading about mathematical proofs, etc.
| Something I thought I'd never be able to do. And I found it much
| more rewarding as I was able to see where my intuitions were
| correct and lined up with the formal approach, and also where I
| was very wrong.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This piece makes assumptions that turn this into a very boring
| discussion with little depth.
|
| How effective is preliminary learning vs on-demand learning? If I
| can have 80% of the conceptual understanding in 1/10 of the time
| is that a good trade-off?
|
| For preliminary learning, how do you know which knowledge will be
| useful in the future and which will be abstracted over?
|
| How fast is the field moving and what do you want to focus on?
|
| For example, someone asked on the ML subreddit about theoretical
| ML research and many comments said theoretical research was
| unnecessary:
|
| _" But, regarding the value of pure ML theory research e.g.
| convergence bounds, versus practical ML research e.g.
| quantization methods, my personal feeling for quite some time has
| been that purely theoretical ML research has been predominantly
| bunk. Machine Learning is so high dimensional that things that
| can't be proven universal can be nearly guaranteed
| probabilistically, and things that can be shown to be possible
| can be staggeringly unlikely; for example, just because the No
| Free Lunch theorem exists, doesn't mean that Adam won't work in
| the vast, vast majority of cases."_
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/101qbfl/d_...
|
| This topic is extremely grey, and blunt arguments like "on-demand
| learning is ruining the tech industry" are not interesting.
|
| I recommend you watch this talk by Laurie Voss where he (They?)
| explains that fundamentals are always shifting. What you consider
| "conceptual understanding" now was a tool many years ago. Tools
| solidify into the new generation of concepts over time. One
| controversial point he makes is that at some point, new
| developers will not know HTML and that's ok!
|
| https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1075031181685592064
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/hWjT_OOBdOc?feature=share
| julienreszka wrote:
| It's all the same just different levels of abstraction
| renewiltord wrote:
| Imho this is not a useful categorization.
|
| You can learn by doing, or by theory and then doing. The point of
| the theory is to take a compressible space of learnings and
| compress+cache them. A principle or law or whatever is just a
| cached compression of a model of reality.
|
| It has all the benefits of compression: you acquire the knowledge
| faster.
|
| It has all the disadvantages of caching: your knowledge may be
| out of date.
|
| There is nothing inherently valuable about a "conceptual"
| understanding or understanding the "fundamental principles" of
| something. All the value comes from the fact that the alternative
| is you can slowly build your model by experiencing reality bit by
| bit, constantly trading off use of your knowledge for building
| more knowledge. Or you can accelerate that process by downloading
| precomputed indexes from other people: what we call "concepts" or
| "principles".
|
| With this model of knowledge, you can see that so long as you can
| extract commonalities from experiences (using your inductive
| reasoning faculty to generalize from small samples) you will
| capture "conceptual" models. This model also permits you to
| choose when you should choose to learn "concepts" and when you
| should choose to acquire the raw uncompressed experience:
| prioritize the compressed cache when it is likely to not be stale
| and it is likely to cover a wide knowledge space.
|
| A heuristic for this is for fields that haven't changed very much
| in a long time. e.g. basic Physics has not changed in a long
| time. Reading the compressed model is superior. On the other
| hand, cross-platform UI development is a new field. You will be
| better served by trying something.
|
| Another heuristic is the search cost. Using your inductive
| reasoning requires some examples. Areas where these are hard to
| acquire should move you to acquire through reading the compressed
| model. e.g. studying epidemiology is better served by reading
| through the state of the art in the field. On the other hand, you
| don't need to study principle to determine if one way to play a
| level in a videogame is superior.
|
| A third heuristic is how large the search space is. e.g. Your
| musical tastes are constantly changing, and it's trivial to play
| the piano. However, the space of notes that sound pleasing to you
| are likely a small fraction of the space of notes that you can
| play on the piano. Here you will be better served learning some
| principles to cut the search space down.
|
| P.S. By the way, to the author, you may benefit from running your
| posts by some English-fluent friends to proof-read. It is
| unlikely you meant to use "gives more inside".
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > You can learn by doing, or by theory and then doing
|
| That's true, but I felt like he was getting at something else,
| though. I've met (and worked with) programmers who tried to
| stumble through everything by looking for a solution to the
| problem immediately in front of them, solving that immediate
| problem as basically as possible, and then working on to the
| next problem. They don't really understand how things like, say
| TCP or SSL or even HTTP work. They don't understand how their
| IDE relates to their compiler. They don't understand machine
| learning well enough to recognize when or how to normalize
| data. They usually expect somebody _else_ to come along and
| "help" them with all of this stuff in a "just-in-time" way.
|
| I remember attending a Java user group one time when Hadoop was
| relatively new and the speaker was presenting it. He was
| talking about some of the challenges they faced getting it up
| and running and a woman interrupted with "but whenever you had
| a problem, couldn't you just google the error message?" He
| said, "there usually weren't any error messages and even when
| there were, google didn't find anything". She seemed shocked
| and actually argued with him a bit in disbelief. I was
| dumbstruck that here was a woman who was actually working as a
| professional programmer deep enough that she was attending Java
| user groups who couldn't conceive that there even _could be_
| problems that required enough fundamental understanding that
| "googling an error message" wasn't going to help.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > Almost every day, there are new technologies to learn, new
| frameworks, new programming languages, new requirements
|
| fire that asshole.
| marymkearney wrote:
| This is hotly debated in the natural sciences also. Big
| difference is that the core body of knowledge in, say, botany or
| ornithology, doesn't change that much over time. Unlike
| technology, which changes all the time.
|
| "On-demand learning" is apps like iNaturalist and eBird. Folks
| are asking "What is this?" basically in a knowledge vacuum. It's
| good that people are curious. But learning the overall taxonomy
| over time, from combined classroom and fieldwork, makes it a much
| much richer experience.
|
| Not sure this translates 100% to CS concepts. But I do understand
| the point being made in the article. Thanks for sharing.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I don't think this really has anything to do with the two
| methods being weaker or stronger than one another.
|
| I've seen plenty of the example that you give involving things
| like iNaturalist. These are people who just plain suck at
| learning on their own. Sorry, I know it's harsh, but I think
| that's usually the case. These are people who wouldn't be
| particularly successful in a classroom either, though they may
| do somewhat better in a classroom setting merely because it
| does away with the need for the student to exercise the skill
| of seeking the right information.
|
| I am more adept at the on-demand side of things. It's not that
| I can't learn in a classroom setting, but a classroom can also
| be smothering to me because it doesn't permit much deviating
| from the formula. What I'm good at is getting the basic idea of
| something, ditching what I don't think to be relevant,
| identifying what I believe may be incorrect, and using that to
| go on my own learning journey and developing the necessary
| skills. Only after I have exhausted every other feasible option
| will I ask someone "What is this?" One reason I hated being in
| a classroom is that a certain amount of question-asking is
| expected of you, and you'll get singled out if you're not
| asking enough questions; I don't ask questions because, quite
| honestly, most lectures are redundant to reading material and
| taking notes.
|
| For the preliminary learner, they _need_ the classroom
| (learning on rails) because they don 't have what it takes to
| be self-directed. They're probably not going to rigorously
| question the information being given to them. If they self-
| guide their learning, the process they'll go through will be
| one of frequent astonishment.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that I think this really comes down
| to the individual and not so much the process. Certain
| personality types are better suited for preliminary learning,
| and others are better (and happier) with on-demand learning.
| marymkearney wrote:
| <using that to go on my own learning journey and developing
| the necessary skills. Only after I have exhausted every other
| feasible option will I ask someone "What is this?">
|
| Yes this, thank you, this expresses much more accurately,
| what I was getting at. When I said "classroom" I think what I
| meant was really "research."
|
| It also digs out the core of my concern, which is I guess the
| laziness fostered by these apps. They don't encourage the
| "learning journey" much. And that is so much richer and more
| interesting, than a jumble of disconnected names.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _Unlike technology, which changes all the time._
|
| The core body of knowledge (in programming anyway) really
| hasn't changed all that much since the 90s, at least.
|
| Sure, the languages and frameworks have changed, and maybe I'm
| not typing as many semicolons as I once did, but a function is
| still a function and a class is still a class.
| marymkearney wrote:
| True true. And the math underlying that, is even more
| enduring.
| a4isms wrote:
| The issue I have with on-demand/just-in-time learning is not when
| you learn, but rather that such learning tends to be self-
| directed. To repurpose a famous quip... _The person who is their
| own teacher has a fool for a student._ The problem is not whether
| you are a good student, the problem is that you selected for a
| teacher someone with no grounding in the subject and no time-
| tested curriculum to teach from. Sometimes it works well, but you
| may end up just like me:
|
| I did a lot of self-directed teaching about programming, starting
| with boyhood explorations almost exactly fifty years ago (1972!).
| Yes, I also have had formal education, but most of what I have
| actually ended up using has been based on self-directed learning.
|
| The result for my N=1 sample is a broken comb profile. I know
| much more about some things than others, and there are areas of
| our industry where I am completely ignorant! The reasons for this
| in my case are that I tend to focus on areas where I already have
| some exposure/interest, and ignore those that I may not
| understand or even know exist.
|
| "On-demand" learning tends to reinforce this. You are trying to
| solve a problem, so you ask yourself questions, and then do
| research to answer the questions you posed to yourself. But this
| can create a serious XY Problem[1]. As a self-directed learner
| solving problems when I encounter them, I search for solutions
| using the knowledge I already have, and I'm completely ignorant
| of the possibility that I'm solving the wrong problem and
| ignoring a deeper understanding of what I'm trying to accomplish.
|
| This can be fixed in various ways, the most obvious of which is:
| _Ask questions of people with experience that differs from
| yours_. If you are a self-made programmer, you will learn the
| most by asking questions of people with a formal education. If
| you are in a three-person YC startup, you will learn the most
| from people in Enterprise companies. That is true no matter how
| little you value formal education ( "credentialism") or
| Enterprise businesses ("bloatware crystallized as an
| organization").
|
| And the other thing I'll mention is to embrace the "XY Problem."
| I personally am just like so many people you see on the
| interwebs. If I ask how to solve problem Y, and someone says
| "Wrong! You actually have problem X, and you solve that in the
| following way," I often emotionally push back. "Just let me solve
| Y today," I think, "I'll ready up about X later."
|
| But that is the glaring weakness of being a self-directed, on-
| demand, just-in-time learner. We chase solving problem Y,
| sometimes aggressively ignorant of X. To be successful as our own
| teachers, we must be open to learning about X even when our
| "priority" is solving problem Y. And this is why being respectful
| of people with different contexts (those with PhDs or those who
| attend 57 meetings a week) is especially valuable for us. JM2C,
| YMMV, and especially, if I'm blathering about Y while the real
| issue with on-demand learning is X, I'm open to your feedback!
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The tech industry is ruining itself by expecting its employees to
| learn a bunch of new topics at breakneck speeds on their own time
| and on their own dime.
| mym1990 wrote:
| From what I have experienced(sample size of 1), the tech
| industry is more than willing to provide financial assistance
| in learning about a topic that is relevant to the work that an
| employee does...the time bit is the one that most people don't
| want to commit to and that is totally understandable. My
| company is offering 500$ to pass a certification, which comes
| out to be like 300 after taxes, they also cover the cost of the
| exam. It takes 2 hours to take the exam, 10-20 to study for it,
| and give or take 1 to get to the proctor site. Kind of meh.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I've worked at a few places and none of them have ever spent
| a dime on developer education. They've sent members of the
| "product core" team to events and trade conferences, but the
| devs are just expected to figure things out as we go.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Unfortunate, this is their loss, offering education is low
| hanging fruit for having more competitiveness in hiring.
| Merrill wrote:
| This is only a problem for the incurious who stop when they solve
| the immediate problem.
|
| The curious will often descend into conceptual rabbit holes and
| acquire conceptual knowledge as well. It's sort of anticipatory
| yak shaving for future projects.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I guess even in web development it might be a bit of a vicious
| circle. The tools are maybe short-lived due to a lack of
| understanding of fundamentals and concepts - leading in turn to
| more ,,on demand" learning and so on.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Wait a second, who here honestly did not practice on-demand
| learning at university? You did, didn't you?
|
| You had to because you were studying for a specific exam, which
| you would fail if you only understood the deeper concepts but not
| specifics of the questions on that exam.
|
| It's also true that you probably don't understand the concepts as
| well as you'd like. If you're like most of us, you passed the
| exams by means of an academic Fosbury Flop. Sort of throwing
| yourself over the bar in pieces while your center of gravity
| passes under it.
|
| On the other hand, most of the things I do understand well are
| things that I've been on-demand learning about. You end up coming
| back to central concepts because they're central. Knit together
| enough programs and you will end up thinking about code
| organization at some point in your career. You will run into a
| Big-O problem at some point. You will run into distributed
| systems.
|
| Yeah so I'm not sure what my point is, perhaps I agree in a way
| that it's a bit of a continuum, but also I think with enough
| exploration you actually end up finding gold.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > You had to because you were studying for a specific exam,
| which you would fail if you only understood the deeper concepts
| but not specifics of the questions on that exam.
|
| I mostly operated that way on a class-by-class basis in grad
| school, but at some point it became a conceptual understanding.
| The "aha" moment came in grad school when I was a TA for a
| class I didn't do particularly well in as an undergrad. During
| a help session, I couldn't recall a couple specific formulae,
| but I was able to infer and derive them based on my conceptual
| understanding of the topic.
|
| I think the real difference was that I was now teaching the
| material, and in doing so, had to approach things from a
| totally different angle than studying for the test.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Neither of those modes alone suffice. At an undergrad course
| you will have the concepts all forced at you in a class, so
| that later when you are learning on demand they can click.
| sdwr wrote:
| Love the analogy. For years after school I found myself going
| into "test mode", a timeboxed intellectual fight to the death.
| Works great when the work gets distilled to a number and thrown
| away, not so well when you have to keep working with your
| results...
| mansoon wrote:
| Me.
|
| I was the conceptologist. I learned by fitting things into
| chunks.
|
| Then I got to the world of tables of apis and frameworks and
| shitty microservices and all of it ad-hoc, and found that my
| mind, tuned to do what I found valuable and beautiful in the
| world, was worthless.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| Wow. That's exactly how I feel. I've always focused on
| concepts over specifics, thinking that I'll figure out the
| details as I do a thing. People don't seem to want that,
| though. Maybe I'm looking for the wrong kind of work.
| mansoon wrote:
| Please let me know if you ever figure out what kind of work
| fits...
|
| I feel like the move would have been to go very deep on
| something. Too late for that now.
| gbro3n wrote:
| To add weight to the merits of on demand learning, on the Tim
| Ferris pod cast, Martine Rothblatt describes how she was able to
| learn enough to start her own pharmaceutical company to save her
| daughters life using what sounds like an on demand learning
| approach. She was also a very well established engineer in
| unrelated fields, but this was truly inspiring nonetheless, and
| showed me that you don't need formal education to make a huge
| impact. https://tim.blog/2020/12/17/martine-rothblatt-transcript/
| civilized wrote:
| The key claim of this post is buried in the middle:
|
| > preliminary learning is quite bad for learning tools but is the
| only way of learning concepts.
|
| This claim is not justified. Why must concepts be learned just-
| in-case (preliminary) rather than just-in-time (on demand)?
|
| I can imagine you might struggle to get a good map of some
| territory, or a deep explanation of why something is true,
| without a teacher and/or setting aside some time. But what does
| this have to do with just-in-case versus just-in-time?
| shkkmo wrote:
| I agree, the article conflates several different learning
| dichotomies that are often only loosely correlated.
|
| The specific quote you include isn't totally wrong, but it
| overstates the connection and ignores the contextual
| differences that maken it more or less true.
|
| One of those contexts in the amount of time pressure vs. slack
| time you have. When you are under lots of time pressure, it's
| harder to take the time to learn concepts and easy to skip
| straight to tools.
|
| To me, this indicates that the author has misunderstood the
| cause of the problem. The problem isn't that tool learning
| replaces concept learning, but that workplace/management
| cultures commonly don't value concept learning and as a result
| don't schedule time for it or reward it.
| civilized wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like the author is reasoning like "concept
| learning can't happen at work, it can only happen at school
| where there's time, and school is a just-in-case learning
| environment". I would hope we can reconsider whether concept
| learning can really never happen at work!
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Why must concepts be learned just-in-case (preliminary)
| rather than just-in-time (on demand)
|
| Because you don't know which concepts you need unless you
| already know what they are.
| civilized wrote:
| It's unclear how just-in-case learning solves this problem.
| By learning more things "just in case" you might happen upon
| the thing you didn't know you didn't know, or you might not.
| It's a shot in the dark and could waste a lot of time.
| jernesto wrote:
| I'm the author. I wasn't expecting for this to spark such an
| interesting conversation, but I'm very glad it did.
|
| Thank you all for the thoughtful and eloquent comments.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'm not so sure about the arguments here. Theoretical knowledge
| is more advantageous if things are soundly designed. If stuff is
| a cobbled together mess, as many modern tools are, it may
| actually block flow or lead to false assumptions.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's a valid pursuit, but I'm not convinced
| by the arguments presented.
|
| Instead you can say it opens the door to more serious work such
| as say language design, operating system teams, things like that.
| It rarefies your skillset especially if you don't suck at it. You
| aren't likely to get an important position at say, nvidia, by
| going through bootcamps. The crack of that door is open much
| wider for those with a Stanford PhD in hand. I'm sure there's
| exceptions, but I'd imagine they're quite rare.
|
| I think it's unlikely, however, to make you necessarily more
| proficient in the latest churn of frameworks to implement the
| latest churn of websites.
| cody_coconuts wrote:
| The article agrees with you that, for learning tools, "on-
| demand" or "just-in-time" learning is advantageous. This
| applies for the things that you point out as being commonly
| cobbled together. However, for learning whole concepts like
| "AI" or "cloud development," these things are rarely cobbled
| together and require one to learn how to think through a whole
| new lens. The concept is larger than any one tool, and the idea
| is that thinking more broadly will be advantageous in the long
| run
| kristopolous wrote:
| And that's what I'm fundamentally disputing. We're in an age
| where "trade school" programming is needed - someone has to
| do the work and there's no shame in a job well done.
|
| A plumber doesn't need to master the mathematics of fluid
| dynamics or have an advanced degree in chemical engineering
| to do their job well. A hair stylist doesn't need to pursue a
| dermatology medical degree focused on hair growth.
|
| Plumbers and cosmetologists have plenty of work and it's a
| good profession. They need to go to school, pass exams, get a
| certification, it's a real thing.
|
| Similarly, getting an e-commerce site up or building a mobile
| app doesn't require an ability to say, demonstrate the
| correspondence principle of procedural abstraction in lambda
| calculus. There's jobs that do but that ain't one of them.
| travisporter wrote:
| I think you're agreeing with the article?
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| A bonus is theoretical knowledge is quite stable: there is
| usually some thought put into how to pace and structure the
| teaching of it (e.g. pedagogy). It builds on itself. And it
| doesn't expire at the same rate that frameworks do. Drinking
| from a deeper pool of knowledge (as it were) is a profoundly
| different experience than learning new tools.
|
| If you're early in your career, focusing on marketable skills
| and getting experience is a smart move. Once you start thinking
| about progressing to intermediate and beyond, theory starts to
| be a secret weapon of sorts that lets you tackle bigger and
| harder problems.
| bovermyer wrote:
| So let's ignore the headline and most of the article's content,
| since it's really not relevant to the most interesting
| supposition of the article.
|
| First, two definitions, from the author:
|
| 1. On-Demand Learning: Learning done to solve a specific problem
| as it is encountered
|
| 2. Preliminary Learning: Learning done for the sake of a broad
| understanding of a subject
|
| I disagree with the naming, but we'll roll with them for
| brevity's sake.
|
| The author worries about on-demand learning being applied _to the
| exclusion of_ preliminary learning.
|
| Put another way, too many people read tutorials without reading
| general information.
|
| So, the solution is pretty simple, on the face of it - make sure
| you're regularly learning broad areas, not just specific
| solutions.
|
| Read a variety of books. Acquire a broad base of knowledge.
| sroussey wrote:
| Would have been better to use ahead of time (AOT) and just in
| time (JIT) as they have analogs in CS.
| [deleted]
| MasterPI wrote:
| I would compare (most) modern development to repairing a car
| engine.
|
| You don't need to know the concepts of material engineering or
| thermodynamics to be able to repair it. You just learn the
| functioning of an engine and the tools you need.
| tester756 wrote:
| I think people prefer on-demand approach because
|
| learning without purpose sucks, I mean it's still very valuable,
| but it sucks in that sense that it is "unpredicatbly effective".
|
| It means that you may learn some stuff and be asked about it on a
| interview month later, or use it in your task a two months later.
| It's unpredictable.
|
| It has one strong advantage - namely you're prepared when facing
| problem.
|
| In both work and academia I've been doing things ahead -
| sometimes due to work, sometimes due to curiosity and when facing
| those problem during lectures or work then I've been prepared.
|
| It's advantage, but the process sucks, is boring and
| unpredictable.
|
| I think on-demand approach doesn't work well when the problems
| are getting harder and require more knowledge / exp and you gotta
| have solid foundations and proficiency to some point in your
| hands.
|
| I think it'd be hard to do cryptography, reverse engineering,
| writing database, compiler, os, etc. when learning on-demand.
| It'd feel miserable, I think.
| a4isms wrote:
| > learning without purpose sucks, I mean it's still very
| valuable, but it sucks in that sense that it is "unpredicatbly
| effective".
|
| Your presumption is that people are only interested in learning
| things that make them more effective. This is certainly true of
| many people at least some of the time, of course. This can be
| established by direct observation: How many times have you ever
| heard someone in a classroom ask, "Will this be on the test?"
|
| Bt as a universal proposition, it can also be contradicted by
| direct observation: People learn things for "the pleasure of
| finding things out," the title of a Feynman book.
|
| Why else would anyone read a book like Raymond Smullyan's "To
| Mock a Mockingbird?" There are precious few occupations where
| you will become more effective if you know how starlings and
| kestrels can combine in various permutations to compute
| anything computable.
|
| The first half of your sentence is correct: Learning without
| purpose sucks. But there are many purposes for learning,
| including fun (like learning combinatory logic via songbirds in
| forests) or a desire to understand the way things work or the
| desire to be viewed by our peers as a learned person.
| tester756 wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should only learn for
| "material" "monetary" "measurable" value, fun/thought has
| value too, but I think that in the context of this thread we
| are talking about learning to get better at job/craft, so -
| languages, frameworks, concepts/theories/foundations, tools,
| and so on
| a4isms wrote:
| Oh I totally get that, and as someone who likes to program
| for fun...
|
| One of the ways you make more time available for the things
| you learn for fun (esoteric programming, rock climbing,
| ultimate, playing music, flying gliders) is by being very
| intentional about what you choose to learn for "your job."
|
| Another comment made a good point: Perhaps we should call
| such learning "training." We expect automobile mechanics to
| know the basic physics behind ICE, but nobody expects the
| person changing their oil to learn about the computational
| fluid dynamics involved in designing fuel injection
| systems.
|
| If you ask, "How can I learn about programming," I would
| expect the answer to involve a mix of both CompSci basics
| and practical direction for writing actual programs in a
| reasonably accessible programming language.
|
| But if you ask, "How can I train to get a job working as a
| programmer in BigCo," I totally get that the answer should
| lean in, hard, on the practical and the currently
| marketable.
| naasking wrote:
| > learning without purpose sucks
|
| Learning can be it's own reward. Learning can give you new eyes
| to appreciate the world.
| tester756 wrote:
| Hmm, isn't curiosity the purpose in this case?
|
| I think that in the context of this thread we are talking
| about learning to get purely better at job/craft
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| On-demand (as-needed) is handy for actually accomplishing
| things at work, but theory is the thing that doesn't become
| obsolete as soon as the trends of the industry sway once more.
| Being able to use react is one thing, but understanding why
| react (or angular, etc) works the way it does is highly
| transferable
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > when the problems are getting harder and require more
| knowledge
|
| https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
| clnq wrote:
| There is one more reason why on-the-spot learning is prevalent in
| tech - tech moves fast. Faster than documentation and much
| quicker than courses or literature. Anyone trying to reach some
| finality in learning tech before practicing it will always fall
| behind. Not to mention that a lack of practice parallel to
| learning intrinsically makes learning ineffective.
|
| Trying to learn in advance is a waste of time. Most people
| learning for tech roles agree, and the industry agrees. It might
| be helpful to step back and look at the big picture when you
| learn or to backfill knowledge gaps to understand a topic better.
| But if one avoids learning on the spot or on the job, they just
| put themselves at a tremendous disadvantage.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Learning how to learn effectively is probably a great ROI for
| this space.
| tester457 wrote:
| That's why everyone should read A Mind For Numbers to learn
| how to learn.
| huijzer wrote:
| Although I agree with most of the arguments in this article, I
| think that tools vs. concepts is a false dichotomy. Concepts are
| built on small pieces of knowledge and small pieces of knowledge
| can be learned via on-demand learning.
|
| The problem is that it's hard to build the concept from the
| ground up. For example, everyone knows that it would be best to
| learn linear algebra before learning machine learning, but no
| one, in practice, has the time to learn linear algebra from the
| ground up.
| gbro3n wrote:
| On demand learning is more efficient. Sure we'd rather understand
| the whole field, but we can't know all of every field. Better to
| learn what you know and go deeper as and when it's clear that
| you'll need to. If I tried to read full text books on every tech
| I've used, I'd never get any work done and I doubt I'd retain it
| all for long without using in anger.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Hm, I think the author has got the causality wrong here. The
| direction of the tech industry is not a result of learning style.
| Rather, the tech industry goes in the direction of the incentives
| presented to it, which are largely capitalist in nature, and
| secondarily due to aggregate preferences and tastes of the
| various practitioners (which include UX, domain interest, taste
| in technology, etc). I believe on-demand learning naturally
| dominates in this environment because the goals are very
| pragmatic and short-term go-to-market concerns. Of course, when
| expand beyond the narrowly defined "tech industry", goals could
| be completely different. For example, pushing the boundaries of
| mathematics or astrophysics obviously requires a huge amount of
| preliminary learning to even start to make a dent.
|
| But this brings me to where I really disagree with the article:
|
| > _Putting it bluntly, on-demand learning is excellent for
| learning tools, but it sucks at learning concepts._
|
| I could not disagree more about this, in fact I think it's
| borderline gibberish. First of all, you can absolutely learn
| concepts on-demand, and in fact a concrete use case can often
| make the concept much clearer than if you learned it from first
| principles. Secondly, of course tools are easy to learn this way,
| since a tool is a thing which was already thoughtfully designed
| for a purpose--if your goal is to quickly get something done, and
| a tool is available, of course that is likely going to be your
| first choice.
|
| Overall preliminary vs on-demand is just about time horizons and
| they are not mutually exclusive. For example, I don't see any
| shortage of programmers continuing to learn over the long-haul
| and develop new concepts and practices inductively based on years
| of short-term focused work.
| kkfx wrote:
| Mh, here "on-demand learning", in my poor English sound like
| "training vs learning", where you just show something to someone
| enough to get him/her able to something.
|
| In a more broad sense: a specialist, too specialist and of low
| general culture to know/grasp "the big picture", so someone
| unable to evolve, who tend to have just a hammer and so see only
| nails etc.
|
| I do not understand the "on demand" part. Beside the title the
| issue is very old and far older than the industrial era or modern
| time: the issue is that broad and skilled people know the big
| picture so are hard to master like famous Greek's "useful
| idiots", while "useful idiots" are... Useful, but not much a
| threat for a leader, anthropomorphic bipeds easy to chain and
| forge ad human-robot.
|
| In some moment in history some leaders have tried a "more
| culture" path, like Peter the Great, and it does end not very
| well for him and just partially well, and at a very big price for
| the people. In some moment the opposite path was took and again
| it does not end well as well.
|
| Probably the ancient Roman's "in medio stat virtus" (in the mean
| lie the virtue" is still valid, and find the mean is not so
| straightforward, NOR easy to keep since we are a living being not
| a static iron bar...
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Reminds me a little of Steve Yegges classic Rich Programmer Food
| [1]
|
| [1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-
| food...
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I don't do well with formal education and what this article
| describes as "preliminary learning", I'm 100% "on-demand". I've
| always learned through experience and practice of things. A lot
| of that is driven by a feeling of "what is this thing." It's kind
| of adjacent to "how does this thing work" but more abstract, as
| in fitting it into a system of existing ideas and concepts and
| building endless categories and subcategories.
|
| I've found that this makes instant proficiency with a lot of
| things easy ("oh, it's one of these") and mastery fairly quick
| too ("it's one of these, but with these key
| differences/details").
|
| The biggest downside is I learn (truly) new things slowly. Where
| most people note things down, remember them and move on, I can't
| learn until I've understood what the new thing is, in the sense
| of having some sort of complete idea of what it is (not
| necessarily with all the details, just enough for it to be
| coherent). But once that is absorbed I can move on fairly
| quickly.
|
| So when I'm being taught "preliminary" I just can't get whole
| picture I need, and it all goes by too quickly for me to figure
| it out in classes and lectures. The other problem with this sort
| of teaching is that it tends to be bottom up whereas my mind
| tends to work top-down, not wanting to know most details until
| later. I'm more interested in why you would want to have this
| thing as it is or why you need it at all, because that reveals
| much more to me, rather than describing how it works or how it
| fits in with the next step up.
| mym1990 wrote:
| "Mastery fairly quickly" is a juxtaposition. Mastery of a
| concept or a subject is not simply understanding it, but being
| able to apply is to many scenarios(aka experience)...and this
| bit does take time.
|
| I think learning through experience and hands on activities is
| totally valid, and in most cases I don't know if I would say
| that kind of learning is 'on-demand'. Preliminary learning
| doesn't have to be reading out of a book or having to do 10
| years or school, but it should be a cohesive, prolonged effort
| to understand fundamentals.
| rexreed wrote:
| Says the guy who right on his home page [0] says:
|
| "I love making fun small projects and learning new things in the
| process. I'm interested in computer science, physics, math, and
| pretty much everything else."
|
| [0] https://www.jernesto.com/
|
| Sounds like the sort of on-demand learning he's criticizing.
| cody_coconuts wrote:
| [flagged]
| rexreed wrote:
| For sure I read it. In fact, he defines On-Demand Learning as
| follows in that article:
|
| "The second category is "on-demand learning", this is the act
| of acquiring knowledge when the situation demands it, not
| sooner nor later. "
|
| Which seems to be the sort of learning he aspires to. Learn
| it when the situation demands it, not sooner nor later. Not-
| withstanding a definition of the term on-demand learning that
| conflicts with other definitions of that term.
| cody_coconuts wrote:
| You present a straw man argument based on the author's bio
| from his website. Of course that doesn't represent his full
| position. He clearly advocates for a combination of both
| approaches in the article
| [deleted]
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