posting a question / problem " format" ?
-
trønderen wrote:
Some textbook authors are excellent. Some academics, even IT people, have an impressing ability to make even complex issues look easy and obvious to a lesser qualified audience.
A personal story from way back when: In my third Uni third year, we had an Electronics course and everyone said if you pass it, it's almost like having the diploma in your pocket. The amazing part was that after every course I would come out convinced I understood everything but when I would read the course again I would realize I don't have a clue. Took me a while to figure out the trick the teacher was using. He would insist on simple things until you realized how obvious they were and just gloss over complicated stuff. Almost like saying "you see 2 plus 2 equals 4 because if you take 2 fingers and 2 fingers that makes 4 fingers... and, by the way, the Laplacian of the electric field in the junction is given by this differential equation...". He had an impressing ability of masking the the complicated things in deceptive simplicity. Although I passed the course, cannot say I enjoyed it.
Mircea
I fully believe you story. Maybe that lecturer did not belong in the class of 'excellent' lecturers. Glossing over complexity can be very counter-productive, as you indicate. However: Grasping the main idea, maybe in a somewhat simplistic way, can be an essential stepping stone. There are exception situations, corner cases, that require special consideration. They can come later. Grasp the main ideas first, even if they do not cover everything. A good lecturer will make it clear where you might encounter exceptions to the main rules, and those cases will be looked at later. A bad lecturer will use his immense knowledge by rushing on to all the corner cases and exceptions long before the students have had an opportunity to digest the normal case. Regarding calculus concepts: Lots of students have merely learned 'That's the way we do it!' and have really never truly understood why that's the way to do it. That nature is that way - it is obvious and natural! A good lecturer makes it obvious to you why it simply has to be that way, why the calculus is the way it is. I remember from my high school years when I got hold of some good books in relativity, and one night realized that the twin paradox simply had to be that way! Anything else would have been completely illogical! Later, I tried to find other textbooks that would explain more advanced topics in relativity in a manner that made it equally obvious. I never found any. But when I was 16-17 yo, I was at the stage where special relativity was an obvious thing to me, even though I was certainly not a calculus wiz kid - not then, and never since. To me, as a teenager, the twin paradox was self-evident even without advanced differential math. A relativity wiz would probably say that my accept for the twin paradox as something obvious is little worth, it doesn't reflect all the complexity of the calculus. That may be right, but if I can fully accept and and appreciate the twin paradox without all that calculus, I have come a long way compared to a lot of the people around me! When I ask someone to explain a solution to me, I always ask them to first present an 'intuitive' solution. Your mainline thoughts, void of mathematical details, data types, lambdas, locking mechanisms ... Which principles do you follow in this solution? I consider calculus to be at the coding level. You can say a lot about a system without referring to implementation code. You can say a lot about relativity without going into calculus. And about elec
-
I fully believe you story. Maybe that lecturer did not belong in the class of 'excellent' lecturers. Glossing over complexity can be very counter-productive, as you indicate. However: Grasping the main idea, maybe in a somewhat simplistic way, can be an essential stepping stone. There are exception situations, corner cases, that require special consideration. They can come later. Grasp the main ideas first, even if they do not cover everything. A good lecturer will make it clear where you might encounter exceptions to the main rules, and those cases will be looked at later. A bad lecturer will use his immense knowledge by rushing on to all the corner cases and exceptions long before the students have had an opportunity to digest the normal case. Regarding calculus concepts: Lots of students have merely learned 'That's the way we do it!' and have really never truly understood why that's the way to do it. That nature is that way - it is obvious and natural! A good lecturer makes it obvious to you why it simply has to be that way, why the calculus is the way it is. I remember from my high school years when I got hold of some good books in relativity, and one night realized that the twin paradox simply had to be that way! Anything else would have been completely illogical! Later, I tried to find other textbooks that would explain more advanced topics in relativity in a manner that made it equally obvious. I never found any. But when I was 16-17 yo, I was at the stage where special relativity was an obvious thing to me, even though I was certainly not a calculus wiz kid - not then, and never since. To me, as a teenager, the twin paradox was self-evident even without advanced differential math. A relativity wiz would probably say that my accept for the twin paradox as something obvious is little worth, it doesn't reflect all the complexity of the calculus. That may be right, but if I can fully accept and and appreciate the twin paradox without all that calculus, I have come a long way compared to a lot of the people around me! When I ask someone to explain a solution to me, I always ask them to first present an 'intuitive' solution. Your mainline thoughts, void of mathematical details, data types, lambdas, locking mechanisms ... Which principles do you follow in this solution? I consider calculus to be at the coding level. You can say a lot about a system without referring to implementation code. You can say a lot about relativity without going into calculus. And about elec
I think we are going on a tangent here, but hey, it's the Lounge so who cares! :)
trønderen wrote:
I remember from my high school years when I got hold of some good books in relativity
For me the fuse was George Gamow's One, Two, Three ... Infinity. Facts & Speculations of Science[^] when I was 12. Got my mind started on concepts like transcendental numbers, atomic structure, relativity - a smorgasbord of delicious intellectual concepts for a nerdy kid :laugh:
trønderen wrote:
even though I was certainly not a calculus wiz kid - not then, and never since.
Funny how our brains can work differently. For some people concepts like music, colors, or relativity for that matter, are absolutely natural. For me they are all learned concepts that I can perceive and understand but I cannot call them natural. With calculus meanwhile, I'm a fish in the water :) In the end all these differences make the world an interesting place to live. With nerds like me it would be such a boring place.
Mircea
-
Well, my honest feelings about this inelegant fellow is that until he "'fesses" up and gives us the true location of his "unseenedness" (by editing his particulars to out his use of the mercan flag) he's just being colorful for the sake of color.
OK folks, you obviously looking for "I am sorry for posting such rant" so here it is
"I am sorry for posting such rant"
anything to make you feel better for wasting your voluntary time ( unfortunately ) some of you (obviously) do not care wasting mine time.
-
I will say to your defense: Most IT people (or you could make it more general, if you like: Most people with a university degree) are very poor at explaining a problem within their field of expertise to someone outside the field. Their advanced knowledge stands in the way. Even when I ask my co-workers to explain something (I have a Master in Comp.Sci), I may have to guide them through their explanation, telling them 'First, explain how this part works, we'll take the rest afterwards', rather than everything messed up. They use terms that are specific to the stuff they are trying to explain, without explaining the term, and I have to stop them and demand an explanation. When they introduce some 'concept', I ask questions about how this concept differs from this and that older and well known concept. And so on. A good teacher/lecturer would structure his presentation, explain terms, refer to related, known stuff, and adapt the presentation to whatever background the audience has. Most IT people just opens the sluice gates to let their immense flood of advance knowledge drown you. When the audience doesn't understand a word, the IT expert usually blames the audience :-) Unfortunately, publishing books is so cheap nowadays that you see the same in a lot of IT books: You senses that the author is really knowledgeable, but the explanations are outright terrible. Sometimes, the better you know the subject area yourself, the more you see how bad the presentation is, how bad the examples are. Wikipedia is certainly no exception (in many articles, not all): When I try to make sense of them, I often ask myself: Is there a single person in the world who will understand this - and also will look it up in Wikipedia? If it takes a Master to understand the article, then you probably learned enough in your studies that you know all the stuff in the article! Some textbook authors are excellent. Some academics, even IT people, have an impressing ability to make even complex issues look easy and obvious to a lesser qualified audience. I wish we had a lot more of those. As long as that is not the case, we will have to cope with explanations that requires a lot of work to be deciphered. Sometimes you ask supplementary questions; sometimes the answer gives you the proper keywords for a google search for more understandable explanations. We won't run into those great pedagogics all the time, and have to live with it.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that t
re/ teaching please see link below. https://winkgo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/67-Hilarious-Teacher-Memes-01-720x1080.jpg[^]
-
OK folks, you obviously looking for "I am sorry for posting such rant" so here it is
"I am sorry for posting such rant"
anything to make you feel better for wasting your voluntary time ( unfortunately ) some of you (obviously) do not care wasting mine time.
-
When I post here , asking for help do I have to spell it out ? "...I am looking for a solution..." is it not obvious? or is this forum now a " social media chat " box? Reason for THIS post I have recently experienced a "reply" which basically restated / reformatted my post and did not actually offered a solution. End of rant
I have been thinking about the area of asking questions recently. Asking a well formed question is a skill, it's not a given that everyone knows how to ask a well-formed question. I think teaching kids how to ask a question should be part of what they learn at school.
Salvatore Terress wrote:
do I have to spell it out ?
Yes, you do have to spell it out. Here is a great example of asking questions with a journalist asking Richard Feynman a question, where Feynman points out how the question is difficult to answer ->Richard Feynman Magnets - YouTube[^]
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
-
I have been thinking about the area of asking questions recently. Asking a well formed question is a skill, it's not a given that everyone knows how to ask a well-formed question. I think teaching kids how to ask a question should be part of what they learn at school.
Salvatore Terress wrote:
do I have to spell it out ?
Yes, you do have to spell it out. Here is a great example of asking questions with a journalist asking Richard Feynman a question, where Feynman points out how the question is difficult to answer ->Richard Feynman Magnets - YouTube[^]
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
(Importunately ) I have to disagree for (simple) reason such point of view emphasizes the FORM of the question and ( most of the time) misses the subject of the question. I have experienced sites which basically stopped the post because it was not formatted properly or my English was not good enough, and when my post was accepted it was promptly rewritten. Of course when I pointed out that my post was not for purpose of perfect English presentation I was prompt banned. And there are sites which tells me that "your past posts were not accepted well..." All of this is NOT based on "customer is always right..."
-
(Importunately ) I have to disagree for (simple) reason such point of view emphasizes the FORM of the question and ( most of the time) misses the subject of the question. I have experienced sites which basically stopped the post because it was not formatted properly or my English was not good enough, and when my post was accepted it was promptly rewritten. Of course when I pointed out that my post was not for purpose of perfect English presentation I was prompt banned. And there are sites which tells me that "your past posts were not accepted well..." All of this is NOT based on "customer is always right..."
Oh well, pearls before swine...
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
-
(Importunately ) I have to disagree for (simple) reason such point of view emphasizes the FORM of the question and ( most of the time) misses the subject of the question. I have experienced sites which basically stopped the post because it was not formatted properly or my English was not good enough, and when my post was accepted it was promptly rewritten. Of course when I pointed out that my post was not for purpose of perfect English presentation I was prompt banned. And there are sites which tells me that "your past posts were not accepted well..." All of this is NOT based on "customer is always right..."
The simple fact is the customer is NOT always right and kissing a customer's backside is not the purpose of this site. The actual quote is, "In matters of taste, the customer is always right." The first phrase is an important point of distinction.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
-
The simple fact is the customer is NOT always right and kissing a customer's backside is not the purpose of this site. The actual quote is, "In matters of taste, the customer is always right." The first phrase is an important point of distinction.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
-
OK folks, you obviously looking for "I am sorry for posting such rant" so here it is
"I am sorry for posting such rant"
anything to make you feel better for wasting your voluntary time ( unfortunately ) some of you (obviously) do not care wasting mine time.
I do not feel my time wasted here... I just bought popcorn and took a sit. Relaxing from technical content for a while can be refreshing :P Thank you for the entertainment :)
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
-
It would be silly to kiss, but insults are acceptable. My favorite RTFM takes few seconds to type, so what is all this fuss about wasting "volunteer contributors" time ?
Salvatore Terress wrote:
My favorite RTFM
Mine is DNFTF :rolleyes: :laugh: But feeding the troll can be funny too :-D
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
-
I have been thinking about the area of asking questions recently. Asking a well formed question is a skill, it's not a given that everyone knows how to ask a well-formed question. I think teaching kids how to ask a question should be part of what they learn at school.
Salvatore Terress wrote:
do I have to spell it out ?
Yes, you do have to spell it out. Here is a great example of asking questions with a journalist asking Richard Feynman a question, where Feynman points out how the question is difficult to answer ->Richard Feynman Magnets - YouTube[^]
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
GuyThiebaut wrote:
Here is a great example of asking questions with a journalist asking Richard Feynman a question, where Feynman points out how the question is difficult to answer
Side note, that might not be the best example video. I only watched the first 30 seconds, but in that clip Richard was being way too literal and not understanding the perspective of the person asking in the common vernacular. As in, we know Feynman is supposed to be the smart one and not the interviewer. But, Feynman can't understand what it means to not know. If you can't learn to communicate with "lesser minds" it's easy enough to argue your mind isn't that great either. What anyone who understands anything about humans would read from the first 30 seconds of that clip was a display of defensiveness at best or arrogance at worst. Ironically enough, 99% of people who spend time with real people can see that. :doh: Also, you may want to study body language because it's real and useful when reading people. Love him or hate him, Neil deGrasse Tyson does a much better job of communicating. Which is probably why he's so well-known. Point of all this is, Richard did not come out in this scenario looking like a super genius or even decent at being a conversationalist.
Jeremy Falcon
-
I do appreciate you taking time and respond. As noted - it was a rant... It is normal to meet people with different attitude, and I do not believe judging, pointing out specific would be helpful, mainly because when the one who acquires attitude " I am better then you are " is generally immune to any suggestions to change. I have been using and (sometime ) abusing this forum for years and most of the time the discussions have been on very professional level and helpful. And I do appreciate that.
Salvatore Terress wrote:
would be helpful, mainly because when the one who acquires attitude " I am better then you are " is generally immune to any suggestions to change.
Years ago on a 'newsnet' channel (or whatever they were called then) on a technical forum for a specific language a specific user routinely told people to RTFM. Not politely. And he would go off on a rant if anyone questioned him. Now he literally was in fact 'better than your are' probably 100% of the time because he, at that time, authored at least two books on the language. I know they were good books because I bought both of them and at least one of them I considered a primary source. (If I actually remember the name correctly then I still have books by him and they are still primary sources.) Surprising to me given that situation how inflammatory his posts were. I can't say he was the most negative poster that I saw but he certainly ranked up there.
Salvatore Terress wrote:
I do not believe judging,
So don't. Instead laugh. That is what I do. The more outrageous the more amusing I find it. Certainly when they denigrate someone (including me) they are certainly not proving to anyone that their knowledge is better. Nor that their ability to communicate is better. Because of course if both of those were true then they could provide a clear and concise answer instead.
-
I will say to your defense: Most IT people (or you could make it more general, if you like: Most people with a university degree) are very poor at explaining a problem within their field of expertise to someone outside the field. Their advanced knowledge stands in the way. Even when I ask my co-workers to explain something (I have a Master in Comp.Sci), I may have to guide them through their explanation, telling them 'First, explain how this part works, we'll take the rest afterwards', rather than everything messed up. They use terms that are specific to the stuff they are trying to explain, without explaining the term, and I have to stop them and demand an explanation. When they introduce some 'concept', I ask questions about how this concept differs from this and that older and well known concept. And so on. A good teacher/lecturer would structure his presentation, explain terms, refer to related, known stuff, and adapt the presentation to whatever background the audience has. Most IT people just opens the sluice gates to let their immense flood of advance knowledge drown you. When the audience doesn't understand a word, the IT expert usually blames the audience :-) Unfortunately, publishing books is so cheap nowadays that you see the same in a lot of IT books: You senses that the author is really knowledgeable, but the explanations are outright terrible. Sometimes, the better you know the subject area yourself, the more you see how bad the presentation is, how bad the examples are. Wikipedia is certainly no exception (in many articles, not all): When I try to make sense of them, I often ask myself: Is there a single person in the world who will understand this - and also will look it up in Wikipedia? If it takes a Master to understand the article, then you probably learned enough in your studies that you know all the stuff in the article! Some textbook authors are excellent. Some academics, even IT people, have an impressing ability to make even complex issues look easy and obvious to a lesser qualified audience. I wish we had a lot more of those. As long as that is not the case, we will have to cope with explanations that requires a lot of work to be deciphered. Sometimes you ask supplementary questions; sometimes the answer gives you the proper keywords for a google search for more understandable explanations. We won't run into those great pedagogics all the time, and have to live with it.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that t
trønderen wrote:
, publishing books is so cheap nowadays that you see the same in a lot of IT books:
Good idea to always keep in mind that in the past, not that far in the past, books were not generally published unless an actual editor went through it first. Certainly these days that impact is far less including cases where it doesn't happen at all.
-
Quote:
"...I am looking for a solution..." is it not obvious?
Firstly, this post comes across very arrogant and I personally think that you are limiting your future assistance from most members that have been supporting you loyally in the past in your numerous questions for help. You might not think that a post from a person/member is related or is a solution to your question but I can almost ensure you that the person/member that took the time, their own free time at that, to answer your question that you found unsolvable saw it as a solution. For you to then question that free time given to your cause is totally unacceptable and I really think you should re-think your post here and offer some kind of apology. I for one will ignore your future questions and will rather spend my free time helping someone that will appreciate the effort. I also welcome your down vote on this as it will prove my point.
-
GuyThiebaut wrote:
Here is a great example of asking questions with a journalist asking Richard Feynman a question, where Feynman points out how the question is difficult to answer
Side note, that might not be the best example video. I only watched the first 30 seconds, but in that clip Richard was being way too literal and not understanding the perspective of the person asking in the common vernacular. As in, we know Feynman is supposed to be the smart one and not the interviewer. But, Feynman can't understand what it means to not know. If you can't learn to communicate with "lesser minds" it's easy enough to argue your mind isn't that great either. What anyone who understands anything about humans would read from the first 30 seconds of that clip was a display of defensiveness at best or arrogance at worst. Ironically enough, 99% of people who spend time with real people can see that. :doh: Also, you may want to study body language because it's real and useful when reading people. Love him or hate him, Neil deGrasse Tyson does a much better job of communicating. Which is probably why he's so well-known. Point of all this is, Richard did not come out in this scenario looking like a super genius or even decent at being a conversationalist.
Jeremy Falcon
I have watched the interview a few times because I thought Feynman was being difficult when I first saw it, I wanted to understand what was going on. After watching it a few times I think that Feynman wants to answer the question but is himself perhaps a bit frustrated by how difficult it is to answer. I think he is not willing to let himself get away with a simple answer because I think he wants to give as correct as possible an answer to the journalist. I used to be a fan of Tyson but no longer am, for various reasons - one of them being because I have seen a video where he is extremely confident but factually incorrect - as I have aged I would rather someone was a little bit abrupt but factually correct than giving me a warm feeling from their answer.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
-
I have watched the interview a few times because I thought Feynman was being difficult when I first saw it, I wanted to understand what was going on. After watching it a few times I think that Feynman wants to answer the question but is himself perhaps a bit frustrated by how difficult it is to answer. I think he is not willing to let himself get away with a simple answer because I think he wants to give as correct as possible an answer to the journalist. I used to be a fan of Tyson but no longer am, for various reasons - one of them being because I have seen a video where he is extremely confident but factually incorrect - as I have aged I would rather someone was a little bit abrupt but factually correct than giving me a warm feeling from their answer.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
Fair enough. Totally agree Tyson isn't always correct and he can be a bit of a bully and overtalk people. So, maybe he's not the best example either. :laugh: And in full transparency, I don't watch many Feynman videos, but I do know if you're good at communicating and if that was the case that you mentioned, then he should've said that. Right now, we be assuming and that's the opposite of communication.
Jeremy Falcon
