> Our pointer wizard was a philosophy major who had no trouble at all with the idea of a named “thing” being a transient stand-in for some other unseen Thing. For a Plato man, this was mother’s milk.
I don't really see the connection. Pointers are not conceptually difficult, it's an address to a point in memory, but they are none-the-less confusing and notoriously difficult to work with for some.
I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of cross-training, the idea that seemingly unrelated studies can help you directly in a given field. I believe the only way to become proficient in task X is by practicing task X. Even the simplest seemingly transferrable skills have been shown to be independent. I think I remember reading about a study that showed that very strong ping-pong players have no quicker reflexes than non-players in traditional tests (can't find the link). Personal antidotal evidence I found also supports that intelligence or skill in one field rarely transfers over to other fields. I would never take financial advice from a brilliant chess player.
The one thing I will grant the author is that a novice, often unencumbered by traditional methods may come up with novel solutions to tasks.
Personally having learnt 8086 in High School, made job of understanding pointers easy. In my opinion the real hard things in CS are often distributed system/computations/clocks which require a radically different perspective.
It seems to me like a pretty big inductive leap to generalize that no skills whatsoever are transferrable across disciplines from anecdotal evidence and one study indicating the inability of ping pong players to improve their physical reflexes, which likely has a limit based purely on human neural and optimal hardware. At the very least, what about soft skills? Discipline? Attitude? Why else would Google be able to correlate success and college athletics when they released that blog post about revamping their interview process? (Notably, GPA and standardized test scores did not have any similar positive correlation...)
I recently read Fermat's Enigma about Andrew Wiles's successful quest to solve the centuries' old problem of proving Fermat's last theorem. His big breakthrough came from the application of insights from one mathematical field, modular forms, to his own field of elliptic curves. Randy Pausch also talks about "head fakes" in his Last Lecture, which similarly praises the ability to learn skills and lessons that are applicable in a wide variety of contexts, often without realizing that's what's happening.
Of course a certain level of fluency in a subject is required before any cross-disciplinary insights would have any additional return beyond pure study of that subject, so becoming a grandmaster at chess indicates little about you than the fact that you are good at chess. And even after obtaining fluency it may in fact be the case that the ability to apply insights from other disciplines may itself be a trainable skill, not an automatic benefit. There is probably an element of choice in the broadening of the subconscious scan that we undertake while solving problems, as well as the ability to generalize lessons learned into applicable insights and patterns. My own personal theory is that we create and myelinate neural models for patterns that we encounter frequently while solving problems, from which point it may then be possible to recognize some of those problems in other contexts, repurposing some of those neural models that we can access with deep fluency to offload some processing power required in solving problems, in addition to the new neural constructs we must create for each specific type of problem.
You are of course free to believe what you want to believe, but I think this particular instance of skepticism has the potential to hold you back from a wealth of insights. Keep in mind that this New York Times article is clearly written for a general audience rather than a technical audience, so it is understandable that many here would be put off by certain stylistic choices and oversimplifications. But I do think the core premise is a sound one, although I still wouldn't recommend getting a liberal arts education. If you are looking for a more convincing argument, try Todd Henry's book from the Accidental Creative, Bob Rice's book on chess and business or a few episodes of Barbara Oakley's Coursera course.
Yep. And, philosophy's pretty much the playground for having cross-disciplinary insights. It's sad to see that the conventional wisdom is to deemphasize these fields, as if humans ran on nothing but purely rational logic lol.
I don't really see the connection. Pointers are not conceptually difficult, it's an address to a point in memory, but they are none-the-less confusing and notoriously difficult to work with for some.
I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of cross-training, the idea that seemingly unrelated studies can help you directly in a given field. I believe the only way to become proficient in task X is by practicing task X. Even the simplest seemingly transferrable skills have been shown to be independent. I think I remember reading about a study that showed that very strong ping-pong players have no quicker reflexes than non-players in traditional tests (can't find the link). Personal antidotal evidence I found also supports that intelligence or skill in one field rarely transfers over to other fields. I would never take financial advice from a brilliant chess player.
The one thing I will grant the author is that a novice, often unencumbered by traditional methods may come up with novel solutions to tasks.