Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Page 27
This makes eyewitness reporting more than a little problematic:
you really don’t see what you think you see.
Eggs Are White, Right?
Betty Edwards describes something similar in the phenomenon of
color constancy. That’s where the brain overrides color information
received by the retina. Just as we saw earlier with the simplistic
14. Discounting any biohazard from that suspiciously sticky, crunchy orange residue on the floor.
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IMAGINATION OVERRIDES SENSES
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Figure 7.1: All input is created equal.
stick-figure representation, you “know” that skies are blue, clouds
are white, blond hair is yellow, and trees are green with brown
trunks—just like in the set of Crayola crayons.
Edwards describes an interesting test that an art teacher per-
formed on a set of students. The teacher set up a still life con-
sisting of white Styrofoam geometric shapes (a cube, a cylinder,
and a sphere) and an egg carton of regular white-shelled eggs. He
added colored floodlights to make everything in the still life a bright
pinkish red and set the students to painting.
According to Edwards, every student painted the white Styrofoam
objects in shades of pinkish red just as they appeared under the
colored light.
But not the eggs.
The students painted the eggs white. The memorized constant that
“eggs are white” overrode their actual appearance caused by the
colored lights. Even more remarkably, when the teacher pointed
out that the eggs were really pink, the student’s didn’t see it. They
still insisted, “But the eggs are white.”
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IMAGINATION OVERRIDES SENSES
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Much of perception is based on predic-
Perception is based on
tion,15 and prediction is based on con-
prediction.
text and past experience, so much so that
current, real-time input takes a backseat.
Have you ever had the experience of a friend who suddenly made
a dramatic difference in their appearance? They grew or shaved a
beard or changed hair style or color, and you didn’t notice right
away? Or even after a while?
The stereotypical story of the wife’s new hairdo that the husband
doesn’t notice really happens: the husband “sees” based on old
input. It’s just how your brain works.16
Since this phenomenon works just as well from remembered expe-
rience and imagined experience, you can use it to your advantage.
Successful Grooving
OK, you’ll need to bear with me here, because this is going to sound
suspiciously like faerie dust. But, since the brain is kinda gullible
with regards to its input source: imagining success is provably
effective in achieving it.
You can improve your performance—whether you’re playing a vio-
lin, debugging code, or designing a new architecture—by imagining
that you’ve already done so successfully.
First, let’s look at some practical examples. You may have noticed
that if you’re at a conference, or some sort of get-together where
you’re surrounded by more advanced practitioners, that your own
ability increases. Maybe you can speak more articulately or argue
your point a little better. Maybe the fact that you even have a point
occurs to you.
Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny takes this idea one step fur-
ther and offers this advice: “Always be the worst guy in every band
you’re in. If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different
band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there
as well.”17
15. This is a major observation in On Intelligence [Haw04].
16. Not, of course, that this makes for any sort of effective excuse.
17. Thanks to Chris Morris by way of Chad Fowler in My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job [Fow05].
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In other words, by surrounding yourself with highly skilled people,
you will increase your own skill level. Some of that is from obser-
vation and application of their practices and approaches. Some of
that comes from the fact that you’re conditioning your mind to
perform at a higher level. You have a natural mechanism known as
mirror neurons that help: watching someone else’s behavior triggers
an equivalence for you to do the same.
The Inner Game folks suggest you should
pretend you are the expert, the pro, the We are natural mimics.
famous soloist. They observed that sim-
ply telling a student to “play like” someone famous in their field
was enough to increase the student’s performance. We are natural
mimics, after all. You’ve heard how Miles Davis sounds; you’ve read
Linus Torvald’s code; you’ve read The Pragmatic Programmer.18
You can imagine writing code in your head or pretend to have that
requirements conversation. You can “play” an instrument when it’s
not really in front of you—and you can imagine that you’ve got it
nailed, that it’s perfect.
In a similar vein, Olympic athletes do this sort of offline practicing,
too. They’ll envision themselves hurtling down the course, taking
the turns, and reacting appropriately. By continuing this practice
even off the field, the brain gets grooved.19 It becomes used to the
experience of doing things correctly so that when the time comes
to do it in the field, success comes naturally.
TIP 38
Groove your mind for success.
Getting used to what “success” feels like is important enough that
it’s worthwhile to fake it first. That is, artificially create the condi-
tions that you’d experience once you learn to perform at that level.
You add whatever scaffolding is necessary to provide an approxi-
mation of the experience.
18. If you haven’t, run, don’t walk, to the bookstore and buy a copy. Seriously.
19. Edward de Bono’s term.
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LEARN IT LIKE AN EXPER T
216
Swimmers do this by being attached to a
Experience using
rope and pulled through the water at high
scaffolding.
speed.20 Before a swimmer can achieve
that sort of speed on their own, they get to
experience what it will feel like. This isn’t just a courtesy; after this
experience, the swimmer’s performance increases dramatically.
You can go the other way as well, by using negative scaffolding,
or unscaffolding, if you wi
ll. That’s when you make it artificially
harder than it should be. Then when you’re doing it for real, it
seems a lot easier. Runners might tie weights to their ankles or
jog through waist-deep snow. Ruby programmers might work in
something like C++ for a while. C++ makes a very effective men-
tal equivalent to heavy ankle weights; after working in C++, more
dynamic languages then feel a whole lot easier by comparison. :-)
You can imagine experiences and learn from them just as effectively
as if you had lived them for real. Your brain doesn’t really know the
difference. So, take the pressure off, become more aware of what’s
wrong, and pretend you’ve made it.
And you will.
Next Actions
! The next time you are stuck in a difficult situation, remember
“Trying fails, awareness cures.” Stop and become fully aware
of the problem first.
! Plan on failing. Know that it doesn’t matter and that it’s OK if
you make a mistake. See whether that helps take the pressure
off and improves your performance.
! Be the expert. Don’t just pretend, actually play the role of the
expert. Notice how this changes your behavior.
! Consider what kind of scaffolding you might need to share in
the expert experience, and see if you can arrange for that.
7.7 Learn It like an Expert
You should feel you’re in a better position to take control of your
own learning experiences now.
20. Thanks to June Kim for this example.
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LEARN IT LIKE AN EXPER T
217
In this chapter, we’ve looked at the value of playing to facilitate
learning and the importance of actively embedding failure as an
essential part of practice. We saw the important—and by now
familiar—lessons from the inner game and the tricks your brain
can play on you, for better or worse.
Don’t forget that as you gain experience, you’ll continue to transi-
tion through the stages of the Dreyfus model. Your ongoing experi-
ence will steadily reshape your views, and you’ll find yourself rein-
terpreting past experiences in the light of new knowledge and grow-
ing mental models.
As I noted in Section 5.1, Meet Your Cognitive Biases, on page 126,
every read of your memory is really a write. Memory is far from
inviolate; your increasing expertise will steadily add to the filters
and pattern matching you employ.
That’s how intuition grows: you have more patterns to draw on and
apply, as well as a growing body of tacit knowledge to know what to
look for and when. In other words, you’ll start to see the beginnings
of expert behavior.
But First, Cut the Green Wire
It seems that anytime a character in a movie is given instructions
on how to defuse a bomb, they start pulling out the parts and
cutting the wires in the prescribed order in earnest. And then the
bomb squad corrects them, adding, “Oh, but before you do any of
that, cut the green wire.” By then, it’s too late, and the ominous
ticking noise reaches a crescendo. So, in the next chapter, we’ll
look at our “green wire,” the important thing you need to do first.
I’m guessing that you’re probably enthusiastic to start trying all
the material in this book right away.
But then a day at work in the real world gets in the way—all the
emails, the meetings, the design problems, the bugs. There’s too
much to do, in too little time. All the grand intentions melt away
under the unforgiving crush of the exigencies of the day.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at a few ways of managing the tor-
rent of information and getting better control over the things that
command your attention.
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A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be
tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to
bear more seed toward the hope of greening the
landscape of idea.
John Anthony Ciardi
Chapter 8
Manage Focus
I don’t need to tell you that we live in information-rich times. But
perversely, the overabundance of information has resulted in a
poverty of knowledge and attention. With so much available dis-
traction, it’s easy to lose focus. Rather than wandering around in
the middle of the information highway,1 you need to take deliberate
steps to manage what you’re thinking about.
Using the same approach as in Chapter 6, Learn Deliberately, on
page 155, you’ll need to manage thinking more deliberately. You
need to be able to focus on the information that you want, filter the
information you are bombarded with, and have the right informa-
tion available to you at the right time, without being distracted by
irrelevant details and without missing subtle clues that make all
the difference.
In this part of the book, we are going to look at how to better man-
age your mind along these three axes:
• Increasing focus and attention
• Managing your knowledge
• Optimizing your current context
Attention is the act of focusing in on an area of interest. You can
pay attention only to a fairly small number of things; beyond that,
events and insights will escape your notice. Many, many things are
competing for your attention in our current environment. Some of
them deserve it; most do not. We’ll look at ways to increase your
ability to focus.
1.
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Sometimes we use the words information and knowledge inter-
changeably, but they aren’t the same thing. Information is raw data
in a given context. For instance, the fact that Microsoft bought
some company for a billion dollars is just information, and there’s
no shortage of information these days. Knowledge imparts mean-
ing to that information. You apply your time, attention, and skill
to information to produce knowledge. Looking at that particular
Microsoft acquisition and knowing how it might change the market,
provide new opportunities, and destroy others constitutes knowl-
edge. We’ll see a better way to organize your far-flung knowledge
and insights.
Context, beyond the usage we’ve seen so far, is the set of stuff you
are focused on at the moment. When you are debugging a program,
for instance, all the variables, object interrelationships, and so on,
form the current context. Think of it as the “working set” of infor-
mation that you are dealing with at a given point in time.
Understanding these three interrelated topics will help you manage
your
mind more effectively.
The first thing you need to do is pay attention.
8.1 Increase Focus and Attention
While working on a presentation about pragmatic programming
back in 2000, I came across a remarkably odd news story. There
was this elderly lady in Darby, Pennsylvania, who was walking
down the street to her local grocery store. A young man came run-
ning up the street and slammed into her but kept running. Fearing
she had been mugged, the woman quickly felt for her purse and
valuables. She was fine, but quite shaken, and proceeded on to the
grocery store.
She talked to several people in the store, checked out her purchase
of Oreo cookies and a newspaper, and left. It was only once she
returned home that her daughter screamed as she saw the handle
of a steak knife sticking out of the woman’s neck.
It’s amazing what you can miss when distracted. Worried at being
robbed, the old lady did not particularly notice the dull pain in her
neck where she had been stabbed.
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INCREASE FOCUS AND ATTENTION
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If you can miss obvious things—like a knife sticking out of your
neck—just think what else might be going on around you that has
escaped your attention.
Attention Deficit
Your attention is in short supply. There is only so much you can
pay attention to, and there are so many things that compete for
your attention daily.
There’s a well-known design problem in multiprocessor systems: if
you’re not careful, you can spend all the CPU cycles coordinating
tasks with all the other CPUs and not actually get any work done.
Similarly, it’s easy for us humans to divide our attention fecklessly
such that nothing receives our full attention and so nothing effec-
tive gets done.
Competition
for
your
attention
isn’t
Beware idle-loop
always external, either. For instance, as
chatter.
we saw in Section 4.2, Draw on the Right
Side, on page 87, your L-mode CPU has a
sort of “idle loop” routine. If nothing more pressing is commanding
your attention, your idle loop will chatter away on some low-grade
worry or indolent concern, such as “What’s for lunch?,” or replay