Re: Aaron Sloman's "The Irrelevance of Turing Machines to AI" article

From: Eray Ozkural exa (erayo_at_bilkent.edu.tr)
Date: 08/05/04 

Date: 5 Aug 2004 03:28:38 -0700

Wolf Kirchmeir <wwolfkir@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<RW5Qc.23952$Jq2.1059793@news20.bellglobal.com>...
> Eray Ozkural exa wrote:
>
> [...]
> > What's more interesting is how little attention is being paid to help
> > students develop these cognitive skills in their early education.
> > Instead they are being taught that they ought to concentrate on
> > unnecessary details, which can always be found in a book.
> [...]
>
> Again, I used to think so, until this very attitude infected curriculum
> revisions at the primary/intermediate levels here in Ontario (and
> elsewhere in Canada.) The problem is, that if you don't know a pretty
> large amount of "unnecessary detail", it's very difficult to know where
> to start looking, and worse, it's even more difficult to judge the
> utility and relevance of what you do find.

So, you mean, trying to teach students some "building block" kind of
skills ultimately failed in practice. That's interesting. What were
they teaching? Can you give an example?

I agree with your remarks on that you have to have a fair amount of
knowledge to know where you should be looking, but tell me, how useful
is it for me to know where a specific plant is being produced in
Southeastern Turkey, or the exact date of an ancient battle between
Ottomans and a now disappeared kingdom? I meant "unnecessary" when I
said "unnecessary" :)

I am no expert on education, but I think if we taught the students the
art of argumentation, reasoning or discovery before tormenting them
with all kinds of "knowledge", maybe it would turn out to be better.
Maybe the (elementary/highschool) curriculum is already light in US
and Canada (I can say it looks like that for US), but it's not the
case here, I think the focus of the curriculum here for instance,
should be shifted from junk and passive information to abstract,
scientific and philosophical discourse. (Even mathematics is being
taught in an extremely counter-scientific way here, I think.
Mathematics textbooks for the young just state the facts, as if the
audience is professional mathematicians. Even I could make it much
more digestible.) I am not suggesting we make it easier, quite the
contrary!!!

Being selective about knowledge is just as important as gathering
knowledge in my opinion. I don't want to remember the myriad of
acronyms of GSM network subsystems and components I learnt in my
mobile course. I want to be able to reconstruct that kind of
information quickly, if need be, however. (So I want to make sure I
remember the crucial information, but not the not-so-crucial bits)

I agree that there are a lot of cases when knowledge would be useful,
and especially so in university education in which you have to get
really focused. In psychology research, you'd have to know who did
what, who said what, who challenged what, and the details of theories,
etc. in order to be able to write an essay in an exam. It just doesn't
come out of the blue.

> I had already discovered that you can't learn "cognitive skills" without
> those messy details. It takes a lot of practice in sorting lots of
> details to learn how to build a classification tree, for example. And
> then, transferring those "cognitive skills" from one domain to another
> is surprisingly difficult. As someone said, "The devil is in the
> details." You may be an excellent classifier in domain A, but if you
> don't know enough details in domain B, your classification will be
> wrong. Reminder 1: Much scientific argument is about how to classify
> some object or phenomenon - IOW, it's an argument about details.
> Reminder 2: If you don't know enough details, you may not be able to
> tell that your classification may be wrong, let alone how to fix it.

Yes, but it's perhaps not things like classification trees and so
forth, but more basic or general skills that we didn't quite pin down
yet, that might also be the case. The classification tree seems to be
at a medium level of abstraction, it's something we actually write on
paper. What about the ones in our heads, do we teach our students
enough of analogy making, or composition skills? Most people I know
lack adequate argumentation skills (philosophical), maybe it's because
they never had to look at an abstract level. Doing that takes a lot of
practice with *specific* arguments.

> Academics, who from a fairly early age have little contact with "average
> people" don't seem to understand this, because they tend to be better
> than average at "transfer of learning," nad by the time they hit grad
> school, they have trandferred a lot "cognitive skills" from one domain
> to another, so it seems easy to do. (Eray, I found your expression of
> pity for my students offensive, BTW.) One technique that works at least
> some of the time is explicit instruction and practice in applying skills
> learned in domain A to domain B -- but both must be dealt with in all
> their messy detail.

I didn't mean to be offensive. But I think a university exam is too
hard to be covered by basic transfer of learning which I am talking
about here. We are talking about expertise, which is perhaps something
else as I noticed when writing another reply to you. The computer
science or psychology exam requires a professional expertise, and it
assumes that you are already equipped with a wealth of knowledge,
names, ideas, techniques, methods of approach. Just opening a CS
subject test shows how specific the questions get. You wouldn't be
able to solve them without having studied at depth some narrow domains
first. ("Aha: I know *why* this algorithm is faster than the other"
kind of knowledge is required, you cannot discover that in the exam.
That is, I agree with you)

Regards, 

--
Eray Ozkural

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Joe Pass as teacher
    ... For students with talent willing to work hard, ... inspired teachers, but not necessarily for their research skills), you send ... So from my perspective Joe Pass' "failings" as a teacher are really only the ... etc and want to make 'art". ...
    (rec.music.makers.guitar.jazz)
  • Re: Top 10 skills that schools should teach
    ... Let me do a Pietro and share a wonderful article on skills which should be ... I suggest schools should consider teaching the following skills: ... pace needs to be taught, together with the most appropriate posture, ... All students need to be taught to read body language, to sense mood, to ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)
  • Re: Top 10 skills that schools should teach
    ... Let me do a Pietro and share a wonderful article on skills which should be ... I suggest schools should consider teaching the following skills: ... pace needs to be taught, together with the most appropriate posture, ... All students need to be taught to read body language, to sense mood, to ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)
  • Re: Advice for mid-life career change (to programming)
    ... >>jobs and old skills such as Cobol aren't needed ... Employers won't ... It allowed programming students to get access to a computer. ... > India taxes their businesses rather highly. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Why is Slick 50 still in business?
    ... >>That is apalling - his parents should have taught that basic household ... >>> socket wrench set to use in the assembly of components. ... >>potential dropouts and other problem students. ... Canadian Test of Basic Skills [If I understood any of a number ...
    (rec.autos.tech)
Quantcast