Cultivating Instinct

As novices we slowly and laboriously sift through a chaotic flood of minutia. To experts the significant details are obvious. Irrelevant details fade to the background. The novice receives a jumble of meaningless impressions; the expert sees patterns and meaning.

Somehow experts have made the trek from "How could you possibly tell?" to "How could you not?". And they probably can't tell you how they got there.

This talk examines the topic of perceptual learning through the lens of theory and practice—research and anecdotes—and speculates how it can be deployed strategically to train new experts.

Transcript

1. Cultivating Instinct Katrina Owen Exercism
2. "You're Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran!" —me
3. "Yes. Yes I am." —vsr
4. (very politely): "Who the hell are you?" —vsr
5. "Some rando." —me
6. "..." —vsr
7. "I live with a synaesthete!" —me
9. "Two is such a cheerful, cuddly number!" —my classmate
12. "I'm hungry." —babies everywhere
13. Expertise
14. An expert isn't just a faster novice.
15. Intuition
16. TODO picture
17. "You can see bacteria from 40k feet?!?" —researcher
18. Experts can't tell you how they know
19. How do you teach intuition?
20. They don't know how they know.
21. Well, actually...
22. TODO picture
23. Science
24. Dr. Eleanor Gibson
28. Meaningful dimensions
30. Differentiation
31. Perceptual resolution
32. TODO picture
33. Perceptual learning
34. Differences in perception of novices and experts
35. How we extract information
36. Units
37. Novices see unrelated pieces of data. Experts see patterns.
38. Selectivity
39. Novices pay attention to irrelevant data. Experts don't even notice it.
40. How we extract information
41. How efficiently we extract information
42. Search type
43. Novices process serially. Experts process in parallel.
44. Novices process slowly. Experts process quickly.
45. Novices have a high attentional load. Experts process effortlessly.
47. Discovery effects units selectivity
48. Fluency effects speed search type attentional load
49. TODO picture
50. Dr. Philip Kellman
51. TODO picture
52. Visual navigation
53. 20 seconds of video 3 locations on a map
54. Reaction time: 30s
55. Accuracy: 50%
56. 3 hours of training
57. Accuracy: 80% (up from 50%)
58. Reaction time: 15s (down from 30s)
59. Naive subjects
60. Accuracy: 60% (up from: random guess)
61. Reaction time: 20s (down from: dismal)
62. Non-pilots crushed it
63. TODO picture
64. Find a part (given the whole)
65. Find the whole (given a part)
66. Different representations
67. Scores improved (dramatically)
68. TODO picture
69. Perceptual Learning in Code
70. "You have a race condition on line 26." —my friend
71. Code review
72. Troubleshooting
73. TODO picture
74. Profiling
75. Refactoring
76. "How do you know where to begin?" —lots of people
77. Debugging
78. "Wait, what's that foreign key value?" —@tenderlove
79. mysql's max int 2,147,483,647
80. TODO picture
81. Abstractions
82. 99 Bottles of Beer on Exercism
83. TODO picture
84. "How did you know?" —me
85. "It was obvious." —Sandi
86. Instinct (explained)
87. TODO picture
88. An Amateur's Guide
89. Brief classification episodes
90. Active judgement
91. Feedback
92. TODO picture
93. Lots of examples
94. No duplicates
95. Complex variation
96. Noise and distractors
97. TODO picture
98. Identifying a target skill
99. ???
100. Naturalistic Decision Making
101. Sources of Power by Gary Klein
102. What next?
103. Unambiguous taxonomy
104. Well-defined activity
105. Fundamental distinction
107. Programmer population doubles every 5 years
108. 50% of programmers have <5 years experience
109. No signal—just noise
110. We need to go beyond the mere mechanics
111. Thank you
112. Katrina Owen @kytrinyx Co-founder and Principle Janitor Exercism
113. Katrina Owen @kytrinyx Co-author, with Sandi Metz 99 Bottles of OOP
114. Cultivating Instinct