There is more cargo where that cult came from!

It seems to me that at least a portion of the recent thread on 'Cargo Cults' dealt with the behavior as a learning pattern. Thinking that in turn reminded me of three other such 'patterns', all tested and found useful over time. I'm sure there are more, these are just the ones that occurred to me first.

Folk Process
Paint by Numbers
Kata

Come to think of it, they are all pretty much the same thing. The basic idea is that you copy something good until you make it your own. The 'make it your own' part even includes the notion of transcription errors as a possibly good thing! If you check out http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Folk+Process%22 you will see that mistakes are a great source of both improvement and comedy! (Hmmm? process + mutation = evolution??) Repetition followed by mastery. And one of the reasons that these are effective beginner patterns is that blind faith works just fine. Or no faith at all or even complete theoretical knowledge, the only important part is repetition (well with an admitted sub-text of learning). Further these are things that can be done even without the help of a teacher. Granted all other things being equal having someone else monitor the process is better than not, but the history of endeavor shows that the process still works in isolation.

–hsm

"Never try to teach a pig to sing…it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

Comment on There is more cargo where that cult came from!

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Re: There is more cargo where that cult came from! by redsquirrel (Hermit) on Jan 17, 2002 at 09:46 UTC
I was recently reading Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerald Weinberg. He brings forth some related ideas... Every mistake is a new idea, if seen by a mind prepared to use it. p. 86 In some sense, the only truly original ideas come from mistakes. p. 86 Another factor in my favor is my ability to misunderstand. When I steal an idea, I often introduce an error, and sometimes the error turns out to be the most creative and invaluable part. p. 87 Ponderous... --Dave	[reply]
Re: There is more cargo where that cult came from! by tadman (Prior) on Jan 17, 2002 at 20:38 UTC
The ants are my friends, They're blowing in the wind. - Bob Dylan Sometimes with programming, it is hard to see the cargo from the cult. With book learning, you are often encouraged to learn by example, where hopefully the examples are good. Though, over time, you tend to forget why you do certain things, but are reluctant to stop doing them. Initially I found using objects in Perl 5 scary, because early on, the examples were quite lengthy and convoluted, with little explanation provided as to why so much code was required. Sure, I knew objects, from C++ and even OO-Pascal, but it took 20-30 lines to "bless" an object in the early examples. So, to make objects, you just had to do what the example said, and hope for the best. Only after much experimentation did I figure out the basic requirements, less all the "extra" material that was functionally useless in the vast majority of cases. Why `@EXPORT` and a `BEGIN{}` block were ever used in an OO-example continues to remain a mystery. Also, what is today quite necessary may tomorrow seem like cargo cult programming. For example, if you need to go out of your way to work around a limitation of the language, after time you may do this subconciously, not even realizing that you do it. Maybe you will be fortunate enough to notice, perhaps when reviewing someone else's code which does it more elegantly, or when someone points it out to you. Perl seems to be an anomaly among programming languages, as with each release, it seems to take less code to achieve the same task. In a world where programming effort and programming error are proportional to that, this is a Good Thing.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: There is more cargo where that cult came from! by chaoticset (Chaplain) on Jan 18, 2002 at 00:06 UTC
I want to say that this simply isn't true. I can't, though; there is a grain of truth to it. However, I feel it's an oversimplification. "Repetition is learning!" No, no it isn't. I may be an anomaly, but I can tell you that memorizing times tables is not the same as learning how to multiply. "Well, no. But after you look at how it works a few hundred times, you start to learn how to multiply." That is, traditionally, how it's happened. I don't believe that's the essence of the mental transaction, however. The key is pattern recognition. You've seen this before. The teacher shows everyone their times tables and one child can predict answers well ahead of the others. "Fast learner!" the educational system exclaims. They've merely recognized the pattern before other people have. The real key in it is learning how to recognize patterns. Once you learn to recognize them, you begin to learn to streamline the learning of patterns; you figure out how to pick out the important parts, how to test patterns out, etc. My own experience with martial arts (which included said Shotokan kata, coincidentally) is part of how I came to this conclusion. The trick is not so much the repetition; that was merely how it was done, and how it has always been done, and likely will always be done. The key, as in every other enterprise, has been figuring out the essentials of the pattern and then embellishing upon it once you've got the essentials down. Repetition serves two purposes; it exposes you to the patterns within the actions, and it (rather surreptitiously) forces away those unwilling to be disciplined in their actions. It's not necessary, by any stretch. Most of the time, if you've got several examples of something and you compare and contrast them all against each other, you can get effective notions of their patterns. Note that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with repetition. It just shouldn't be confused with actual learning. You can learn while repeating, but you don't have to repeat while learning. ----------------------- You are what you think.	[reply]
Re: Re: There is more cargo where that cult came from! by poqui (Deacon) on Jan 18, 2002 at 01:22 UTC
I agree, chaoticset, that is true with an external art, as I am assuming Shotokan Kata is. My experience is with Tai Chi Chuan, especially the Modified BeiJing variant of the Long Yang form. My Sifu starts out all students in learning the postures of the form (about 30 depending on how you count them). Learning the entire form, just the external positioning of it, takes about 3 months. However, the external postures are only a framework upon which to hang the real substance, which is the internal work that goes on while doing the postures: the movement and rotation of chi. Once the movement and rotation of chi is learned, one could almost do any external form, and as long as it is in balance, it would suffice. Advanced students learn a 4 posture form that can substitute for daily practice of the long form, if the mindfulness and inner work are true. More to the point: the specific repetition may not be necessary, but I believe that repetition of some kind is necessary to move the mind out of the (usually) stuck place it is in, in order for new learning to come in. Especially so, if the thing to be learned is to replace older learned habits (in this example, such as: carriage, balance, awareness). In other words, I see the repetition as a kind of "rocking the truck to get it out of a rut" kind of thing.	[reply]