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Cultivating Instinct

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.

Katrina Owen

October 07, 2023
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Transcript

  1. Cultivating Instinct


    Katrina Owen


    Exercism

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  2. "You're Dr. Vilayanur
    S. Ramachandran!"
    —me

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  3. "Yes. Yes I am."
    —vsr

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  4. (very politely):


    "Who the hell are you?"
    —vsr

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  5. "Some rando."
    —me

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  6. "..."
    —vsr

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  7. "I live with a
    synaesthete!"
    —me

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  9. "Two is such a cheerful,
    cuddly number!"
    —my classmate

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  11. View Slide

  12. "I'm hungry."
    —babies everywhere

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  13. Expertise

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  14. An expert isn't just a
    faster novice.

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  15. Intuition

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  16. TODO
    picture

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  17. "You can see bacteria
    from 40k feet?!?"
    —researcher

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  18. Experts can't tell


    you how they know

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  19. How do you teach
    intuition?

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  20. They don't know how they
    know.

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  21. Well, actually...

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  22. TODO
    picture

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  23. Science

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  24. Dr. Eleanor Gibson

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  27. View Slide

  28. Meaningful dimensions

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  29. View Slide

  30. Differentiation

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  31. Perceptual resolution

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  32. TODO
    picture

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  33. Perceptual learning

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  34. Differences in perception
    of novices and experts

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  35. How we


    extract information

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  36. Units

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  37. Novices see


    unrelated pieces of data.
    Experts see patterns.

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  38. Selectivity

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  39. Novices pay attention


    to irrelevant data.
    Experts don't even notice it.

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  40. How we


    extract information

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  41. How efficiently we


    extract information

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  42. Search type

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  43. Novices process serially.
    Experts process in parallel.

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  44. Novices process slowly.
    Experts process quickly.

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  45. Novices have a high
    attentional load.
    Experts process effortlessly.

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  47. Discovery effects
    units


    selectivity

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  48. Fluency effects
    speed


    search type


    attentional load

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  49. TODO
    picture

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  50. Dr. Philip Kellman

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  51. TODO
    picture

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  52. Visual navigation

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  53. 20 seconds of video
    3 locations on a map

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  54. Reaction time: 30s

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  55. Accuracy: 50%

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  56. 3 hours of training

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  57. Accuracy: 80%
    (up from 50%)

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  58. Reaction time: 15s
    (down from 30s)

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  59. Naive subjects

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  60. Accuracy: 60%
    (up from: random guess)

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  61. Reaction time: 20s
    (down from: dismal)

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  62. Non-pilots crushed it

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  63. TODO
    picture

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  64. Find a part
    (given the whole)

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  65. Find the whole
    (given a part)

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  66. Different representations

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  67. Scores improved
    (dramatically)

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  68. TODO
    picture

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  69. Perceptual
    Learning in
    Code

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  70. "You have a


    race condition on line 26."
    —my friend

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  71. Code review

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  72. Troubleshooting

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  73. TODO
    picture

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  74. Profiling

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  75. Refactoring

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  76. "How do you know


    where to begin?"
    —lots of people

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  77. Debugging

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  78. "Wait, what's that


    foreign key value?"
    —@tenderlove

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  79. mysql's max int
    2,147,483,647

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  80. TODO
    picture

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  81. Abstractions

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  82. 99 Bottles of Beer
    on Exercism

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  83. TODO
    picture

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  84. "How did you know?"
    —me

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  85. "It was obvious."
    —Sandi

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  86. Instinct
    (explained)

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  87. TODO
    picture

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  88. An
    Amateur's
    Guide

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  89. Brief


    classification episodes

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  90. Active judgement

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  91. Feedback

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  92. TODO
    picture

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  93. Lots of examples

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  94. No duplicates

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  95. Complex variation

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  96. Noise and distractors

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  97. TODO
    picture

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  98. Identifying a target skill

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  99. ???

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  100. Naturalistic Decision
    Making

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  101. Sources of Power
    by Gary Klein

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  102. What next?

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  103. Unambiguous taxonomy

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  104. Well-defined activity

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  105. Fundamental distinction

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  107. Programmer population
    doubles every 5 years

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  108. 50% of programmers
    have <5 years experience

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  109. No signal—just noise

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  110. We need to go beyond
    the mere mechanics

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  111. Thank you

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  112. Katrina Owen
    @kytrinyx
    Co-founder and Principle Janitor
    Exercism

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  113. Katrina Owen
    @kytrinyx
    Co-author, with Sandi Metz
    99 Bottles of OOP

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  114. Cultivating Instinct


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