It's a good sign the clueless want you there.
I'm thinking about writing a paper about students' ability to self-assess. I'm going to call the phenomenon Geebie-Hicks.
Possibly I just explained your own joke back to you. I'm not confident in my ability to estimate my performance here.
Funny, I don't identify with either of those. The hazard being stuckness rather than wild wrongness (I do get stuck, I generally don't go haring off down wildly wrong pathways) puts me in the methodical camp, but my thinking doesn't feel methodical.
I wasn't making a joke but because of Bayesian reasoning, people often thing I'm making a joke when I'm not.
I also think that if you could get the spaghetti thinkers teamed up with methodical thinkers they trusted, you'd get very successful groups. I supervise a lawyer who is maximally spaghetti-brained, in a really fascinating way. Super smart on some level, remarkably strong at spotting issues and coming up with plausible ideas. Absolutely horrendous at spotting when those ideas don't work -- I wouldn't leave him unsupervised around anything sharp for fear he'd amputate a limb trying to cut his nails. If he were yoked to a reliable methodical thinker who he trusted to tell him when he was wrong (generally around five times out of seven, but the other two times make it pretty close to worth it) they'd be an unstoppable team.
And thinking about my problem kid makes me want to rename the categories. Instead of spaghetti versus methodical, could we call the two groups people who have ideas versus people who test ideas? Not exclusively in either case, but as someone who's more in the latter group than the former, coming up with a new idea is hard. Figuring out if it's right and if so how to make use of it is easy.
We actually have to call them Spaghetti and Noodlers. Sorry.
And 'tortellini" is the new word for dyslexia.
Can't argue with the rules, I guess.
I can't tell you how fascinated I am by my problem child. He is so remarkably smart in his strong points, and so incredibly not where he's weak. I have never interacted with anyone like that before.
the Bieber and overpriced fashion house Balenciaga were good cooperators, I shouldn't be interested but I am. Benedictine extra from Dune with an interest in keys? Janitors carry swaths of keys, so do chatelaines or scchool principals, me of those combined with maybe a Masonic tradition? Shoes cost more than my car. Anyway, hoping not to derail completely from group work dynamics, this example of a collaboration from I ❤️ Mess
Funny, I don't identify with either of those. The hazard being stuckness rather than wild wrongness (I do get stuck, I generally don't go haring off down wildly wrong pathways) puts me in the methodical camp, but my thinking doesn't feel methodical.
When you write a proof and you know the area already, you don't have to do spaghetti thinking because you already know how the stepping stones are laid out, and you just write out how to get from one to the next. Often in Unfogged discussions, I see you coming in with that kind of bird's eye view. You can just describe what you see, if you can see the whole picture.
Outside of Unfogged, it's too dark to analyze LB's thinking.
I do suspect that people at Heebie U see me as a (less severe, I hope) version of your problem child. And the colleague that I work with most is methodical to the point of farce, and it does work very well.
This is fascinating. I've had groups that have worked really well before, this year they're fine but not working as well, but I haven't had good ideas for what to do other than randomizing or letting students pick.
I'm 100% a spaghetti person, but I received really good training to learn to be more careful and more methodical (especially at the summer program I went to). This gets me in trouble because I end up with students who are spaghetti people and I'm not good at teaching them to be more careful and somehow I feel like they don't understand that I have learned to be more careful. I think it's because I work with them a lot on the ideas of a paper, but I don't actually cowrite the papers with them, so they don't see that side of me the way that collaborators would.
I heard 3rd hand a story about a good friend where someone asked him why he and I had never written a paper together and he said something like "In any collaboration there's the person who has the crazy ideas, and the person who has to work through the details carefully. I don't want to be the latter kind of person but if I worked with upetgi I'd have to be!" In retrospect, I think he's actually wrong and if he and I worked together he'd be the former person, I'd be the latter person, and I'd be the one who was grumpy about it. I have now had one collaboration where I played that role and it was quite frustrating for me, and we added another collaborator for the next paper to solve the problem.
Ok, just read the interesting post. Agree that these are useful categories. More experience benefits both groups, for methodical thinkers by seeding reservoirs of helpful examples to consider.
There's a great book about mathematical thinking (a bunch of them probably, but I remember these), G Polya's "how to solve it". There's also a nice Martin Gardner book , "aha!"
How about a book chat for Math and Logic by Kac and Ulam ? Originally a Britannica chapter if I remember right. Low prerequisite for comprehension, high quality thought.
Agree strongly with 6, and my parents are a great example of this. My mom is a brainstormer with terrible judgement who really struggles with any kind of systematic thinking or eliminating bad options, and my dad is very very good at taking 10 ideas and very quickly picking the second best option. This gives them a very good joint working style that I've learned a lot from. I'm more on the brainstorming side, but I learned from a young age that the combination of the two styles is much better than either individually and so you should try to do the combined style of reasoning.
My mom is a brainstormer with terrible judgement who really struggles with any kind of systematic thinking or eliminating bad options, and my dad is very very good at taking 10 ideas and very quickly picking the second best option.
Boy, this is 100% me and Jammies. Sheesh.
Me: "Can't we just paint over it with white out? With gorilla glue? Can we just buy a banana and stick it in there? What about a pipe cleaner? Or a dowel? or a towel, wrapped around the dowel? Or just leave the whole board off? Or use a bucket with holes drilled in it?"
Jammies: Go back to the idea about the dowel.
18: I honestly think it was one of the best things about growing up in my family. Both that it lead them to make good decisions, but more importantly that it modeled for me out-loud in a way I can see a great decision making process that is often internal to a person an unheard. I think it's great for your kids.
19: This makes the two of you sound like an absolutely terrific team.
17: Is "second-best" there a mistake, or something real about your dad?
Second-best was intentional. Really it's something more like even odds between the top three options. But he's not one to spend time finding the best option when the second best will do.
That makes sense -- he's a satisficer not an optimizer.
You guys are so nice! I feel good about me and Jammies.
I mean, for it to work you need a lot of mutual trust and respect. He has to respect that your process is going to come up with good ideas even though lots of them are batshit, and you have to trust that he's not shooting you down out of hostility and that when you've got something good he'll help you identify it. If you can do that without getting mad at each other (don't ask me about my parents) it's really powerful.
The people really committed to marriage are the ones who can make it work without love and mutual respect. Otherwise, they might just be in it for the love and respect while not carrying about the institution.
Sometimes I can argue him into trying one of the more batshit ones.
And that banana is still holding up the roof.
24. As someone told me about 40 years ago, quality means fit for purpose; it doesn't mean shiny.
I'm not quite sure what I am, but AJ is methodical, and I sometimes have trouble getting him unstuck. So, with heebie's example, there will be a problem to solve, like repairing something. He'll tell me what the problem is, and I have no idea how to resolve it, but I know he can give me enough information to make a plan collaboratively if I can coax or prompt it out of him. "Can we chip it out? Can we use pliers? Do we need a tool we don't own?" And he just looks at me like I'm a fool, because these are so clearly wrong. What sometimes ends up working is to actually start gathering the wrong tool and maybe gently starting with an approach to see, and then it'll click for him and he'll go fetch the right thing and proceed. It feels a little like guessing at charades.
That makes me think of rubber duck programming, except that he's not engaging in it spontaneously, so you're being an active duck.
I would have read your pained expression and invited anyone who preferred to work alone to do so.
A better solution than the one one of my elementary school teachers came up with. "You don't have anyone," she asked, horrified and loud enough for the whole class to hear, before assigning me to some group. Then, for every group assignment I got to relive that before she would announce* that we we're going to work with our seating neighbors instead of self-selected groups and I would barely have a moment's relief before obsessing over how all my classmates would blame me for not being allowed to work with their friends. We did a lot of group work in that class.
*My memory has her beaming at me with pride when she announced her solution but I doubt I was looking anywhere but at my desk.
re: 4
Ditto. Psychologically I don't feel like I'm in either camp. I am (re-reading the thread AFTER I wrote most of the comment below) much more like UPETGI's Dad, who very quickly gets a "good enough" solution. I am quite happy with satisficing when working.
I do sometimes get completely stumped by things, even in areas like the things I do for my job, where by any standards I'm fairly skilled. When I get stumped I will deliberately switch into a methodical mode, which often involves very specifically writing out basic things that ordinarily I wouldn't even think about, because they are just there in the background of the problem I am trying to solve, and then working step by step towards the goal. A big part of it is making explicit _to myself_ a bunch of things that normally sit almost below the level of conscious thought. This happens quite a lot. Multiple times a week, for sure, and I also sometimes use it as a deliberate technique to deal with periods when I am having procrastination or attention span issues, especially if I am tired or over-worked.
But ... I never do the spaghetti thing. There's zero chance of me just splurging a load of wrong or possibly wrong things out there and then filtering/iterating until I'm in the ballpark of the right solution/answer. Or if I do it, I do it in very quick leaps that aren't very transparent, even to me. I'm conscious that I'm sort of flitting about but it's more like "skip skip skip LAND". It's not something that happens on a level of self-awareness that I could share with other people. I can retrospectively justify and argue effectively for the solution I've landed on, but I get to that solution via something that's less conscious than that.
Reasoning to me feels like very holistic taking-in-everything-at-a glance thinking followed by a sudden zoom in/snap into focus. If that doesn't happen quite quickly, I then drop into methodical mode.
That holistic thing is what drives me crazy about watching other people looking at things on screens or reading something written down. I can literally see their eyes scanning the page, and it's like watching some terribly slow steampunk tractor crawling across a ploughed field or something.
"It's right fucking there. There! On the top left of the page/paragraph 5."
I don't have eidetic memory or anything like that, but I can literally flip through a book I've read before and stop at the right place for the thing I want, because I'm just sort of looking for "shapes" that I have in memory, and I can do something similar when reading a single page of text or looking at a web page in real time. I skim the content almost instantly and then do a quick zoom in and close read on the bit of content I want. I don't think this is particularly special. I've talked to a lot of people with similar academic backgrounds that do exactly this, and other people on Unfogged have described similar mental processes, and I know, just from working with them all the time, that quite a few of my work colleagues sort of work the same way. I think it's quite a common trait among people who work on certain kinds of problems or who have hobbies/interests that intersect with those kinds of problems.
People who have to do that one-step-at-a-time thing aren't any less intelligent, or any less likely to come up with good answers to problems. They are just frustrating as fuck to watch working through things (or reading) in real time.
I have a collaborator who is a 36.2 style thinker. I used to be frustrated by it because it would take an hour before we would get to my actual question, but I learned he was quite good at it and by the time we'd get to my actual question he'd just answer it. The analogy I've used is a glacier. It moves slowly but once it gets there it can't be stopped.
Which explains the moraine in his office.
>but I can literally flip through a book I've read before and stop at the right place for the thing I want, because I'm just sort of looking for "shapes" that I have in memory, and I can do something similar when reading a single page of text or looking at a web page in real time.
I do that to some extent. It seems like electronic documents with their reflow would make it a lot harder though.
My son is using a fancy citation website which I've never seen before. My contribution is to argue that Voltaire's first name is Kevin.
