I was following some completely unrelated stuff (or so I thought!) and I ran into this:
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.
Which was in a discussion about -- at least according to one paper -- some 30-40% of incoming freshmen could not learn to program and would never learn to program. As in, the history of CS classes seemed to show there was a sizable population that was simply unteachable.
Now I'm a huge believer in plasticity. Heck, good lines of evidence are showing that perfect pitch is not as innate as we thought it was. But it does seem possible that there is a basic division in how one constructs certain sorts of thoughts. One group has as part of its worldview a habit of manipulating symbolic logic in the terms required by the computer. The other has a different set of associations and habits and is forced to unlearn as much as they learn in order to grasp the subject.
But this is one paper, which I haven't even read; I'm mindlessly speculating at this point; I'm following a process no more rigorous than that of the typical hoax believer. That given; interesting thought or no?
