flâneur

Hard Thing #6.2: Hundreds of daily decisions

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A fun thing to do with young kids (or students in an intro to CS class) is to ask them to explain how to do simple tasks in the excruciating detail required to actually do them. How do you make a peanut butter sandwich? Well…put the peanut butter on the bread! No! Not like that!! Ok fine… Take out two slices of bread, open the peanut butter jar, and put a scoop of peanut butter on each of the two slices of bread. What’s wrong with you?!?! Use a knife to get the peanut butter out and then spread it all over each slice of bread. sigh… No… you open the jar first… I give up! Ok you get the idea. What’s intuitive and obvious to us, as experts, is hard to proactively describe, even though it is trivial to spot the errors when they occur. Even worse, every step we might write in a protocol opens up many more questions. Is the peanut butter in the pantry or did I leave it out in the dining room? Are the knives in the drawer or are they still in the dishwasher? Is the peanut butter warm enough

A fun thing to do with young kids (or students in an intro to CS class) is to ask them to explain how to do simple tasks in the excruciating detail required to actually do them. How do you make a peanut butter sandwich? Well…put the peanut butter on the bread! No! Not like that!! Ok fine… Take out two slices of bread, open the peanut butter jar, and put a scoop of peanut butter on each of the two slices of bread. What’s wrong with you?!?! Use a knife to get the peanut butter out and then spread it all over each slice of bread. sigh… No… you open the jar first… I give up! Ok you get the…

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