It seems like a flavour of the rubber duck method; by trying to explain it to a third party, you think about it in a different way and find a solution.
Trust me bro(ette): Rubber duck is the SHIT. I don’t even program save for a few rare instances, but any complex issue where you just know something is wrong but can’t quite put your finger on it? It works miracles. A lot better tbf if you are actually explaining it to someone who can ask questions, but any object that you can look at is a good substitute.
I think it’s a bit more than that. I think that the idea is that you simplify the problem so that the rubber duck could understand it. Or at least reformulate it in order to communicate it clearly.
It’s the simplification, reformulation or reorganisation that helps to get the breakthrough.
Just thinking out loud isn’t quite the same thing.
Even though this is true for like 90% of my thinking (that I can see when I try), so far I’m concinced this ist because I am a predominantly language-and-normal-grammar-rules thinker.
There are people that mostly think via associations of words that don’t have to be formulated/ cast into grammar.
And then there supposedly people mainly thinking in pictures or smth, without words.
Anyways for some people rubber duck mode reoresents a change in thinking method, I think
Yes, saying thinks out loud requires a different change in thinking because you are verbalizing the thoughts in addition to approaching it as an explanation instead of just an understanding. I know how a phone works, but describing how it works is a different thing from knowing. The duck is just a stand in for someone else to get the mindset of explaining
I’m one of the latter that doesn’t really think in words, and a LOT of the time, thoughts have to be greatly simplified or at least much more organized to be stated in clear sentences. It’s that pause-and-refine that often gets the breakthrough for me. Sometimes it takes clear until I’m trying to put it in understandable sentences instead of a big ramble, but it still largely boils down to ACTUALLY stopping the task work to loop back over the landscape.
A lot of people do the same thing physically. Like when you’re climbing a big ladder and suddenly realize how high up you are, or how unstable the ladder is. Just a pause and broadening of attention is often enough to cue different thoughts and realizations.
AI in general is only a glorified rubber duck for most cases. The amount of bullshit cobbled together is too high for many uses
I’ve been using it like that. I have been trying to program this macropad thing I bought that uses python without having done much programming and it has yet to give me a solution that works. But in the course of explaining to it why whatever it gave me doesn’t work I’ve made a lot of progress so that’s nice at least.
Maybe the real artificial intelligence is the regular intelligence we found along the way.
AI clock would be sweet.
Knows I slept through an alarm or forgot to set it and wakes me up or suggests the right time to set alarms based on traffic conditions
More specifically:
Rubber Duck debugging.
And all we needed was the electricity of a good sized industrial nation state.
She didn’t actually submit it though, so it shouldn’t have needed to process it and use up that electricity.
Ha, I never knew this had an actual name.
I thought it was known as talking to a brick wall, ie. if you have a issue talk to a brick wall and you’ll get the answer
It’s got more than a name, too: it’s got a Wikipedia page! Part of my job is IT support for normies, and I love sharing that with clients (because of course they’ve not heard of it). Usually gets a laugh, and I like to think they adopt the term and “rubber duck” things in their daily life thereafter.
To be fair, I’ve written countless stack overflow posts detailing my problems in hope someone would be able to spot the mistake or error only for me to realize what it was along the way and never even submitting it.
And I didn’t even need a 🦆 for it
Education has really failed to impress upon people the importance of asking questions. It’s amazing how much time is wasted on making people learn answers to questions they don’t even know how to ask.
The most valuable tool I ever got (as a tutor/teacher) was Socratic Questioning. Students not only benefit from its application but it also helps to impress upon them the value (and relative skill) to asking thoughtful questions.
I don’t mean to sound like a Mom for Liberty, but to my mind, the American public education system (probably others) is not about developing intelligence but rather preparing children for work and keeping them busy/safe while their parents work, and I’d argue it’s not very good at its primary function. The ones who escape with curiosity, capacity, and confidence intact are woefully rare if you care about power to the people and thankfully rare if you care about keeping people easy to control.
On top of that, it doesn’t even do a good job of preparing kids for work since the majority of jobs will be in a team based environment while schools focus on individual/isolated learning almost exclusively.
The modern school system was largely developed around the early 1900s with the intent of creating factory line workers: people who could remember and perform 2 or 3 repetitive tasks. This is further compounded by the rise of standardized testing, which provides a good base level for quality of subjects across the range of individual teacher’s skills but has become an administrative crutch that puts test scores above everything else, leading to a cycle where kids are taught only to remember stuff long enough to pass the next test and then dump it from memory for the next set of test subjects.
Schooling needs a major revision from the ground up for the modern age.
I don’t think that’s why questions aren’t asked. I find questions aren’t asked because of ego. Nobody wants to look like they don’t know things. Lots of people will judge others for asking questions. I’m a question guy and it always surprised me how other people just knew things and didn’t ask questions. But I soon started to realize that they don’t know as much as they want others to think. They just have a high value for more independent thinking.
Yeah, it’s a well known technique in programming called “rubber duck debugging”.
The process of explaining the situation forces you to think about it in a different way, which can help you with the debugging.
But, nobody actually credits the duck when it works. It’s weird that this guy seems to want to credit ChatGPT
Is it just me or is this a really weird way of repeating what the OP said? He even used the duck emoji for clarity…
This is how symbolism worked in the Bible. It taught peace, love and prosperity through gaining knowledge over time.
You can rubber duck debug any logic system or truth statement, and it’s a far more elegant way to think than just old sciences based on Newton laws.
