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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 06 2012 @ 07:57 PM EDT |
This isn't about nature, so much as its about *nurture*. Reflection is
something kids naturally discover for themselves, but the education system
and adult direction usually drums it out of them.
Most people don't use their reflection capability much especially in
adulthood, so they don't develop robust maps and they don't come to
prefer correctness of the map over memorizing a bunch of facts.
But some fraction of kids learn to reflect effectively anyway, and grow up
to be active Mapper thinkers. There's a reason that all of the best
programmers are self-taught. (I've talked to hundreds of programmers,
and all of the good ones were self taught. They are all mappers, every
single one. Its easy for one mapper to recognize another in conversation,
once you are aware that there are actually other people--the majority--
who don't think that way at all. I can explain complex interrelated
concepts to another mapper in 5 minutes, that wpuld take hours to explain
to a non-mapper, if they were willing to learn them at all. Its hard to
explain how, but mappers somehow tease out the shared parts of each
other's maps and use them to communicate and to teach each other. In
that 5 minutes, I can find related concepts that the other guy already
knows and use them as a powerful shorthand to feed the proper concepts
and relationships directly into his mental map (which he can then massage
and reorganize later, until he is confident in it). The same thing just
doesn't work with packers, because they don't keep their mental map in
shape, its a disused closet of their brain, which seems to mostly be full of
facts. Even contradictory facts, which they will happily recite in the
appropriate situations without any awareness of the contradictions -- which
to a mapper, would be a warning sign that something needs refactoring in
the mental map. A mapper would mull it over, seek new knowledge, or let
go of old ideas. They would adjust their mental map until the
contradictions were resolved.
Honestly, I was always a mapper and I had no idea until I heard about the
mapper/packer theory in my 20's that not everybody thinks this way. It
sure explained a lot of little things though. I always thought not seeing the
contradictions was had something to do with intelligence (or lack thereof)
but even seemingly-smart people would say and do contradictory things
and I never understood why. It turns out they *were* smart, they just
weren't mapper-centric thinkers, they didn't spend any time reflecting and
looking for contradictions or other impurities in their mental map.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 06 2012 @ 08:18 PM EDT |
| By that logic, handedness should be on a bell-curve, with almost 50% preferring
their right hand, and almost 50% preferring their left hand, and some
bell-shaped area of ambidexterous overlap in the middle! But only around 10-15%
of people are left-handed. There is probably something genetic that
determines which hand is dominant (though I'm not suggesting mapper tendency is
genetic, I think its as much a learned trait as anything--or rather, a trait
that most people "un-learned" during their childhood).
I think the
prevalence of mapping is somewhere in the 10-20% range, and there surely is a
continuum between "super-mappers" and "super-packers", so not everybody in this
~20% uses their mapping abilities to the same extent. Pretty much all
programmers are somewhere in that 20% though, and the really good ones all seem
to be clustered at the "super-mapper" end of the scale.
I don't know why,
but there also seems to be a higher rate of left-handedness among the
programmers I've met, than among the population in general.. easily more than
20%. Other people have noticed this but I don't know if anyone has a good
explanation for it. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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