Ken Tilton  <kentilton@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Slava Akhmechet wrote:
| > Ken Tilton <kennytilton@optonline.net> writes:
| >>Like someone just learning to play the piano who falls in love with D
| >>minor, the saddest of all keys, and wants to play nothing else. This
| >>we call a disease, as in to be cured.
| > 
| > Not a natural part of a learning process?
| 
| Non sequitor. A natural part of a learning process /is/ getting stuck in 
| false minima, and indeed one of the biggest contributions of a coach is 
| spotting and, um, curing these blocks.
+---------------

An even better coach is one who teaches you to recognize for yourself
when you're blocked, when you're looping, when you're thrashing[1], or
when you're self-deadlocked. Once one has learned this, then one can
recognize such situations and "uplevel" oneself to a higher level of
abstraction/cognition when such a problem arises.


-Rob

[1] Which used to be called "pink scheduling" on the DEC PDP-10,
    because it made the Interrupt Service Level 7 light bulb
    glow a constant pink. [Level 7 was where the scheduler ran.]

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607