@djnavarro yeah things are definitely splitting into two camps. I am comforted in that when the AI bills come due in a few years and people have to actually start paying hefty subscriptions for this stuff, I'll be able to market myself as someone who knows how to work without AI assistance.
@jimbob @djnavarro The two camps? People who read the fucking manual and people who don’t 🫠
@mccarthymg @djnavarro it's always been the way!
@jimbob @mccarthymg @djnavarro But... you need to have a well written manual and you need to be able to understand it... which is not a given (and that's why we need to also train people on his to do that)
@mccarthymg @jimbob @djnavarro Yes, I teach a lot of biologists who are completely scared of programming. A student the other day told me they get anxious whenever they get a red line in the console in R Studio (in that particular instance, we were actually installing a package and all these red lines continue popping out although there was no error... grrrr).
A great thing to do when dealing with non-technical audiences, is to make coding mistakes on purpose so that you can analyse the error messages that you get with them. You demistify the error message and they start to be a bit more comfortable with the whole programming thing. And then you get them to read the manual, or Google the error code, or hell even use chatgpt if they're onto that. But the important thing is you have them engage with their code.
Another thing that I often see in my field is that people often have complex data, and they want to analyse it and get a results out of it. They don't care about programming details, or how the underneath algorithms work, and in a sense I understand them. However, you need a good balance between the two if you are to trust your own results.
@nicolaromano @jimbob @djnavarro Some good and relatable tips there! I do think there would be a huge psychological and practical benefit if programming was a regular part of the curriculum for scientists.
@nicolaromano @jimbob @djnavarro Yeah, it’s definitely not a given (although at least with R it’s a given that a manual actually exists and is easily accessible). It takes a lot of empathy to write documentation that will be useful to a diverse user base.