I am wondering how universally useful these qualities are across disciplines. It might be interesting to consider each of the categories in a totally different field. Take dancing for example. I am very fond of Argentine tango, and will attempt to consider the article in light of it.
## Read the reference
It is very difficult to dance from written instuctions, but I think one hugely underappreciated resource is watching very intently great instructors dance basic movements. I did this in my early days, because it is very enjoyable entertainment when you apreciate this dance, and it was I think a large part of why I progressed rather quickly.
I could go on about this point, but I think there is a similar thing going on with humans and our mirror neurons when we watch others do something, to how we acquire spoken languages, and the recent wave of input-based language learning movements.
Another way to interpret this point might be to know the history of the dance, of Argentina, the broader dance communities and movements across the world, and the culture in general. The main advantage to this I think is to contextualize a lot of what you learn, and that the dancer becomes more immersed in the activity.
## Know your tools really well
Dancing involves some tools external to the dancer, like clothing and shoes, the dance floor of course, perhaps talcum powder to reduce friction, and most importantly the music.
While there is considerable advantage to be gained from wearing an outfit suited for dancing, there's a quick and hard cutoff as to how much knowing more about these things improve your dance. The same applies to the floor surface and so on.
But of these "tools", I think the biggest gain is found in familiarizing oneself with the music. Both gaining intuition about the structure of songs, melodies, and rhythms, but also gaining deeper insight and access to the emotions at play. Dancing is an opportunity to interpret all of these aspects of the song, and being familiar with the music, the medium that connects one with ones partner and also the thing you are trying to represent through movement, goes hand in hand with being able to execute the movements of the dance at all.
All of the points of the article apply here: the history of the music inform you of what the tango is all about, and of the different sounds and movements that are available to us today; the present, in the sense of what music is currently popular, and played live; limitations, in the sense of what different styles of tango music work with what sorts of movements and feelings; finally, the ecosystem is like a summary of all of the above, and something that people discuss at length in every milonga, like which orchestra they prefer, or which contemporary groups they like.
However, one thing that I think qualifies as a tool, although somewhat subtly, is the dancer's own body. I have not pursued this avenue very far yet, and am thrilled to realize that this is something I really ought to do. I know only a little bit about human anatomy, after strength training years ago. And as for my own body specifically, perhaps something like yoga, pilates, or calisthenics would be valuable.
## Read the error message / Break down problems
While there are no error messages in dancing, you definitiely feel when something isn't quite working out. If you're in a class and are trying to learn a step, it is crucial to be able to be critical of your own performance, and look for faults or inconsistencies.
Maybe a step feels a little off, like there's something awkward going on between you and your partner.
One thing I have noticed is that, if you are trying to go over a sequence of steps A-B-C-D, and something isn't quite working out at point C of the sequence, the soure of the error is usually actually somewhere in either point B, or perhaps already at point A.
This might remind some of looking at a stack trace of an error, and trying to figure out at which turn things went sideways. The problem is frequently not located exactly at the point where the error was actually raised.
## Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty
One of the dangers for any learner is calcifying into bad habits that were adopted at an early stage of learning. In order to break out of these, you have to be willing to abandon old guardrails, be uncomfortable over again, and to learn something over. This might be analogous to refactoring some kind of broken legacy code.
Growth is also possible through experimentation, abandoning old patterns in search of something new and potentially interesting. This also requires courage, and feels a lot like getting ones hands dirty, and applies to both programming and dancing and probably many other things alike.
## Always help others / Write / Status doesn't matter / Build a reputation
Since dancing is a communal activity, it is not so vital to be writing in order to be heard. But I still think that communication in this space is hugely valuable.
From what I have seen, any healthy dance community has great communication between the more experienced dancers and the less experienced ones. Unhealthy ones are often referred to as snobbish, The alternative, where there is a strong divide and exclusion from the top downward, are often referred to as snobbish, and I would characterize that as unhealthy. That sort of a scene will gradually wane from the high barrier of entry, and will wither and die if not already sufficiently large.
## Never stop learning / Have patience
Any tango dancer will tell you, no matter how experienced or accomplished they may be, that one never stops learning this dance. Even decades into ones journey, it is extremely common to hear dancers say that they're still working on their walk - which also happens to be more or less the very first thing you learn in your very first class.
## Never blame the computer
In a dance that famously requires two people, it is very easy for a lot of people to blame one's partner when something goes wrong. I think it is much more valuable to take the opposite approach, and always look to what you can improve in your own dancing, whether you are a leader or a follower, long before attempting to throwing accusations and corrections at your partner.
There may of course eventually come a breaking point, at which you want to raise some questions and explore together for a solution. But to immediately correct your partner, before they've even had a chance to correct themselves, is never a good approach in my opinion.
## Don't guess
I think this one is hard to stick to rigidly when learning how to dance. If you want to be completely sure of a movement before you try it out, you'll forever remain paralyzed. We all have to do some guessing in the beginning, trusting that our muscles move us through space in about the right way as the dance is supposed to be performed.
However, these guesses that we make are frequently wrong, and result in incorrect technique and bad habits which must be weeded out and corrected before they calcify too much.
So while I think not guessing at all is impossible, I think we really should not underestimate the value of any means available to us for correcting incorrect guesses that we have made and accumulated. These include someone more experienced than us that we trust, or private lessons from tutors who know what they're talking about.
## Keep it simple
It is funny, but this exact piece of advice is also so very frequently heard in tango classes. As you progress and learn and acquire vocabulary in tango, speaking now mainly about leaders, it is very easy to want to use it all and throw every shiny new step and sequence you know at the poor follower that you've convinced to join you on the floor.
Many also are nervous and afraid of the silence that comes with not moving all the time, and keep leading step on every beat in order to never make it seem like they're running out of ideas.
But in actual fact, it can be wildly better to relax, and do simple steps well, with tasteful pauses aligned with the music, than to hurriedly toss around every step that you know.
## My own final thoughts
Despite the fact that code is run on computers, and dance is performed by humans, I think this analogy holds really well. If you think about it, dancers are just meat robots performing fuzzy instructions written to their brain by themselves and dance instructors, or whatever they've acquired by watching others dance. You could summarize as follows the mapping in this analogy:
Spec <-> The goal that the dance-student is aiming for
Code <-> Steps that have been acquired by a dancer (maybe imperfect)
Runtime <-> A night out on the dance floor
Error <-> Improper technique
Programming <-> Learning and improving as a dancer
Programmer <-> Learner/teacher
I think an interesting insight here is that both the learner and the teacher play a role as the "programmer". A learner that is totally passive and lacking in introspective ability will perhaps not learn as quickly. So, the points of the article are applicable to both of these parties.
For any autodidacts out there, that last part is good motivation to reflect some more on the points of this blog post.
Dancing is a good example, though not perfect. It's hard to convince a club to have a salsa/bachata/tango/swing centered evening, because the interested crowd actually comes to dance and socialize. It is much more profitable and easy to turn down the lights and up the music and get customers that buy alcohol.
Not to say that dancing is not commodifiable. People make a living offering classes, outfits, shoes, and travels centered on specific dance genres. But as a participant, you can get pretty far for a lot less money than the price of the proverbial night on the town.
I think it's important to distinguish Acts which individuals perform from the culture around those Acts.
Commodification of a subculture is spoken about as if it is a binary a purity test but that isn't reflective of reality. You can pay $500 to watch some aged punk rockers perform in an arena, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an illegal Warehouse show going on at the same time in the same city.
I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of those!
Like you say, computers nowadays can do basically anything. It is then a funny feeling to take an old computer, one that was once abandoned over all the minor frustrations that surrounded it, and revisit it today, only to be filled with wonder and parent-like pride in what the cute little thing is still able to do. Even trivial things, like playing mp3s! Despite being older in time, this antique relic of the past has its place in a younger part of my mind, and so feels more childish and immature. And yet, look at it go!
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
This phrase is repeated many, many times in the legendary fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality (HPMOR)[1], which I'm sure many here are familiar with already.
It is perplexing to hear people making room for their favourite pseudoscience using the excuse that "there are things science cannot explain". See, the annoying thing about science is that if something can as much as be observed, then it can be observed repeatedly, and then reasoned about - effectively allowing us to do science on it. That's even the case for magic, if it were real, as illustrated in HPMOR.
Even the most absurd and chaotic phenomenon, bereft of any discernible pattern or rhyme or reason, can at least be observed to behave chaotically and then be described as such. Et voilà : science !
There are many that would strongly object to this conclusion. I have heard friends describe their inner life as almost entirely verbal, that they "think in words", and are totally unable to relate to anything else.
When we say "communication", I think there is an implication that the goal is communication with others. But there is also value in communication with oneself. To verbalize is to condense ones thoughts into words, and when we hear words they get unpacked and evoke meaning. The resulting feedback loop can be amazing for refining ideas.
It should be no surprise that humans might end up relying on this internal monologue when thinking to the point that they mistake it for thought itself.
I think in words. There is always an internal dialogue. Even when doing music, or painting, I'm always anticipating what's next by some words; here comes the bridge, goes to Am now, gonna paint leaves in this shape, or maybe this other. I can visualize things and sounds, but words are always involved. That's probably why I'm not very talented at music or painting.
The thing is: I'm fairly confident my subconsciousness is the actual thinking part and my consciousness is kinda dumb if that makes sense. The part of my brain that does think in words is pretty slow and gets a lot of information from the "processor" behind without actually realizing it.
I visualize it as the 2 man start up where there one tech guy and one who sells it outwards.
I surprised my freshman-year Spanish teacher on the last day of classes when he did an AMA. I asked "do you think in Spanish"? This question was nonsense to him—another student got it, but he was baffled by what I was asking. It wasn't until years later when I found out that some people didn't have an internal monologue that his confusion made sense.
Are there really people with no internal voice at all? I understand that not everyone has this constant internal chat as I do, but it's hard to me to imagine, for example, solving math problems without "thinking" the numbers aloud.
I have an internal monologue and I struggle to imagine how someone can think without one. Yet I also wonder if bypassing the need to articulate thoughts in words is actually more efficient. Do those people have a higher thought throughput? I suspect we may never know.
I've abandoned the idea of all humans use language the same way a long time ago. However I hope everybody does not use language as a tool to drive a car and looking at the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan I'm pretty sure no language was involved before it sparked.
Took me a moment to get that heatmap. An axis labelled 1-10 from pale to red seemed absurd to me at first. "On a scale from-one-to-ten, how expensive are houses?"
It is a shame how vulgarization of science and statistics seems to necessitate a simplification of the data set to the point where its usefulness becomes debatable. It always seems to me like I want access to the axes that they've simplified away down to just a mean or an average. I get that presenting data is hard, but if I'm left more puzzled than informed at the end, what have you really presented to me?
In this case, I wish I could see the distribution of salaries through time and by location, as well as that of home prices. There ought to be a more interesting metric available than simply calculating the average of either and dividing the two.
I was eager to see the data, but exporting from the first source only gives the same data shown in the article, although in a spreadsheet.
The explanations in your second link are more like definitions than justifications for why this and those boiled down quantities are worth talking about.
I'm not trying to excuse them, I just had similar questions and googled around a bit and those looked interesting to save the next person a couple minutes! I also shamelessly sorta use my own HN comments as a brain dump sometimes for myself in the future.
I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation, neither of which imply any depth of understanding.
But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
Memorization def gets a bad rap, for the reasons you mention.
Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.
> "Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express."
That's also the reason little credence is given to coders who moan about college CS knowledge being useless memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up when needed.
I totally agree. I've spent time learning several poems of Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Spell of the Yukon, The Men Who Don't Fit In) because I've enjoyed reading them. Now, I don't need a book, I just recall one from memory any time I like. I'm not an actor so I had none of the techniques that they would use to learn lines. It was purely rote memorization through repeated readings and recitation.
I agree, but I think it does depend on what the objective is. If preserving the literal accuracy of the source material is important, then memorization deserves it's bad rap and is worthy of much criticism.
That's not to say that people can't memorize things accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for accuracy or historical value.
On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is a wonderful technique for doing so.
This extraordinary book from Frances Yates explains how before writing, scholars and story tellers would visualize architecture so they could store memories in rooms, then they would walk from room to room and recover memories, for example to tell very long stories.
> If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.
(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)
I went to a Saturday school for many of my childhood years, as my dad wanted me to learn Arabic. They were bad at teaching the language, but did get us to read the script and memorise several Quran verses. You were supposed to get "rewards" in heaven just for memorising without understanding. To this day I can recite Al-Fatiha [0] despite not understanding a word, being an atheist, and not having prayed for maybe 15 years.
Same, as a kid there were a whole bunch of bible verses to memorize, which was required. To this day I can recite quite a few of them, and (despite now being an atheist) I still occasionally have some of them pop into my head in situations where it might be relevant. Memorization is an extremely powerful tool, and particularly religions have known and used this for millenia.
The difference between your experience and mine is that I have no idea what the verses are saying! They almost never pop into my head because I can't relate them to situations.
It's possible to just memorize the words, of course. But for myself, I find that very tedious and difficult to make myself do (nor very worthwhile), and much prefer becoming deeply acquainted with the text in order to memorize it.
I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.
> I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.
Worth noting that India's oldest poetic/litergical traditions, the Vedas, were transmitted orally for at least 1500 years, and developed elaborate systems of memorization and pronounceation to ensure they passed down (almost) unmodified.
In Mauritania there is a village where most people who lived there are blind. This is how they learn to memorizw the Quran which is more than 600 pages, each have 15 lines.
Fun facts, there is an important Islamic tradition where group of people (tens or hundreds thousands of them) called Hafiz memorize the entire Quran. If for example, God forbid, that the entire written copies either physicallly or digitally of the Quran are completely destroyed, it can be recreated completely in no time. This practice is considered a living miracle since no other holy book has this crucial feature and it is also well known that even the Pope do not memorize the complete Bible.
The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just for personal betterment and to better share it with others.
The Bible’s also not generally regarded as wholly and precisely an exact, unaltered, unfiltered, and unadulterated message directly, syllable-by-syllable and letter-by-letter, as written on the page, message straight from God, not so much as a word out of place for its entire length, all as revealed in a single (long) event to a single person and recorded without error. I think that has a major effect on how important precise preservation of the Quran is to believers, and how interested in memorizing part of all of it they might be, versus the Bible.
To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel, and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his sacrifice.
After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.
People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.
Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.
The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
> After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.
There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.
> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.
Just in case you don't realise the Gospel is 'the message of salvation through Jesus' and is not the books in the New Testament called "the gospels". In the Bible when Jesus tells disciples to teach the gospel, the Greek word can be translated 'good news'.
A similar reference-instance error occurs with the Bible itself: 'the Word of God' is Jesus, not the Bible, the Bible is a pointer to the Word.
I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet we have humans still around after that.
I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of college students or pedestrians on the street who walk past them. The Christians already have usable full sized copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want it at all, neither group revere the physical item and will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to the point that they purposefully let it get worn and ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a few hundred intact copies of the Bible.
Forget the entire Bible, how about memorizing just the Gospel or the New Testament that's pertinent to Jesus, I think that all the Christians will fail that too including the Pope.
Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].
Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].
The Gospel is literally the good news of God coming to earth as a man to die for our sins, not the literal words of the Bible. It's this message that is to be shared, not necessarily the exact words on the page, especially because it's going to be translated anyway.
But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:
Isaiah 40:8
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Matthew 5:18
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
I sincerely hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way but this seems like a worldly solution to a Godly problem. Is the God in the Quran not sovereign? Why would He need humans to protect the Quran?
Why would any almighty deity need humans to do anything at all?
This is a generalised critique against most commandments of many religions.
(If the deity didn't want me to commit act X, why is act X even physically possible?)
There are quite a few specific and also generalised responses to this critique. Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)
The Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GGSJ) has also been memorized by some people. It’s much rarer than in Islam, but the GGSJ being written in verse with defined melodies/meter helps with memorization. It is much longer than the Quran though, and there isn’t as much emphasis on memorizing the whole thing (the daily prayers are commonly known though).
## Read the reference
It is very difficult to dance from written instuctions, but I think one hugely underappreciated resource is watching very intently great instructors dance basic movements. I did this in my early days, because it is very enjoyable entertainment when you apreciate this dance, and it was I think a large part of why I progressed rather quickly.
I could go on about this point, but I think there is a similar thing going on with humans and our mirror neurons when we watch others do something, to how we acquire spoken languages, and the recent wave of input-based language learning movements.
Another way to interpret this point might be to know the history of the dance, of Argentina, the broader dance communities and movements across the world, and the culture in general. The main advantage to this I think is to contextualize a lot of what you learn, and that the dancer becomes more immersed in the activity.
## Know your tools really well
Dancing involves some tools external to the dancer, like clothing and shoes, the dance floor of course, perhaps talcum powder to reduce friction, and most importantly the music.
While there is considerable advantage to be gained from wearing an outfit suited for dancing, there's a quick and hard cutoff as to how much knowing more about these things improve your dance. The same applies to the floor surface and so on.
But of these "tools", I think the biggest gain is found in familiarizing oneself with the music. Both gaining intuition about the structure of songs, melodies, and rhythms, but also gaining deeper insight and access to the emotions at play. Dancing is an opportunity to interpret all of these aspects of the song, and being familiar with the music, the medium that connects one with ones partner and also the thing you are trying to represent through movement, goes hand in hand with being able to execute the movements of the dance at all.
All of the points of the article apply here: the history of the music inform you of what the tango is all about, and of the different sounds and movements that are available to us today; the present, in the sense of what music is currently popular, and played live; limitations, in the sense of what different styles of tango music work with what sorts of movements and feelings; finally, the ecosystem is like a summary of all of the above, and something that people discuss at length in every milonga, like which orchestra they prefer, or which contemporary groups they like.
However, one thing that I think qualifies as a tool, although somewhat subtly, is the dancer's own body. I have not pursued this avenue very far yet, and am thrilled to realize that this is something I really ought to do. I know only a little bit about human anatomy, after strength training years ago. And as for my own body specifically, perhaps something like yoga, pilates, or calisthenics would be valuable.
## Read the error message / Break down problems
While there are no error messages in dancing, you definitiely feel when something isn't quite working out. If you're in a class and are trying to learn a step, it is crucial to be able to be critical of your own performance, and look for faults or inconsistencies.
Maybe a step feels a little off, like there's something awkward going on between you and your partner.
One thing I have noticed is that, if you are trying to go over a sequence of steps A-B-C-D, and something isn't quite working out at point C of the sequence, the soure of the error is usually actually somewhere in either point B, or perhaps already at point A.
This might remind some of looking at a stack trace of an error, and trying to figure out at which turn things went sideways. The problem is frequently not located exactly at the point where the error was actually raised.
## Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty
One of the dangers for any learner is calcifying into bad habits that were adopted at an early stage of learning. In order to break out of these, you have to be willing to abandon old guardrails, be uncomfortable over again, and to learn something over. This might be analogous to refactoring some kind of broken legacy code.
Growth is also possible through experimentation, abandoning old patterns in search of something new and potentially interesting. This also requires courage, and feels a lot like getting ones hands dirty, and applies to both programming and dancing and probably many other things alike.
## Always help others / Write / Status doesn't matter / Build a reputation
Since dancing is a communal activity, it is not so vital to be writing in order to be heard. But I still think that communication in this space is hugely valuable.
From what I have seen, any healthy dance community has great communication between the more experienced dancers and the less experienced ones. Unhealthy ones are often referred to as snobbish, The alternative, where there is a strong divide and exclusion from the top downward, are often referred to as snobbish, and I would characterize that as unhealthy. That sort of a scene will gradually wane from the high barrier of entry, and will wither and die if not already sufficiently large.
## Never stop learning / Have patience
Any tango dancer will tell you, no matter how experienced or accomplished they may be, that one never stops learning this dance. Even decades into ones journey, it is extremely common to hear dancers say that they're still working on their walk - which also happens to be more or less the very first thing you learn in your very first class.
## Never blame the computer
In a dance that famously requires two people, it is very easy for a lot of people to blame one's partner when something goes wrong. I think it is much more valuable to take the opposite approach, and always look to what you can improve in your own dancing, whether you are a leader or a follower, long before attempting to throwing accusations and corrections at your partner.
There may of course eventually come a breaking point, at which you want to raise some questions and explore together for a solution. But to immediately correct your partner, before they've even had a chance to correct themselves, is never a good approach in my opinion.
## Don't guess
I think this one is hard to stick to rigidly when learning how to dance. If you want to be completely sure of a movement before you try it out, you'll forever remain paralyzed. We all have to do some guessing in the beginning, trusting that our muscles move us through space in about the right way as the dance is supposed to be performed.
However, these guesses that we make are frequently wrong, and result in incorrect technique and bad habits which must be weeded out and corrected before they calcify too much.
So while I think not guessing at all is impossible, I think we really should not underestimate the value of any means available to us for correcting incorrect guesses that we have made and accumulated. These include someone more experienced than us that we trust, or private lessons from tutors who know what they're talking about.
## Keep it simple
It is funny, but this exact piece of advice is also so very frequently heard in tango classes. As you progress and learn and acquire vocabulary in tango, speaking now mainly about leaders, it is very easy to want to use it all and throw every shiny new step and sequence you know at the poor follower that you've convinced to join you on the floor.
Many also are nervous and afraid of the silence that comes with not moving all the time, and keep leading step on every beat in order to never make it seem like they're running out of ideas.
But in actual fact, it can be wildly better to relax, and do simple steps well, with tasteful pauses aligned with the music, than to hurriedly toss around every step that you know.
## My own final thoughts
Despite the fact that code is run on computers, and dance is performed by humans, I think this analogy holds really well. If you think about it, dancers are just meat robots performing fuzzy instructions written to their brain by themselves and dance instructors, or whatever they've acquired by watching others dance. You could summarize as follows the mapping in this analogy:
I think an interesting insight here is that both the learner and the teacher play a role as the "programmer". A learner that is totally passive and lacking in introspective ability will perhaps not learn as quickly. So, the points of the article are applicable to both of these parties.For any autodidacts out there, that last part is good motivation to reflect some more on the points of this blog post.
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