Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies
summary
Experienced developers use visual and linguistic shortcuts but those shortcuts carry predictable biases. The talk shows concrete tools — rubber duck debugging, the please mr gear naming test, diagrams and the squint test — and a surprising worked example: a Pac‑Man AI built by modeling a pac‑man smell diffusion across tiles so ghosts climb scent hills and cooperate when they zero out tiles, simple and effective. It highlights the bias blind spot and urges asking “how is this biased.”
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Start
- 4:24STATE MACHINE DIAGRAM
- 10:05BODY SYNTONIC REASONING
- 21:11PROGRAMMING PAC-MAN
- 24:37DIFFUSION CONTOUR
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