In Search of Balls and Sticks

This is not a molecule of acetone:

It’s not even an accurate representation of a molecule of acetone: atoms are not little colored balls, and the bonds between them are not little sticks. However, you can explain most practical chemistry using the ball-and-stick model. More importantly, if you insist that ten-year-olds have to start with electron shells and quantum chemistry because they’re “real”, I don’t think you’re really interested in teaching them. Whether you acknowledge it or not, what you’re doing is gatekeeping.

Over the past six months I have tried and failed to get into several books on ethics in tech, psychological safety, the governance of open source projects, and similar topics that I think are really important in software engineering. In each case I felt the author was expecting me to dive straight into quantum mechanics. In particular, the (many, repeated) off-hand references to work I’d never heard of made me feel like a ten-year-old encountering “basic” trigonometry.

I’d have no grounds for complaint if these books were intended for a scholarly audience: I don’t expect someone who has never programmed to understand type theory without doing a lot of preparatory work, so it would be narcissistic to expect advanced topics in other people’s disciplines to be instantly accessible to me just because I can code. But the authors of these books clearly thought they were writing for a wider audience—for people in tech who wanted to get into ethics, political theory, or group psychology. They just missed the mark in the way that I once missed the mark by insisting on explaining hash tables to a room full of biologists in their first lesson on Python because hey, how can you possibly use dictionaries without understanding how they work?

I think it is possible to write about these things at the ball-and-stick level. I also think that people who do so probably encounter the same sniffy reaction from their peers that I did in the early days of Software Carpentry (which a senior professor in computer science once dismissed as “merely useful”). If you have favorite examples to share, I’d enjoy hearing from you.