The Mapper-Packer Divide

There are two basic strategies for writing programs. The same divide reappears in the society at large, stress in early childhood or severe chronic stress turns people into automatons without higher cognitive functions.

Mapping
Mapper thinking

(programming is ) a process of internalising the capabilities of the system, the nature of the problem, and the desire, and capturing the insight in a programming language. It is all about exploring the details of our desires, and understanding them in such a way that we can keep track of all the complexity. Mapper problem collapse can produce beautiful, tiny, elegant programs with no room for bugs in them.

--from Programmers Stone, Chapter 1
 * 1) Create a model of the problem,
 * 2) Investigate links between all the objects in the problem domain
 * 3) Measure and define the relevant Quality to achieve improving results
 * 4) Simplify and optimise the problem until the minimal level of simplicity is found
 * 5) Goal-oriented activities. The bigger picture is compared with the smaller
 * 6) Ideation -- Ability to generate ideas aplenty (Idea generation skill)
 * 7) Salience
 * 8) Pattern recognition, pattern seeking
 * 9) Cognitive flexibility
 * 10) Creativity
 * 11) Curiosity
 * 12) Consciousness
 * 13) Learn by yourself (because there is a map/meaning behind everything)
 * 14) Learning disability may be observed when kids do not want to engage in repetitive and conditioned learning
 * 15) Abstraction - Deep analysis takes one to some inherent simple principles
 * 16) Making insights - Insightment
 * 17) Procedures make mappers bored
 * 18) Likes mental challenges, building towards goals, discovering novelty
 * 19) Inductive reasoning
 * 20) Juxtapositional thinking that overlays results of deductive reasoning with those from inductive reasoning
 * 21) Work: mapper flow intensity
 * 22) Serotonergic introverts

Packing
Packing - socially conditioned conventional thinking, based on action.

"What is packing? Well, you just stop yourself asking `Why?'. You never really clean up your map of the world, so you don't find many of the underlying patterns that mappers use to `cheat'. You learn slower, because you learn little pockets of knowledge that you can't check all the way through, so lots of little problems crop up. You rarely get to the point where you've got so much of the map sorted out you can just see how the rest of it develops. In thinking-intensive areas like maths and physics, mappers can understand enough to get good GCSE grades in two weeks, while most schools have to spend three years or more bashing the knowledge packets into rote-learned memory, where they sit unexamined because the kids are good and do not daydream. It really isn't a very efficient way to go about things in the Information Age.

Some people have so little experience of direct understanding, produced by mapping over time, that they cannot believe that anything can be achieved unless someone else spells out in exact detail how to do absolutely everything. They believe that the only alternative to total regimentation is total anarchy, not a bunch of people getting things done." ...Thinking about Thinking, Day 1, Programmer's Stone
 * 1) Memorise a lot of procedures to solve problems
 * 2) Find how to solve a similar problem from self, others or request solutions from the superiors
 * 3) Copy the solution as the procedure
 * 4) Turn everything into a procedure
 * 5) Follow compliance to the procedure
 * 6) Demand compliance from others
 * 7) Stress everyone who is not compliant by displaying anger at them thus enforcing and dispersing SICD(Stress Induced Cognitive Dysfunction)
 * 8) SICD makes people act in set behaviours
 * 9) SICD floods the brain with dopamine and shuts off normal executive functions
 * 10) Stress can bring on AOD addiction and other illnesses
 * 11) Missing motivation; no care for the end result/goal for the project because stress becomes the only motivation
 * 12) HIgh complexity makes packers "bored", actually it is frustration
 * 13) Likes standards, conventions, traditions, rituals, staying in the familiar routines.
 * 14) Work: binge overwork displays
 * 15) Learning Ability is oserved when kids willingly submit to rote learning and numerous repetitive study assignments
 * 16) Dopaminergic extroverts