Not Everyone Can Code

Not everyone can debug code Counterfactual reasoning is a technique where you assume alternative scenarios that could have happened, but did not in fact happen. You assume something is true when it is, in fact, false. A question involving a counterfactual is "What if dinosaurs had not gone extinct?" Reasoning with counterfactuals is considered an advanced cognitive skill, and it comes in quite handy when you are debugging code. To debug effectively, you have to entertain insulting falsehoods. You must look at your own logic and ask: "Suppose this invariant I spent three days designing failed. Suppose this pointer is null, even though I checked it two lines ago. How does that world exist?" You have to temporarily decouple the state of the machine from your own intentions. A surprising proportion of the adult population has extreme difficulty with counterfactual reasoning. They get actively frustrated or hostile when asked to reason from a premise they know to be untrue. Psychological…