If you are making a scientific report and are saying "science based," you're doing it wrong.
You seem to have no idea why the term is needed. It is needed because science isn't the only guide people have to behavior. It's not even the only legitimate guide. There's personal experience. There's tradition. There's cultural norms.
You can easily see this in how medical practices vary from country to country; culture plays a huge part. In France wine is sometimes prescribed by doctors. Is there any point? In Germany physicians often prescribe traditional herbal medicines alongside regular drugs. Do any of those treatments help or hurt? In the US physicians order more tests much more aggressively than doctors in other parts of the world. Does that do any good?
You need evidence-based approaches to answer those questions. While uniformly across western medicine there is an ideology of science-based treatment, some of it is more "science-y" than "science-based". By which I mean many practices are emotionally impressive rather than justified by their outcomes (e.g. more tests, robotic surgery in some cases).
In a word, yes. In a democracy, public opinion doesn't change facts, but it sure as hell changes policy.
The contempt people have for politicians is both self-serving and ultimately self-defeating. The real problem is *us*. If we were better people, we'd have better politicians. That's the single biggest drawback to democracy: voters suck.
"Science-based" means something different than science when used as an adjective. Consider:
(1) Science policy -- principles which govern your support of science;
vs.
(2) Science-based policy -- positions on *anything* which are chosen because of scientific evidence.
An example of science policy would be favoring fundamental over applied research -- as did the Reagan administration. They did this for ideological reasons (which doesn't make the reasons *bad*): they thought the government shouldn't do anything the private sector might be interested in doing. An example of science-based policy would be to not underwrite flood insurance that allows rebuilding in areas threatened by floodplain expansion. It's not that science says you should or shouldn't pay to have the same house rebuilt over and over again; it just tells you that if you don't want to do that you have to draw lines somewhere.
Weighing politics as well as evidence in policy is nothing new. As Otto von Bismarck remarked, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best”. Evidence leads you to what the best policy would be; community standards limit what you can actually achieve.
What's unusual about the present is that we live in an age which uniquely devalues expertise. Fifty years ago expertise was arguably fetishized; but today people view it as just another opinion. And never before have we been so able to wrap ourselves in such an impervious blanket of social reinforcement when it comes to our opinions.
This makes "evidence" threatening, whether it bears on vaccines causing autism or anthropogenic climate change -- this is *not* an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. Someone claiming to have "evidence" claims a privileged position from which he can contradict what you "know" to be true.
Most people seem to be jumping to conclusions on this story, fitting it into what they "know" about Trump -- and they may be right. But sticking more closely to the facts, what we have here is a contemporary list of political dirty words. It's obvious why "fetus", "entitlement", "diversity" and "transgender" are on the list, but what's novel is that "science" and "evidence" are also seen as controversial.
There is of course writing code which embodies the solution to a particular problem in a methodical and systematic manner. But before that, comes what for me is the interesting part: transforming a problem I don't know how to solve into a set of problems that I know how to solve. That's what determines if you can be any good at it. Any reasonably disciplined and literate person can be trained to write code that solves a particular problem, but can you find a problem or problems that embody what needs to be done? That's the creative part.
Now there's a lot more to programming than designing and writing code. There's testing. There's software architecture. There's management. There's all the quite difficult stuff involved with working with *other programmers* and people who aren't programmers. All those things are important and if you don't get them right you fail. But creative problem transformation is the reason to become a programmer; the thing that makes it fun. The rest of that stuff you put up with to get that shot of smug satisfaction you get when you're proved right.
And what pleases it is what keeps it in power. In general projects that don't generate cash for contributors in the near term don't qualify. So you can start a fighter plane project that will take over a decade to produce anything usable, but that's because it generates huge cash flows right from the get-go.
Here's output I generated with one that is trained on Carl Sagan's Cosmos:
The universe is finite but unbounded. The red shift of the cosmos in terms of the speed of light is generated from the same laws underlying nature.
There are many different ways in which stars are born in our universe; in all directions that we know of light is generated then it takes millions of years until its density becomes enriched in heavy elements. Virtually everything else in our universe has been sculpted by change: the earth, the sun, and the moon and the stars.
Some think that when we go to the very edge of the cosmos, there will be no brains quite like ours. Mutation and natural selection are basically random processes sparked in our genes and so fast that there must be 28,000 times more information content in our human species as the earth has mechanisms to form new knowledge. Our individual dots of information content, like our universe, have survived slow stages of human history ; such changes can clearly be determined from everyday experience.
I wouldn't say that the creation of a currency is useless, if it fill some sort of need it will probably will metaphorically feed mouths. The problem with Bitcoin is that it sucks as money. Sure if you're trading in BitCoin as an *asset* and your timing works out you'll make a killing, but the volatility of Bitcoin makes it unattractive to set a price for goods denominated in Bitcoin. If the price swings high nobody will buy. If it swings low then you could be selling at a loss.
Sure, there are vehicles that exist today that fifty years ago would have had to been written of as sheer fantasy -- stealth aircraft for example. And a plausible argument could be made that a country possessing a secret hypersonic vehicle might want to make overflights of US territory to determine whether the US is capable of responding to such a thing.
But as easy as it is to gin up reasonable justification for a program like this, the details of this particular program carry a considerable whiff of crackpottery. And crony capitalism too.
The difference is that the US is a democracy and it's very, very hard to get any kind of public support for anything that won't make anyone money until after most of the people currently in office will probably be out of office.
Despite democracy's many advantages, it doesn't mean that a one-party autocracy run by apparachniks with long term career security can't have its own advantages.
Storage absolutely is viable, or at least on the cusp of being so. The the economics of storing renewable energy is different from the economics of storing non-renewable energy. Even if you lost 90% of the solar energy you tried to store, it's energy you got for free. As long as the cost of conversion and storage is low enough, waste isn't critical. That wouldn't be true of energy you generate from stuff you have to buy, like oil.
I read a few years ago about a group experimenting with photovoltaic housepaint. Its conversion rate was abysmal, but if they could get the price down low enough it wouldn't matter because you've got to paint the house anyway.
I've read the original WaPo report on this *carefully*, and at present the effect is limited to budgetary documents that are being sent to Congress. It does not affect working scientists or epidemiologists... yet. So my interpretation is that while we should expect policy and research priorities to change, the ban on the seven dirty words at the CDC isn't evidence of that. At present it seems to be more about how the agency presents itself to Congress.
It's interesting that "evidence-based" and "science-based" should be thrown into the ban-bin with "fetus" and "transgender" as terms that are likely to cause an unfavorable Congressional reaction.
One of the great accomplishments of the developers of game theory is that the moved us beyond strategy that was based on assuming your opponent would do something stupid.
Actually, weather satellites alone probably pay for the entire space program many times over. They are probably the single best investment we've ever made in anything, on a dollars returned (or at least saved) per dollar invested basis, to say nothing of lives.
When the hurricane of 38 made landfall at Long Island New York at 2PM, people were out and about their business because they didn't know it was coming. In contrast people knew Hurricane Sandy was coming some five days in advance. Imagine what it woudl have been like if nobody had known it was coming.
I suspect it's likely that GPS, if you could actually quantify all the public benefits, might also end up being valuable enough to justify the entire space program. People just don't think of it as a space-based service; they think of it as a magic box.
Well, as for WW2 veterans, they had all the same problems Vietnam veterans did. They just weren't homeless because of government welfare programs. I know because I grew up in the 60s, a mere 20 years after WW2, and I often visited my friends' crazy old unemployed uncles living in subsidized housing who'd show us their war tropies -- enemy uniform caps, even samurai swords.
The worst off would have been institutionalized, but in the 60s and 70s there was an anti-psychiatry movement, centered around something called the Laing-Szaz hypothesis: "mental illness" doesn't exist; what we call mental illness is just a reaction to the irrationality of society. This united people on the left in the right behind deinstitutionalization: the left because they thought they were liberating mental patients, the right because they didn't want to pay for treatment. Moderates wanted to move the more functional of the patients out of the worst institutions to receive care in the community. That care never materialized -- not on the scale needed -- because of cost and NIMBY opposition.
The result was in the 70s a lot of people who had been institutionalized ended up on the streets, and suddenly the mentally ill became a visible problem. It wasn't until years later I understood the policies which produced this, but at the time I remember walking down the street and marveling at the number of "bums" there suddenly were.
Uh, the article says that they located Russians buying three ads totaling about a dollar.
Because that's all they would have done. They'd have bought just those three ads then they'd have said to themselves, "Job done!". That's how government foreign agencies roll: they're all about individual initiative, not doing things in large, centralized, and bureaucratic ways.
All kidding aside, finding that first piece of evidence of an intelligence agency psy-ops effort is like seeing that first cockroach in your kitchen. Sure you step on it, but you don't assume you've got them all; you always assume there's more. Likewise once you've seen evidence that a government with substantial intelligence capabilities has done *anything* to covertly sway an election, you've got to assume they've at least made a credible effort.
Now it's possible that this is purely a social media operation, consisting of media buys and troll farms and the like -- but even so they must have done more than buy three ads. And we can't assume that doesn't extend to recruiting and directing local stooges, because *that's* how they roll, at least traditionally. Us too, for that matter. But even if we think it's OK for us to meddle in foreign elections, that doesn't make the the people on our payroll over there loyal to their country.
It's nice to be able to keep up with people you knew from college. But that doesn't mean I want to share in everything that goes through their heads. Pictures of and updates on their kids? Sure. Pictures of food at the restaurant they're at? Er... Their predictable reactions to political news? No thank you.
First of all, you have to realize not everyone looks up at the sky; it's not like it was a thousand years ago, most modern city dwellers never give it a second glance. Second, with light pollution many wouldn't have much to see if they did.
But I have seen things. Mysterious things. Things that appear to be impossible to explain as anything other than a fleet of alien spacecraft with propulsion.... unless you know a little astronomy.
As most people who've gone out to view a meteor shower know, even with a supposedly "major" meteor shower, if you didn't know it was happening you probably wouldn't even notice. Given the levels of light pollution most of us live with you're lucky if you see one or two brief (maybe 200 msec) flashes every ten minutes.
But sometimes you're out in a place with a dark sky, and you just luck out; you get a meteor shower that really lives up to the name: shower. I mean more meteors than you can count in a minute. And when you find yourself with a good sample like that, you see a lot of things that look impossible for a falling rock. For example you can see a light that descends, hovers in place, and then zooms upward. This is a meteor that is actually falling all the time, but because you can't perceive the horizontal component of its velocity until it is overhead looks like it is falling slowly or hovering. When it passes "up" overhead it is still falling because then you can't perceive the vertical component of velocity.
People unfamiliar with the sky frequently react to ordinary stuff that is unfamiliar to them with superstitious awe. Here's an example of a news crew mistaking the planet Jupiter for a spacecraft. Just to explain the circumstances, earlier that day a large number of mylar balloons had been accidentally released in New Jersey. They floated east over Manhattan and generated lots of reports as the sun set in the west. The news crew got there too late to photograph that, but the camerman did manage to capture Jupiter being "trailed" by its four Galilean moons.
It's easy for someone like me who's seen that in a telescope hundreds of times to laugh at these people, but how many New Yorkers could identify Jupiter, even though it's one of the few astronomical bodies visible through the light pollution there? Normal people don't spend their time gazing up at the sky, and so when their attention is brought there they're naturally surprised.
But it's quite plausible for someone who assembles cars to make a career shift into doing body work. That would be a much more apt analogy. Back in the 70s, when I first learned to program, things were quite a bit different than they are today. You didn't have to know nearly so much.
The volume of knowledge in the field has grown; even for relatively low-level jobs. Imagine: most programs back then were very small, and largely consisted of reading an input stream like a tape file and producing either another data stream, a simple report, or even just a few numbers. Since almost no computers were networked, and almost nobody had any reason to worry about security. Even database management systems were rare, so for the most part your program didn't interact with other software other than a handful of system calls and some very small by modern standards libraries. Frameworks -- which take up vast amounts of a modern programmer's mental landscape -- were unheard of.
By comparison even a fairly low-level job doing front end programming today requires the grasp of a number of subtle architectural, performance, and security issues (e.g. single origin policy). Things I guess are better today, and we're certainly more productive, but we spend so much of our time dealing with the choices, mistakes, and bad intentions of other people than we did back in the day.
To answer your question, they were typing the text of programs in languages like COBOL, which weren't quite the machine-oriented gibberish you use to program a calculator. A program might look like this: Begin.
SORT WorkFile ON ASCENDING KEY WStudentName
INPUT PROCEDURE IS GetMaleStudents
GIVING MaleStudentFile.
STOP RUN.
...
If you spent all day every day for a couple of months you'd have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the syntax rules of the language; and if you were of the right mentality it wouldn't be that hard to turn you into a programmer.
Compare the above to a calculator listing: 001- 42,21,11 f LBL A 002- 43 8 g RAD 003- 42 3 f !RAD 004- 44.3 STO.3 005- 33 R# 006- 44.1 STO.1 007- 33 R# 008- 44.0 STO.0 009- 33 R# 010- 44.2 STO.2
Slashdot Mirror
If you are making a scientific report and are saying "science based," you're doing it wrong.
You seem to have no idea why the term is needed. It is needed because science isn't the only guide people have to behavior. It's not even the only legitimate guide. There's personal experience. There's tradition. There's cultural norms.
You can easily see this in how medical practices vary from country to country; culture plays a huge part. In France wine is sometimes prescribed by doctors. Is there any point? In Germany physicians often prescribe traditional herbal medicines alongside regular drugs. Do any of those treatments help or hurt? In the US physicians order more tests much more aggressively than doctors in other parts of the world. Does that do any good?
You need evidence-based approaches to answer those questions. While uniformly across western medicine there is an ideology of science-based treatment, some of it is more "science-y" than "science-based". By which I mean many practices are emotionally impressive rather than justified by their outcomes (e.g. more tests, robotic surgery in some cases).
Which is just another way of saying they represent opinions.
In a word, yes. In a democracy, public opinion doesn't change facts, but it sure as hell changes policy.
The contempt people have for politicians is both self-serving and ultimately self-defeating. The real problem is *us*. If we were better people, we'd have better politicians. That's the single biggest drawback to democracy: voters suck.
Rejecting the neutral "fetus" may be intended to force the use of a more loaded term, e.g. "unborn baby".
"Science-based" means something different than science when used as an adjective. Consider:
(1) Science policy -- principles which govern your support of science;
vs.
(2) Science-based policy -- positions on *anything* which are chosen because of scientific evidence.
An example of science policy would be favoring fundamental over applied research -- as did the Reagan administration. They did this for ideological reasons (which doesn't make the reasons *bad*): they thought the government shouldn't do anything the private sector might be interested in doing. An example of science-based policy would be to not underwrite flood insurance that allows rebuilding in areas threatened by floodplain expansion. It's not that science says you should or shouldn't pay to have the same house rebuilt over and over again; it just tells you that if you don't want to do that you have to draw lines somewhere.
Weighing politics as well as evidence in policy is nothing new. As Otto von Bismarck remarked, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best”. Evidence leads you to what the best policy would be; community standards limit what you can actually achieve.
What's unusual about the present is that we live in an age which uniquely devalues expertise. Fifty years ago expertise was arguably fetishized; but today people view it as just another opinion. And never before have we been so able to wrap ourselves in such an impervious blanket of social reinforcement when it comes to our opinions.
This makes "evidence" threatening, whether it bears on vaccines causing autism or anthropogenic climate change -- this is *not* an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. Someone claiming to have "evidence" claims a privileged position from which he can contradict what you "know" to be true.
Most people seem to be jumping to conclusions on this story, fitting it into what they "know" about Trump -- and they may be right. But sticking more closely to the facts, what we have here is a contemporary list of political dirty words. It's obvious why "fetus", "entitlement", "diversity" and "transgender" are on the list, but what's novel is that "science" and "evidence" are also seen as controversial.
There is of course writing code which embodies the solution to a particular problem in a methodical and systematic manner. But before that, comes what for me is the interesting part: transforming a problem I don't know how to solve into a set of problems that I know how to solve. That's what determines if you can be any good at it. Any reasonably disciplined and literate person can be trained to write code that solves a particular problem, but can you find a problem or problems that embody what needs to be done? That's the creative part.
Now there's a lot more to programming than designing and writing code. There's testing. There's software architecture. There's management. There's all the quite difficult stuff involved with working with *other programmers* and people who aren't programmers. All those things are important and if you don't get them right you fail. But creative problem transformation is the reason to become a programmer; the thing that makes it fun. The rest of that stuff you put up with to get that shot of smug satisfaction you get when you're proved right.
And what pleases it is what keeps it in power. In general projects that don't generate cash for contributors in the near term don't qualify. So you can start a fighter plane project that will take over a decade to produce anything usable, but that's because it generates huge cash flows right from the get-go.
Here's output I generated with one that is trained on Carl Sagan's Cosmos:
The universe is finite but unbounded. The red shift of the cosmos in terms of the speed of light is generated from the same laws underlying nature.
There are many different ways in which stars are born in our universe; in all directions that we know of light is generated then it takes millions of years until its density becomes enriched in heavy elements. Virtually everything else in our universe has been sculpted by change: the earth, the sun, and the moon and the stars.
Some think that when we go to the very edge of the cosmos, there will be no brains quite like ours. Mutation and natural selection are basically random processes sparked in our genes and so fast that there must be 28,000 times more information content in our human species as the earth has mechanisms to form new knowledge. Our individual dots of information content, like our universe, have survived slow stages of human history ; such changes can clearly be determined from everyday experience.
I wouldn't say that the creation of a currency is useless, if it fill some sort of need it will probably will metaphorically feed mouths. The problem with Bitcoin is that it sucks as money. Sure if you're trading in BitCoin as an *asset* and your timing works out you'll make a killing, but the volatility of Bitcoin makes it unattractive to set a price for goods denominated in Bitcoin. If the price swings high nobody will buy. If it swings low then you could be selling at a loss.
Sure, there are vehicles that exist today that fifty years ago would have had to been written of as sheer fantasy -- stealth aircraft for example. And a plausible argument could be made that a country possessing a secret hypersonic vehicle might want to make overflights of US territory to determine whether the US is capable of responding to such a thing.
But as easy as it is to gin up reasonable justification for a program like this, the details of this particular program carry a considerable whiff of crackpottery. And crony capitalism too.
The difference is that the US is a democracy and it's very, very hard to get any kind of public support for anything that won't make anyone money until after most of the people currently in office will probably be out of office.
Despite democracy's many advantages, it doesn't mean that a one-party autocracy run by apparachniks with long term career security can't have its own advantages.
Storage absolutely is viable, or at least on the cusp of being so. The the economics of storing renewable energy is different from the economics of storing non-renewable energy. Even if you lost 90% of the solar energy you tried to store, it's energy you got for free. As long as the cost of conversion and storage is low enough, waste isn't critical. That wouldn't be true of energy you generate from stuff you have to buy, like oil.
I read a few years ago about a group experimenting with photovoltaic housepaint. Its conversion rate was abysmal, but if they could get the price down low enough it wouldn't matter because you've got to paint the house anyway.
I've read the original WaPo report on this *carefully*, and at present the effect is limited to budgetary documents that are being sent to Congress. It does not affect working scientists or epidemiologists... yet. So my interpretation is that while we should expect policy and research priorities to change, the ban on the seven dirty words at the CDC isn't evidence of that. At present it seems to be more about how the agency presents itself to Congress.
It's interesting that "evidence-based" and "science-based" should be thrown into the ban-bin with "fetus" and "transgender" as terms that are likely to cause an unfavorable Congressional reaction.
One of the great accomplishments of the developers of game theory is that the moved us beyond strategy that was based on assuming your opponent would do something stupid.
Why don't we call them "smart microphones"?
Actually, weather satellites alone probably pay for the entire space program many times over. They are probably the single best investment we've ever made in anything, on a dollars returned (or at least saved) per dollar invested basis, to say nothing of lives.
When the hurricane of 38 made landfall at Long Island New York at 2PM, people were out and about their business because they didn't know it was coming. In contrast people knew Hurricane Sandy was coming some five days in advance. Imagine what it woudl have been like if nobody had known it was coming.
I suspect it's likely that GPS, if you could actually quantify all the public benefits, might also end up being valuable enough to justify the entire space program. People just don't think of it as a space-based service; they think of it as a magic box.
Well, as for WW2 veterans, they had all the same problems Vietnam veterans did. They just weren't homeless because of government welfare programs. I know because I grew up in the 60s, a mere 20 years after WW2, and I often visited my friends' crazy old unemployed uncles living in subsidized housing who'd show us their war tropies -- enemy uniform caps, even samurai swords.
The worst off would have been institutionalized, but in the 60s and 70s there was an anti-psychiatry movement, centered around something called the Laing-Szaz hypothesis: "mental illness" doesn't exist; what we call mental illness is just a reaction to the irrationality of society. This united people on the left in the right behind deinstitutionalization: the left because they thought they were liberating mental patients, the right because they didn't want to pay for treatment. Moderates wanted to move the more functional of the patients out of the worst institutions to receive care in the community. That care never materialized -- not on the scale needed -- because of cost and NIMBY opposition.
The result was in the 70s a lot of people who had been institutionalized ended up on the streets, and suddenly the mentally ill became a visible problem. It wasn't until years later I understood the policies which produced this, but at the time I remember walking down the street and marveling at the number of "bums" there suddenly were.
Uh, the article says that they located Russians buying three ads totaling about a dollar.
Because that's all they would have done. They'd have bought just those three ads then they'd have said to themselves, "Job done!". That's how government foreign agencies roll: they're all about individual initiative, not doing things in large, centralized, and bureaucratic ways.
All kidding aside, finding that first piece of evidence of an intelligence agency psy-ops effort is like seeing that first cockroach in your kitchen. Sure you step on it, but you don't assume you've got them all; you always assume there's more. Likewise once you've seen evidence that a government with substantial intelligence capabilities has done *anything* to covertly sway an election, you've got to assume they've at least made a credible effort.
Now it's possible that this is purely a social media operation, consisting of media buys and troll farms and the like -- but even so they must have done more than buy three ads. And we can't assume that doesn't extend to recruiting and directing local stooges, because *that's* how they roll, at least traditionally. Us too, for that matter. But even if we think it's OK for us to meddle in foreign elections, that doesn't make the the people on our payroll over there loyal to their country.
It's nice to be able to keep up with people you knew from college. But that doesn't mean I want to share in everything that goes through their heads. Pictures of and updates on their kids? Sure. Pictures of food at the restaurant they're at? Er... Their predictable reactions to political news? No thank you.
First of all, you have to realize not everyone looks up at the sky; it's not like it was a thousand years ago, most modern city dwellers never give it a second glance. Second, with light pollution many wouldn't have much to see if they did.
But I have seen things. Mysterious things. Things that appear to be impossible to explain as anything other than a fleet of alien spacecraft with propulsion .... unless you know a little astronomy.
As most people who've gone out to view a meteor shower know, even with a supposedly "major" meteor shower, if you didn't know it was happening you probably wouldn't even notice. Given the levels of light pollution most of us live with you're lucky if you see one or two brief (maybe 200 msec) flashes every ten minutes.
But sometimes you're out in a place with a dark sky, and you just luck out; you get a meteor shower that really lives up to the name: shower. I mean more meteors than you can count in a minute. And when you find yourself with a good sample like that, you see a lot of things that look impossible for a falling rock. For example you can see a light that descends, hovers in place, and then zooms upward. This is a meteor that is actually falling all the time, but because you can't perceive the horizontal component of its velocity until it is overhead looks like it is falling slowly or hovering. When it passes "up" overhead it is still falling because then you can't perceive the vertical component of velocity.
People unfamiliar with the sky frequently react to ordinary stuff that is unfamiliar to them with superstitious awe. Here's an example of a news crew mistaking the planet Jupiter for a spacecraft. Just to explain the circumstances, earlier that day a large number of mylar balloons had been accidentally released in New Jersey. They floated east over Manhattan and generated lots of reports as the sun set in the west. The news crew got there too late to photograph that, but the camerman did manage to capture Jupiter being "trailed" by its four Galilean moons.
It's easy for someone like me who's seen that in a telescope hundreds of times to laugh at these people, but how many New Yorkers could identify Jupiter, even though it's one of the few astronomical bodies visible through the light pollution there? Normal people don't spend their time gazing up at the sky, and so when their attention is brought there they're naturally surprised.
But it's quite plausible for someone who assembles cars to make a career shift into doing body work. That would be a much more apt analogy. Back in the 70s, when I first learned to program, things were quite a bit different than they are today. You didn't have to know nearly so much.
The volume of knowledge in the field has grown; even for relatively low-level jobs. Imagine: most programs back then were very small, and largely consisted of reading an input stream like a tape file and producing either another data stream, a simple report, or even just a few numbers. Since almost no computers were networked, and almost nobody had any reason to worry about security. Even database management systems were rare, so for the most part your program didn't interact with other software other than a handful of system calls and some very small by modern standards libraries. Frameworks -- which take up vast amounts of a modern programmer's mental landscape -- were unheard of.
By comparison even a fairly low-level job doing front end programming today requires the grasp of a number of subtle architectural, performance, and security issues (e.g. single origin policy). Things I guess are better today, and we're certainly more productive, but we spend so much of our time dealing with the choices, mistakes, and bad intentions of other people than we did back in the day.
Going into IT management.
To answer your question, they were typing the text of programs in languages like COBOL, which weren't quite the machine-oriented gibberish you use to program a calculator. A program might look like this:
Begin.
SORT WorkFile ON ASCENDING KEY WStudentName
INPUT PROCEDURE IS GetMaleStudents
GIVING MaleStudentFile.
STOP RUN.
...
If you spent all day every day for a couple of months you'd have a pretty good intuitive grasp of the syntax rules of the language; and if you were of the right mentality it wouldn't be that hard to turn you into a programmer.
Compare the above to a calculator listing:
.3 STO .3 .1 STO .1 .0 STO .0 .2 STO .2
001- 42,21,11 f LBL A
002- 43 8 g RAD
003- 42 3 f !RAD
004- 44
005- 33 R#
006- 44
007- 33 R#
008- 44
009- 33 R#
010- 44
...
How many of the have jobs *copying programs* from handwritten forms into machine readable form?
None. That's why this particular career path doesn't exist any longer.