Anchoring the new set of intuitions with a succinct anchor phrase or image that ideally has conceptual hooks into the relevant problem domains so that the concept automatically gets triggered in the situations in which it is useful
Strongly agreed, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how valuable this approach is. I think having a clear label to important intuitions is one of the really valuable things I’ve gotten from the rationalist community. When writing blog posts, I try fairly hard to give clear labels to the key ideas and to put them in bold.
Creating a toy example of the core concept that has moving parts the student can then move themselves to see how other parts move (conceptually)
I’d be curious to see any examples of this you have in mind? I’m super excited about this as a form of learning, but struggle to imagine a specific example for anything I’ve tried teaching. This seems better suited to tutoring 1 on 1 than to larger groups/talks, I think?
Andy Grove’s classic book High Output Management starts with the example of a diner that has to produce breakfasts with cooked eggs, and keeps referring to it to teach management concepts.
Minute Physics introduces a “Spacetime Globe” to visualize spacetime (the way a globe visualizes the Earth’s surface) and refers to it often starting at 3:25 in this video: https://youtu.be/1rLWVZVWfdY
It’s more scalable with remote learning where each student can access an animation with sliders that they can move themselves. This is extremely valuable for helping math concepts click IME. The intuitions get tuned by directly seeing how some output varies with an input. Otherwise there is manually going through several dimensions, what happens if we vary this vs if we vary that etc.
Thanks!
Strongly agreed, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how valuable this approach is. I think having a clear label to important intuitions is one of the really valuable things I’ve gotten from the rationalist community. When writing blog posts, I try fairly hard to give clear labels to the key ideas and to put them in bold.
I’d be curious to see any examples of this you have in mind? I’m super excited about this as a form of learning, but struggle to imagine a specific example for anything I’ve tried teaching. This seems better suited to tutoring 1 on 1 than to larger groups/talks, I think?
Re examples of toy examples with moving parts:
Andy Grove’s classic book High Output Management starts with the example of a diner that has to produce breakfasts with cooked eggs, and keeps referring to it to teach management concepts.
Minute Physics introduces a “Spacetime Globe” to visualize spacetime (the way a globe visualizes the Earth’s surface) and refers to it often starting at 3:25 in this video: https://youtu.be/1rLWVZVWfdY
It’s more scalable with remote learning where each student can access an animation with sliders that they can move themselves. This is extremely valuable for helping math concepts click IME. The intuitions get tuned by directly seeing how some output varies with an input. Otherwise there is manually going through several dimensions, what happens if we vary this vs if we vary that etc.