Thanks for your help. It’s more… well, look: We at LessWrong are very familiar with the idea that if you really want to pin some hypothesis down, there’s a certain minimum amount of work you have to do. You can’t just magically jump there without certain bits of information, and processing the bits together in the right way. And most of the work goes into just locating the general area of the correct hypothesis.
Okay, that’s obvious. We get that. The big thing DI does (in the stimulus-locus analysis) is turn that sideways and apply it to teaching.
There are certain bits of information without which the naive student can not just magically figure out what we’re trying to communicate, so we need to sequence the introduction of those bits of information, make each logically unambiguous, and prompt the proper processing of the bits together in a manageable context that lets us ensure each step has gotten across properly before moving on to the next bit. The teaching communication should be designed to at least strongly imply the correct conclusion as early as possible.
Thank you, I’m glad to know I’m at least making some progress (I sweated over my first attempt for ages and it ended up terrible, but then just a little time of feedback and back and forth discussion seems to really be tightening up my understanding of what I need to communicate and how! That’s probably a highly generalizable principle :P - actually reminds me of some “just make an attempt already if failure is low cost!” post I saw some months back in main… can’t find it right now, but maybe you remember the one I mean. [Edit: it was “Just Try It”)
Anyway, is this also helpful? (Even ‘unutterably’ so? :P)
Thanks for your help. It’s more… well, look: We at LessWrong are very familiar with the idea that if you really want to pin some hypothesis down, there’s a certain minimum amount of work you have to do. You can’t just magically jump there without certain bits of information, and processing the bits together in the right way. And most of the work goes into just locating the general area of the correct hypothesis.
Okay, that’s obvious. We get that. The big thing DI does (in the stimulus-locus analysis) is turn that sideways and apply it to teaching.
There are certain bits of information without which the naive student can not just magically figure out what we’re trying to communicate, so we need to sequence the introduction of those bits of information, make each logically unambiguous, and prompt the proper processing of the bits together in a manageable context that lets us ensure each step has gotten across properly before moving on to the next bit. The teaching communication should be designed to at least strongly imply the correct conclusion as early as possible.
That make any sense?
Aha!
This is a very useful and relevant explanation, which would have been unutterably more useful to read in the article itself.
Thank you, I’m glad to know I’m at least making some progress (I sweated over my first attempt for ages and it ended up terrible, but then just a little time of feedback and back and forth discussion seems to really be tightening up my understanding of what I need to communicate and how! That’s probably a highly generalizable principle :P - actually reminds me of some “just make an attempt already if failure is low cost!” post I saw some months back in main… can’t find it right now, but maybe you remember the one I mean. [Edit: it was “Just Try It”)
Anyway, is this also helpful? (Even ‘unutterably’ so? :P)