I have experienced this problem before—the teacher assumes you have prior knowledge that you just do not have, and all of what he says afterwards assumes you’ve made the logical leap. I wonder to what extent thoughtful people will reconstruct the gaps in their knowledge assuming the end conclusion is correct and working backwards to what they know in order to give themselves a useful (but possibly incorrect) bridge from B to A. For example, I recently heard a horrible biochem lecture about using various types of protein sequence and domain homology to predict function and cellular localization. Now, the idea that homology could be used to partially predict these things just seemed logical, and I think my brain just ran with the idea and thought about how I would go about using the technique, and placed everything he said piece-wise into that schema. When I actually started to question specifics at the end of the lecture, it became clear that I didn’t understand anything the man was saying at all outside of the words “homology” and “prediction”, and I had just filled in what seemed logical to me. How dangerous is it to try to “catch up” when people take huge inferential leaps?
I have experienced this problem before—the teacher assumes you have prior knowledge that you just do not have, and all of what he says afterwards assumes you’ve made the logical leap. I wonder to what extent thoughtful people will reconstruct the gaps in their knowledge assuming the end conclusion is correct and working backwards to what they know in order to give themselves a useful (but possibly incorrect) bridge from B to A. For example, I recently heard a horrible biochem lecture about using various types of protein sequence and domain homology to predict function and cellular localization. Now, the idea that homology could be used to partially predict these things just seemed logical, and I think my brain just ran with the idea and thought about how I would go about using the technique, and placed everything he said piece-wise into that schema. When I actually started to question specifics at the end of the lecture, it became clear that I didn’t understand anything the man was saying at all outside of the words “homology” and “prediction”, and I had just filled in what seemed logical to me. How dangerous is it to try to “catch up” when people take huge inferential leaps?