Here’s how I understand this post: When we “understand” parts of a skill/framework/encoding X, we can translate it into our own mental model U, then translate anything U captures into any other form Y. Ideally we would just communicate U. But it’s more precise and useful to describe Y than to describe U, which may be nebulous from the inside or filled with idiosyncracies, and it’s even worse to give up and just say “I understand X”.
I think this is a good insight, but it seems less useful in the following cases:
Most people understand X the same way up to idiosyncracies of U, so they can do the same thing with the knowledge, and it gives enough information to say they understand X. The typical mind fallacy can persist when people have similar commonly observed abilities, but vastly different subjective experiences.
The skill X is made of abstract skills that combine into a whole and don’t correspond to translating to different Y. Take X = abstract problem solving. Subskills include factoring into subproblems, gaining intuition, solving subproblems, and combining subproblem solutions into a whole. One could technically say that a person who is good at problem-factoring is good at translating problems into lists of smaller problems, but this doesn’t seem meaningful.
Here’s how I understand this post: When we “understand” parts of a skill/framework/encoding X, we can translate it into our own mental model U, then translate anything U captures into any other form Y. Ideally we would just communicate U. But it’s more precise and useful to describe Y than to describe U, which may be nebulous from the inside or filled with idiosyncracies, and it’s even worse to give up and just say “I understand X”.
I think this is a good insight, but it seems less useful in the following cases:
Most people understand X the same way up to idiosyncracies of U, so they can do the same thing with the knowledge, and it gives enough information to say they understand X. The typical mind fallacy can persist when people have similar commonly observed abilities, but vastly different subjective experiences.
The skill X is made of abstract skills that combine into a whole and don’t correspond to translating to different Y. Take X = abstract problem solving. Subskills include factoring into subproblems, gaining intuition, solving subproblems, and combining subproblem solutions into a whole. One could technically say that a person who is good at problem-factoring is good at translating problems into lists of smaller problems, but this doesn’t seem meaningful.