Given our present teaching technology, this skill seems transmissible from master to apprentice, but not yet replicable by exercises.
Transmission may be a lot of how specificity has to be taught, since it’s about comparing what’s in your mind that you’re trying to communicate to what’s actually being received by someone else’s mind, and the lesson is clearer if it’s something you actually want to communicate—that is, not an exercise.
Computer programming has lots of replicable tasks, and with any kind of meaningful feedback it’s quite good at “be precise,” which is the abstract version of “be specific.”
That doesn’t seem like the kind of precision most people have trouble with, though teaching it explicitly might help people who have trouble getting started on programming.
Do you think knowing how to program helps people be sufficiently explicit about other subjects?
Transmission may be a lot of how specificity has to be taught, since it’s about comparing what’s in your mind that you’re trying to communicate to what’s actually being received by someone else’s mind, and the lesson is clearer if it’s something you actually want to communicate—that is, not an exercise.
Computer programming has lots of replicable tasks, and with any kind of meaningful feedback it’s quite good at “be precise,” which is the abstract version of “be specific.”
That doesn’t seem like the kind of precision most people have trouble with, though teaching it explicitly might help people who have trouble getting started on programming.
Do you think knowing how to program helps people be sufficiently explicit about other subjects?
Probably not, because of compartmentalization.
I wonder, though, if there is some sort of similar activity that:
Doesn’t require expert instructors (some feedback is obvious or automatic)
Deals with less mathematical and more “real world” problems
Builds skills that transfer well to other domains.
Management, which is at times remarkably similar to the “malicious idiot” game...