However, the trained behavior of most people when facing a puzzle is to look at it for a few seconds and then throw the first good-sounding solution you can think of.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Either they’ll get a right answer despite throwing the first possible solution at it, or they’ll widely miss the mark, in which case they might actually realize that they’ve learned something by the time that the right answer is demonstrated.
You have a point. My (subconscious) priors on that end are skewed towards “Never, ever throw out solutions before you’ve laid things out properly” because of lots and lots of little personal experiences with complete failure modes due to stopping with the first solution I found.
“Puzzle” is good because it suggests that there is a solution, whereas some “problems” don’t have solutions, because they are simply confused.
However, the trained behavior of most people when facing a puzzle is to look at it for a few seconds and then throw the first good-sounding solution you can think of.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Either they’ll get a right answer despite throwing the first possible solution at it, or they’ll widely miss the mark, in which case they might actually realize that they’ve learned something by the time that the right answer is demonstrated.
You have a point. My (subconscious) priors on that end are skewed towards “Never, ever throw out solutions before you’ve laid things out properly” because of lots and lots of little personal experiences with complete failure modes due to stopping with the first solution I found.