It still feels as if, once we toss that phrase out the window, we need something to take its place: words are not universally an effective method of instruction, practice clearly plays a vital part in learning (why?), and the hypothesis that a learner reconstructs knowledge rather than being the recipient of a “transfer” in a literal sense strikes me as facially plausible given the sum of my learning experiences.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t see how it contradicts my position either. The evidence you give against words being effective is that, basically, they don’t fully constrain what the other person is being told to do, so they can always mess up in unpredictable ways. That’s true, but it just shows how you need to understand the listener’s epistemic state to know which insights they lack that would allow them to bridge the gap
People do get this wrong, and end up giving “let them eat cake” advice—advice that, if it were useful, the problem would have been solved. But at the same time, a good understanding of where they are can lead to remarkably informative advice. (I’ve noticed Roko and HughRistik are excellent at this when it comes to human sociality, while some are stuck in “let them eat cake” land.)
Perhaps an adult can comprehend “as long as you keep moving, you won’t tip over”, but I have a strong intuition it wouldn’t go over very well with kids, depending on age and dispositions.
Well, in my case, once it clicked for me, my thought was, “Oh, so if you just keep moving, you won’t tip over, it’s only when you stop or slow down that you tip—why didn’t he just tell me that?”
It’s all too easy to overgeneralize from a sparse set of examples and obtain a simple, elegant, convincing, but false theory of learning. I hope your article doesn’t fall into that trap. :)
Well, if it were a sparse set I wouldn’t be so confident. I have a frustratingly long history of people telling me something can’t be explained or is really hard to explain, followed by me explaining it to newbies with relative ease. And of cases where someone appeals to their inarticulable personal experience for justification, when really it was an articulable hidden assumption they could have found with a little effort.
Anyone is welcome to PM me for an advance draft of the article if they’re interested in giving feedback.
And of cases where someone appeals to their inarticulable personal experience for justification, when really it was an articulable hidden assumption they could have found with a little effort.
leaves me wondering if you underestimate how much effort it takes to notice and express how to do things which are usually non-verbal.
I don’t understand. The part you quoted isn’t about expressing how to do non-verbal things; it’s about people who say, “when you get to be my age, you’ll agree, [and no I can’t explain what experiences you have as you approach my age that will cause you to agree because that would require a claim regarding how to interpret the experience which you have a chance of refuting]”
What does that have to do with the effort need to express how to do non-verbal things?
Excuse me—I wasn’t reading carefully enough to notice that you’d shifted from claims that it was too hard to explain non-verbal skills to claims that it was too hard to explain the lessons of experience.
Okay. Well, then, assuming your remark was a reply to a different part of my comment, my answer is that yes, it may be hard, but for most people, I’m not convinced they even tried.
Am I interpreting you correctly that you are not denying that some skills can only be learned by practicing the skill (rather than by reading about or observing the skill) but are saying that verbal or written instruction is just as effective as an aid to practice as demonstration if done well?
I’m still a bit skeptical about this claim. When I was learning to snowboard for example it was clear that some instructors were better able to verbalize certain key information (keep your weight on your front foot, turn your body first and let the board follow rather than trying to turn the board, etc.) but I don’t think the verbal instructions would have been nearly as effective if they were not accompanied by physical demonstrations.
It’s possible that a sufficiently good instructor could communicate just as effectively through purely verbal instruction but I’m not sure such an instructor exists. The fact that this is a rare skill also seems relevant even if it is possible—there are many more instructors who can be effective if they are allowed to combine verbal instruction with physical demonstrations.
Good points, but keep in mind snowboarding instructors aren’t optimizing the same thing that a rationalist (in their capacity as a rationalist) is optimizing. If you just want to make money, quickly, and churn out good snowboarders, then use the best tools available to you—you have no reason to convert the instruction into words where you don’t have to.
But if you’re approaching this as a rationalist, who wants to open the black box and understand why certain things work, then it is a tremendously useful exercise to try to verbalize it, and identify the most important things people need to know—knowledge that can allow them to leapfrog a few steps in learning, even and especially if they can’t reach the Holy Grail of full transmission of the understanding.
And I’d say (despite the first paragraph in this comment) that it’s a good thing to do anyway. I suspect that people’s inability to explain things stems in large part from a lack of trying—specifically, a lack of trying to understand what mental processes are going on in side of them that allows a skill to work like it does. They fail to imagine what it is like not to have this skill and assume certain things are easy or obvious which really aren’t.
To more directly answer your question, yes, I think verbal instruction, if it understands the epistemic state of the student, can replace a lot of what normally takes practice to learn. There are things you can say that get someone in just the right mindset to bypass a huge number of errors that are normally learned hands-on.
My main point, though, is that people severely overestimate the extent of their knowledge which can’t be articulated, because the incentives for such a self-assessment are very high. Most people would do well to avoid appeals to tacit knowledge, an instead introspect on their knowledge so as to gain a deeper understanding of how it works, labeling knowledge as “tacit” only as a last resort.
It’s possible that a sufficiently good instructor could communicate just as effectively through purely verbal instruction but I’m not sure such an instructor exists.
I would suspect this has more to do with the skill of the student in translating verbal descriptions into motions. You can perfectly understand a series of motions to be executed under various conditions, without having the motor skill to assess the conditions and execute them perfectly in real-time.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t see how it contradicts my position either. The evidence you give against words being effective is that, basically, they don’t fully constrain what the other person is being told to do, so they can always mess up in unpredictable ways. That’s true, but it just shows how you need to understand the listener’s epistemic state to know which insights they lack that would allow them to bridge the gap
People do get this wrong, and end up giving “let them eat cake” advice—advice that, if it were useful, the problem would have been solved. But at the same time, a good understanding of where they are can lead to remarkably informative advice. (I’ve noticed Roko and HughRistik are excellent at this when it comes to human sociality, while some are stuck in “let them eat cake” land.)
Well, in my case, once it clicked for me, my thought was, “Oh, so if you just keep moving, you won’t tip over, it’s only when you stop or slow down that you tip—why didn’t he just tell me that?”
Well, if it were a sparse set I wouldn’t be so confident. I have a frustratingly long history of people telling me something can’t be explained or is really hard to explain, followed by me explaining it to newbies with relative ease. And of cases where someone appeals to their inarticulable personal experience for justification, when really it was an articulable hidden assumption they could have found with a little effort.
Anyone is welcome to PM me for an advance draft of the article if they’re interested in giving feedback.
I’m in general agreement, but
leaves me wondering if you underestimate how much effort it takes to notice and express how to do things which are usually non-verbal.
I don’t understand. The part you quoted isn’t about expressing how to do non-verbal things; it’s about people who say, “when you get to be my age, you’ll agree, [and no I can’t explain what experiences you have as you approach my age that will cause you to agree because that would require a claim regarding how to interpret the experience which you have a chance of refuting]”
What does that have to do with the effort need to express how to do non-verbal things?
Excuse me—I wasn’t reading carefully enough to notice that you’d shifted from claims that it was too hard to explain non-verbal skills to claims that it was too hard to explain the lessons of experience.
Okay. Well, then, assuming your remark was a reply to a different part of my comment, my answer is that yes, it may be hard, but for most people, I’m not convinced they even tried.
xkcd
Am I interpreting you correctly that you are not denying that some skills can only be learned by practicing the skill (rather than by reading about or observing the skill) but are saying that verbal or written instruction is just as effective as an aid to practice as demonstration if done well?
I’m still a bit skeptical about this claim. When I was learning to snowboard for example it was clear that some instructors were better able to verbalize certain key information (keep your weight on your front foot, turn your body first and let the board follow rather than trying to turn the board, etc.) but I don’t think the verbal instructions would have been nearly as effective if they were not accompanied by physical demonstrations.
It’s possible that a sufficiently good instructor could communicate just as effectively through purely verbal instruction but I’m not sure such an instructor exists. The fact that this is a rare skill also seems relevant even if it is possible—there are many more instructors who can be effective if they are allowed to combine verbal instruction with physical demonstrations.
Good points, but keep in mind snowboarding instructors aren’t optimizing the same thing that a rationalist (in their capacity as a rationalist) is optimizing. If you just want to make money, quickly, and churn out good snowboarders, then use the best tools available to you—you have no reason to convert the instruction into words where you don’t have to.
But if you’re approaching this as a rationalist, who wants to open the black box and understand why certain things work, then it is a tremendously useful exercise to try to verbalize it, and identify the most important things people need to know—knowledge that can allow them to leapfrog a few steps in learning, even and especially if they can’t reach the Holy Grail of full transmission of the understanding.
And I’d say (despite the first paragraph in this comment) that it’s a good thing to do anyway. I suspect that people’s inability to explain things stems in large part from a lack of trying—specifically, a lack of trying to understand what mental processes are going on in side of them that allows a skill to work like it does. They fail to imagine what it is like not to have this skill and assume certain things are easy or obvious which really aren’t.
To more directly answer your question, yes, I think verbal instruction, if it understands the epistemic state of the student, can replace a lot of what normally takes practice to learn. There are things you can say that get someone in just the right mindset to bypass a huge number of errors that are normally learned hands-on.
My main point, though, is that people severely overestimate the extent of their knowledge which can’t be articulated, because the incentives for such a self-assessment are very high. Most people would do well to avoid appeals to tacit knowledge, an instead introspect on their knowledge so as to gain a deeper understanding of how it works, labeling knowledge as “tacit” only as a last resort.
I would suspect this has more to do with the skill of the student in translating verbal descriptions into motions. You can perfectly understand a series of motions to be executed under various conditions, without having the motor skill to assess the conditions and execute them perfectly in real-time.