I think your list is roughly correct. But, put another way that feels oriented better to me:
It might or might not be that zetetic explanations are good. But what are the problems that Benquo is trying to solve here and how can we tell if they got solved?
People often learn bits of knowledge as isolated facts that that don’t fit together into a cohesive world-model. This is a problem when:
people are confronted with problems that they have the knowledge to solve, but aren’t aware that they do
people are confronted with situations they don’t even realize are problems, or worth considering as problems, because they were so disconnected from how their world fits together that they didn’t see it as gears.
a stronger claim may be that there exists a longterm, high level payoff for having a highly developed ability to integrate knowledge. (Partly because you have a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that fits together usefully, but moreover, because you have the ability to reflexively form theories and test them and use them effectively, which is built out of several subskills. (See Sunset at Noon middle sections for my take on that)
So the hypothesis here is that:
Most people’s pedagogy has room for improvement, in the domain of helping people to connect facts into an integrated world-model, and to build the skill of doing so.
Explanations that include cross domains, historical content, and connecting a concept to anchors that a person can clearly see and understand are a good way to improve pedagogy in this way
I’d perhaps add that that style of pedagogy may be good for the teacher as well as the student.
I think your list is roughly correct. But, put another way that feels oriented better to me:
It might or might not be that zetetic explanations are good. But what are the problems that Benquo is trying to solve here and how can we tell if they got solved?
People often learn bits of knowledge as isolated facts that that don’t fit together into a cohesive world-model. This is a problem when:
people are confronted with problems that they have the knowledge to solve, but aren’t aware that they do
people are confronted with situations they don’t even realize are problems, or worth considering as problems, because they were so disconnected from how their world fits together that they didn’t see it as gears.
a stronger claim may be that there exists a longterm, high level payoff for having a highly developed ability to integrate knowledge. (Partly because you have a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that fits together usefully, but moreover, because you have the ability to reflexively form theories and test them and use them effectively, which is built out of several subskills. (See Sunset at Noon middle sections for my take on that)
So the hypothesis here is that:
Most people’s pedagogy has room for improvement, in the domain of helping people to connect facts into an integrated world-model, and to build the skill of doing so.
Explanations that include cross domains, historical content, and connecting a concept to anchors that a person can clearly see and understand are a good way to improve pedagogy in this way
I’d perhaps add that that style of pedagogy may be good for the teacher as well as the student.