“knowledge compilation” or “production compilation,” which serves only to specialize knowledge: turning a general operation like “recall the next digit of my phone number and then say it” into a specialized one like “say ‘seven.’”
This is a great concept to add to my mental vocabulary, thanks for mentioning it.
(Going off-topic from the main point of the post here.) It helps me understand, for eg., the pattern of success and failure in teaching my dad how to use a smartphone. Originally, I kept trying to directly transfer the general knowledge I had, about what to expect from mobile UIs, the dark patterns websites and apps use, etc., and found very little of it stuck. It turns out that, if I instead give him the compiled knowledge, specific to each instance—which intuitively feels like a bad way to teach things—he’s able to reverse engineer a “good enough” part of the general knowledge from that, given enough examples. (Insert comparison to the success of just-give-it-lots-of-samples ML over symbolic top-down AI here.)
This concept of general uncompiled knowledge vs specific compiled action is a good tool for thinking about pedagogy and learning, applicable in many ways.
I believed this firmly for most of my life, and still think there’s some value in it, but I’ve learnt that this is a pretty privileged take on things. Targeted at a LW audience, it’s probably true and useful to a majority, but that’s because most of us (I believe) are living better lives than at least 80% of humanity, and thus fall into the truthish region of these ideas.
Most of humanity lives in uncertainty, instability, and the myriad day-to-day pains that are ultimately rooted in those. Most people don’t have the privilege of sorting through multiple sources or spending time gaining enough background knowledge, such that learning something becomes the joy it should be.
When your very survival, barely holding together a family and a home, takes up 15 hours of your day, it’s going to hurt if you’re trying to advance yourself with education or other self-improvement, it’s going to take a necessary toll on your physical and mental health. The reason “pain is the unit of effort” is such a common idea is that it was true for the majority and still is (if to a slightly lesser extent than back then, because of slowly declining poverty rates). For people in bad life situations, almost any extra effort is pain, so if you’re supposed to be working and are not experiencing pain, it’s a good heuristic that you’re most likely avoiding actual work by some means, because that’s such a tempting prospect, rather than that you’ve somehow cleverly worked around the pain.
The post is (likely) a good lens to evaluate your own life, and especially to leave behind baggage from previous less-privileged generations that might not apply any more, but make sure not to misapply it as a lens to view the rest of the world, to whom it likely doesn’t apply and may even be counterproductive.