Open Thread June 2010, Part 3

Kevin

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

The thrilling conclusion of what is likely to be an inaccurately named trilogy of June Open Threads.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

The thrilling conclusion of what is likely to be an inaccurately named trilogy of June Open Threads.

I remember intro physics being straightforward and intuitive, and I had no trouble explaining it to others. In fact, the first day we had a substitute teacher who just told us to read the first chapter, which was just the basics like scientific notation, algebraic manipulation, unit conversion, etc. I ended up just teaching the others when something didn't make sense.

If there was any pattern to it, it was that I was always able to "drop back a level" to any grounding concept. "Wait, do you understand why dividing a variable by itself cancels it out?" "Do you understand what multiplying by a power of 10 does?"

That is, I could trace back to the beginning of what they found confusing. I don't think I was special in having this ability -- it's just something people don't bother to do, or don't themselves possess the understanding to do, whether it's teaching physics or social skills (for which I have the same complaint as you).

Someone who really understands sociality (i.e., level 2, as mentioned above) can fall back to the questions of why people engage in small talk, and what kind of mentality you should have when doing so. But most people either don't bother to do this, or have only an automatic (level 1) understanding.

Do you ever have trouble explaining physics to others? Do you find any commonality to the barriers you encounter?

That is, I could trace back to the beginning of what they found confusing. I don't think I was special in having this ability -- it's just something people don't bother to do, or don't themselves possess the understanding to do, whether it's teaching physics or social skills (for which I have the same complaint as you).

This demonstrates a highly developed theory of mind. In order to do this one needs to both have a good command of material and a good understanding of what people are likely to understand or not understand. This is often very difficult.

6steven046116y

In mathy fields, how much of it is caused by insufficiently deep understanding and how much of it is caused by taboos against explicitly discussing intuitive ways of thinking that can't be defended as hard results? The common view seems to be that textbooks/lectures are for showing the formal structure of whatever it is you're learning, and to build intuitions you have to spend a lot of time doing exercises. But I've always thought such effort could be partly avoided if instead of playing dignified Zen master, textbooks were full of low-status sentences like "a prisoner's dilemma means two parties both have the opportunity to help the other at a cost that's smaller than the benefit, so it's basically the same thing as trade, where both parties give each other stuff that they value less than the other, so you should imagine trade as people lobbing balls of stuff at each other that grow in the lobbing, and if you zoom out it's like little fountains of stuff coming from nowhere". (ETA: I mean in addition to the math itself, of course.) It's possible that I'm overrating how much such intuitions can be shared between people, maybe because of learning-style issues.

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Open Thread June 2010, Part 3

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