Humans greatly underestimate how much sense our explanations make. In order to explain something adequately, pretend that you're trying to explain it to someone much less informed than your target audience.
Shouldn't that be "greatly overestimate how much sense our explanations make", or "greatly underestimate the background knowledge needed", or something similar?
I think part of the problem is not that the audience is stupider than you imagine but that people sometimes use different techniques to learn the same thing. Your explanation may seem obvious to you but confuse everyone else while an alternative explanation that you would have difficulty understanding yourself would be obvious to others.
One example of this would be that some people learn better by concrete examples while others learn better by abstract ones.
This makes me wonder what would constitute a good explanation of probability at the grade-school level.
Hmm ...
Suppose we put the names of everyone in your school into a hat, and mix them all up, and pull one out, and call that person up and give them a cookie. What's the chance that the cookie will go to a fifth-grader? (One in five, if your school goes from first to fifth grade and all of the grades have the same number of students.) What's the chance that the cookie will go to a girl? (One-half, probably.) What's the chance that it will be a fifth-grader and a girl? Five times two is ten, so it'll be one in ten. (Multiplication rule for probabilities.)
Suppose that there's the same number of kids in each grade — but all the first graders are boys, and all the fifth graders are girls. The second through fourth grades are evenly split between boys and girls. If I draw a name out of a hat, and I don't tell you what grade or gender that person is, how likely is it they're a fifth grader? (One-fifth.) Suppose I tell you they're a girl, then how likely do you think it is? (Two-fifths.) Why did your answer change? (New information changes your probabilities.)
I have four chocolate cookies and one gingerbread cookie. I'm going to pick one without looking. If you can guess what kind of cookie it is, I'll give it to you. Should you guess chocolate or gingerbread? (Chocolate.) How sure are you? (Four-fifths sure.) Why? Because you've seen the cookies and you know four out of five are chocolate, but you know there's a one in five chance I could pick gingerbread even though it's less likely. If you want to win a cookie, you're better off picking chocolate. (Probabilities as measurement of uncertainty.)
For fifth graders you would likely need to do a lot more than just this. For the first case you'd probably need visual aids, and a lot more examples.
Even then, I suspect a lot of kids would have trouble. Probability is tough. Teaching it even to highschool students can be tricky.
Oh, sure, I agree pictures and lots more examples would be essential. I was just trying to think of how simple an approach would need to be; not to actually write a probability textbook at the fifth grade level.
How far down the scale does this work? 5 year olds? Chimps? Rats? Earthworms? Where does evolutions fit on it?
Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low! was originally published on 24 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Humans greatly underestimate how much sense our explanations make. In order to explain something adequately, pretend that you're trying to explain it to someone much less informed than your target audience.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Expecting Short Inferential Distances, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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