(Please discuss on LessWrong 2.0)

(Cross-posted from my medium channel)

When you are trying to understand something by yourself, a useful skill to check your grasp on the subject is to try out the moving parts of your model and see if you can simulate the resulting changes.

Suppose you want to learn how a rocket works. At the bare minimum, you should be able to calculate the speed of the rocket given the time past launch. But can you tell what happens if Earth gravity was stronger? Weaker? What if the atmosphere had no oxygen? What if we replaced the fuel with Diet Coke and Mentos?

To really understand something, it's not enough to be able to predict the future in a normal, expected, ceteris paribus scenario. You should also be able to predict what happens when several variables are changed is several ways, or, at least, point to which calculations need to be run to arrived at such a prediction.

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett call that "turning the knobs". Imagine your model as a box with several knobs, where each knob controls one aspect of the modeled system. You don't have to be able to turn all the possible knobs to all possible values and still get a sensible, testable and correct answer, but the more, the better.

Doug and Dan apply this approach to thought experiments and intuition pumps, as a way to explore possible answers to philosophical questions. In my experience, this skill is also effective when applied to real world problems, notably when trying to understand something that is being explained by someone else.

In this case, you can run this knob-turning check interactively with the other person, which makes it way more powerful. If someone says “X+Y = Z” and “X+W = Z+A”, it’s not enough to mentally turn the knobs and calculate “X+Y+W = Z+A+B”. You should do that, then actually ask the explainer “Hey, let me see if I get what you mean: for example, X+Y+W would be Z+A+B”?

This interactive model knob-turning has been useful to me in many walks of life, but the most common and mundane application is helping out people at work. In that context, I identify six effects which make it helpful:

1) Communication check: maybe you misunderstood and actually X+W = Z-A

This is useful overall, but very important if someone uses metaphor. Some metaphors are clearly vague and people will know that and avoid th...

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