I think there's this problem that occurs often when explaining something technical. Let's say you wanted to explain how a computer works. You could pick a specific computer, e.g. a Macbook Pro Retina. This would hang together nicely as an item, you could explain, in principle, why each specific bit of it was there and was designed the way it was. Of course, this would be insanely complicated for a beginner. They'd come away without understanding (in part because they can't triangulate from other computer architectures to what you've taught them about this one), nor intuition (because they can't leverage what you've taught them about this one to others).
You could instead come... (read 279 more words →)
Many thanks!