18 ms·

To test the concept, I put together a taxonomy of a topic few people understand (dressage, or essentially, riding horses), which can be mystifying from the grou

To test the concept, I put together a taxonomy of a topic few people understand (dressage, or essentially, riding horses), which can be mystifying from the ground up. A taxonomy is right in the middle of an unstructured mind map, and a logically parseable ontology. So maybe, a directed acyclic mindmap?:) The practical parts of this are in the "Movements" branch of the tree, and when you have expanded it, consider that most people learn this topic from right to left, instead of left to right. https://www.qtra.io/hn-comment-answer https://www.qtra.io/hn-comment-answer It uses code directly from the d3 example pages. I just wrote something for parsing a csv file into a tree, which I think is now native to a few packages. It doesn't give you physical competence (which can take decades), but a map of the logic of categories is useful.

bangonkeyboard 8y ago
That's a very impressive and tactile answer, thanks for taking the time to put it together. This seems to tie into the old debate of top-down versus bottom-up pedagogies. A high-level map of a topic is indisputably valuable, but I personally find it most useful as a guide for where to dive deep and back out, to make concrete the abstractions; a more directed patching-together of competencies, as you put it.
- motohagiography 8y ago
  Thank you. Indeed, the top-down/bottom-up view of education is analogous to the efficiency of breadth-first vs. depth-first searches in different problems. Depends on what you want to achieve. The reason I use these is I think a lot of suffering comes from (or can be defined as) churning on deep-node problems without information from higher level concepts, and a notation that "locates" meaning in an broader ontology can relieve some of it, and yield new understanding. I think this is a theme Ted Chiang is on to as well, as it appears in the literary world as well as STEM.

bangonkeyboard 8y ago

That's a very impressive and tactile answer, thanks for taking the time to put it together. This seems to tie into the old debate of top-down versus bottom-up pedagogies. A high-level map of a topic is indisputably valuable, but I personally find it most useful as a guide for where to dive deep and back out, to make concrete the abstractions; a more directed patching-together of competencies, as you put it.

motohagiography 8y ago
Thank you. Indeed, the top-down/bottom-up view of education is analogous to the efficiency of breadth-first vs. depth-first searches in different problems. Depends on what you want to achieve. The reason I use these is I think a lot of suffering comes from (or can be defined as) churning on deep-node problems without information from higher level concepts, and a notation that "locates" meaning in an broader ontology can relieve some of it, and yield new understanding. I think this is a theme Ted Chiang is on to as well, as it appears in the literary world as well as STEM.