9 ms·

I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth. I have notic

by im3w1l 7y ago

I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth. I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive. Edited: Added second paragraph

arketyp 7y ago
I think everyone to some extent learns to hack some aspect or another of the social fabric by something close to simulating patterns which come more or less natural to another person. But there are introspective lessons in coming to terms with these obstacles in the first place that are maybe the things of truer value and which could be lost in artificial reward games.
- mettamage 7y ago
  I thought about this at one point in my life. We don't get to experience the pain and suffering that medieval people or cavemen experienced. I think their pain and suffering was much more brutal than what most of us experience. I mean, the child mortality rate was a lot higher, people died younger and you couldn't fix ailments easily. I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high. And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends. Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.
mettamage 7y ago
> I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive. I had a bad case of this, I did it a lot. Fortunately, some people made me aware of this tendency. Now a lot of those things I've learned are natural as if they've always been part of me. To be fair, there's 10 years in between both points.
- faceplanted 7y ago
  I think this is a fairly natural cognitive bias, possibly a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but there might be a better explanation I don't know for sure.
  - gowld 7y ago
    That not what Dunning-Kruger effect is.
    - poppypetalmask 7y ago
      It is a demonstration of th effect
drawkbox 7y ago
> I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive. A motivating way to learn is to teach or re-iterate what you know, you learn new things that way. Going overboard or thinking you are a genius on the topic suddenly is annoying but sometimes it is how that person is motivated. As far as sharing what people know through learning, that they previously didn't know and is interesting and fresh to their mind, that is part of their learning process. Spaced Learning [1] + Spaced Repetition [2] are very effective learning/memory techniques, revisiting a topic many times over time. Even commenting on topics you are into or researched on, simply restating them sometimes leads to learning more about it, at a minimum it sets it into your knowledge through repetition or spaced learning. There is a fun spaced learning game using Spaced Repetition called How To Remember Anything Forever-ish [3]. Really both techniques just pattern-ize already existing techniques how people learn things through repetition and time. It is really just revisiting a topic in intervals that will put it in memory and make it important, which the brain will spend more cycles on, and new ideas and uses for that knowledge come up. Talking or sharing what you know about what you just learned is part of that unstructured spaced learning/repetition that helps learn. It plays into presentation as well, when you are teaching a topic you start by summarizing, then get to the details, then resurface with the summary while hitting key points multiple times throughout. A teacher or presenter will learn more and more the more they repeat that topic/lesson etc that is impossible to get to on early iterations or draft/sketch phases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition [3] https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/
- im3w1l 7y ago
  The issue is that though they are well read they are still below average (typically).
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
True experts are often quiet. Conversely, a loudmouth seeks to distract from their lack of knowledge by talking excessively.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  could also just be misguided (or even genuine) passion. think the loudmouth is common among the activist types too. e.g. people we sometimes say in retrospect "must have felt like a Cassandra" etc I think the problematic thing here is seeing alone isn't feeling+seeing but making assumptions that it is.
  - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    It’s interesting you bring up feeling, as that plays a huge role in memory. I’ve often wondered if an autistic person has vivid memory, or if it is more of a factual record of past events. This device may then indirectly affect memory of the autistic as well.
    - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      pretty fascinating. I just googled relation of memory and feeling and think this topic is something I could get sucked into for the rest of the quarantine. adding autism to the discussion is one a hell of an interesting curveball. "Emotional false memory in autism spectrum disorder" ... unfortunately not on sci-hub so I didn't make it past the abstract :( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30973243 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30973243
  - woadwarrior01 7y ago
    Activism is uncorrelated with expertise.
    - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      it's correlated with passion. I've never seen an activist who was la-di-da about their work. have you?
z3t4 7y ago
Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.
- hammock 7y ago
  "Sophomore" is a term for second-year students (not even halfway done) that means "wise fool" referring to how they're at a level where they think they're smarter than they are, and they don't yet know what they don't know.
  - msla 7y ago
    Sadly, if an etymology seems clever, it's likely false: https://www.etymonline.com/word/sophomore https://www.etymonline.com/word/sophomore > 1680s, "student in the second year of university study," literally "arguer," altered from sophumer (1650s, from sophume, archaic variant form of sophism), probably by influence of folk etymology derivation from Greek sophos "wise" + mōros "foolish, dull" (see moron). The original reference might be to the dialectic exercises that formed a large part of education in the middle years. At Oxford and Cambridge, a sophister (from sophist with spurious -er as in philosopher) was a second- or third-year student (what Americans would call a "junior" might be a senior sophister).
- derefr 7y ago
  And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something, because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes. People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first language recognize its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don’t understand it, because they picked the language up “naturally.” Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask them to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less useful to a junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.
garfieldnate 7y ago
I recognize the phenomenon. I once had a roommate who changed his major to communications and then bragged that it was his life's calling and he was the best at communication. He fought with us over stupid stuff and never learned to listen. Drove us totally insane. He used to say that we were going to be bad husbands in the future because we didn't mention things that bothered us as aggressively as he did. Another friend who studied communications very seriously said that many communications professors had marital issues because of their belief in their own abilities. Totally anecdotal, of course.

by im3w1l 7y ago

arketyp 7y ago

I think everyone to some extent learns to hack some aspect or another of the social fabric by something close to simulating patterns which come more or less natural to another person. But there are introspective lessons in coming to terms with these obstacles in the first place that are maybe the things of truer value and which could be lost in artificial reward games.

mettamage 7y ago
I thought about this at one point in my life. We don't get to experience the pain and suffering that medieval people or cavemen experienced. I think their pain and suffering was much more brutal than what most of us experience. I mean, the child mortality rate was a lot higher, people died younger and you couldn't fix ailments easily. I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high. And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends. Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.

mettamage 7y ago

faceplanted 7y ago
I think this is a fairly natural cognitive bias, possibly a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but there might be a better explanation I don't know for sure.
- gowld 7y ago
  That not what Dunning-Kruger effect is.
  - poppypetalmask 7y ago
    It is a demonstration of th effect

drawkbox 7y ago

> I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive. A motivating way to learn is to teach or re-iterate what you know, you learn new things that way. Going overboard or thinking you are a genius on the topic suddenly is annoying but sometimes it is how that person is motivated. As far as sharing what people know through learning, that they previously didn't know and is interesting and fresh to their mind, that is part of their learning process. Spaced Learning [1] + Spaced Repetition [2] are very effective learning/memory techniques, revisiting a topic many times over time. Even commenting on topics you are into or researched on, simply restating them sometimes leads to learning more about it, at a minimum it sets it into your knowledge through repetition or spaced learning. There is a fun spaced learning game using Spaced Repetition called How To Remember Anything Forever-ish [3]. Really both techniques just pattern-ize already existing techniques how people learn things through repetition and time. It is really just revisiting a topic in intervals that will put it in memory and make it important, which the brain will spend more cycles on, and new ideas and uses for that knowledge come up. Talking or sharing what you know about what you just learned is part of that unstructured spaced learning/repetition that helps learn. It plays into presentation as well, when you are teaching a topic you start by summarizing, then get to the details, then resurface with the summary while hitting key points multiple times throughout. A teacher or presenter will learn more and more the more they repeat that topic/lesson etc that is impossible to get to on early iterations or draft/sketch phases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition [3] https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/

im3w1l 7y ago
The issue is that though they are well read they are still below average (typically).

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

True experts are often quiet. Conversely, a loudmouth seeks to distract from their lack of knowledge by talking excessively.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
could also just be misguided (or even genuine) passion. think the loudmouth is common among the activist types too. e.g. people we sometimes say in retrospect "must have felt like a Cassandra" etc I think the problematic thing here is seeing alone isn't feeling+seeing but making assumptions that it is.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  It’s interesting you bring up feeling, as that plays a huge role in memory. I’ve often wondered if an autistic person has vivid memory, or if it is more of a factual record of past events. This device may then indirectly affect memory of the autistic as well.
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    pretty fascinating. I just googled relation of memory and feeling and think this topic is something I could get sucked into for the rest of the quarantine. adding autism to the discussion is one a hell of an interesting curveball. "Emotional false memory in autism spectrum disorder" ... unfortunately not on sci-hub so I didn't make it past the abstract :( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30973243 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30973243
- woadwarrior01 7y ago
  Activism is uncorrelated with expertise.
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    it's correlated with passion. I've never seen an activist who was la-di-da about their work. have you?

z3t4 7y ago

Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.

hammock 7y ago
"Sophomore" is a term for second-year students (not even halfway done) that means "wise fool" referring to how they're at a level where they think they're smarter than they are, and they don't yet know what they don't know.
- msla 7y ago
  Sadly, if an etymology seems clever, it's likely false: https://www.etymonline.com/word/sophomore https://www.etymonline.com/word/sophomore > 1680s, "student in the second year of university study," literally "arguer," altered from sophumer (1650s, from sophume, archaic variant form of sophism), probably by influence of folk etymology derivation from Greek sophos "wise" + mōros "foolish, dull" (see moron). The original reference might be to the dialectic exercises that formed a large part of education in the middle years. At Oxford and Cambridge, a sophister (from sophist with spurious -er as in philosopher) was a second- or third-year student (what Americans would call a "junior" might be a senior sophister).
derefr 7y ago
And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something, because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes. People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first language recognize its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don’t understand it, because they picked the language up “naturally.” Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask them to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less useful to a junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.

garfieldnate 7y ago

I recognize the phenomenon. I once had a roommate who changed his major to communications and then bragged that it was his life's calling and he was the best at communication. He fought with us over stupid stuff and never learned to listen. Drove us totally insane. He used to say that we were going to be bad husbands in the future because we didn't mention things that bothered us as aggressively as he did. Another friend who studied communications very seriously said that many communications professors had marital issues because of their belief in their own abilities. Totally anecdotal, of course.