13 ms·

This reminds me of something that I heard once from a Chinese teacher. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but he was definitely on to something: In the West,

• spacephysics 2y ago
  I find a similar trend with education in general. Some states have phased out programs for gifted students. Instead, many of them aren’t stimulated enough and end up going down a troubling path (worst case) or they don’t really reach their full potential during those formidable years. Teachers are expected to make the content match the lowest denominator, outside of the occasional exceptional teacher
  • surfingdino 2y ago
    Because making someone think is stupid-shaming and therefore not politically correct.
    • monero-xmr 2y ago
      Eventually everyone is tested. I have received perfect looking resumes and cover letters, then you get the person on a call and they are… hopeless. It’s very sad. Who pushed them so far? How did they get the credentials? Who wrote and edited their materials? Eventually the “rubber meets the road” so to speak, and all of the lies and gold stars and platitudes don’t count for anything.
      • kaba0 2y ago
        There are certainly people like that, but there are also exceptionally smart people that just absolutely suck at selling themselves, and you might unknowingly decided the same way in case of both. It’s very hard to fairly evaluate someone. E.g. I had interviews where I 100% know more than one of my interviewers on the specific topic (not bragging, my knowledge is ain’t a high bar), and that gap in this unusual direction made the process very awkward and strange.
        • lanstin 2y ago
          I have only gotten jobs because of people I have worked with before. I have written all kinds of software for all kinds of systems and products but I just don't come across as smart on a first meeting. And to be fair I almost invariably like to chew on a knotty problem for a few days turning it over in my head till I get a feel for it, unless I have already solved a very similar problem; but I only want to solve novel problems. Old problems in software should be solvable easily. The current interviewing process would not hire me unless I had already worked with the deciders before.
          • surfingdino 2y ago
            > Old problems in software should be solvable easily I keep telling people who interview me that this is what APIs, modules, and frameworks are for. They capture good solutions to problems and allow us to move faster and build better software. If they are rude to me I tell them that I thought they were an e-commerce business and should not be solving basic problems in Computer Science.
  • ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    In some ways this supports the point, in others it's the exact opposite. He says spoonfeeding information to people in bite-size chunks is like processed food and it should be hard, but you're saying that information should be spoonfed to 'smart' kids in exactly the right level of difficulty or they'll wreck their lives. Possibly it's like the concept of flow, where the standard suggestion is that things should be not too hard and not too easy, in order to keep your attention, interest and focus. But philosphically, that's just 'spoon-feeding' information in bite-size chunks like processed food, it's just varying the size of the bite to suit the level of the reciever, which again is exactly what he's saying is bad.
  • Broken_Hippo 2y ago
    And so many of those programs were absolutely horrible. I had a lot more homework than my peers and was expected to act more mature. Sorry, but we were all the same age as other kids - we didn't deserve a higher workload (as kids and teens) and we should have been expected to act our age. It was pretty common to make fun of others for not keeping up well enough (struggling not allowed) or for appearing too smart (Not me, but a family member). Some school systems completely separated gifted kids from 'regular' students. By high school, it was obvious that this created some issues communicating with a broader range of folks. There is more than one way to make sure gifted kids get challenged - you don't necessarily need a special class for gifted kids. And you'll need to provide proof for the last one. It is true that they do teach so that the test scores are good - and since funding and jobs are tied to that testing, other things are going to go down. This isn't really making content matching the lowest denominator, though.
    • conjectures 2y ago
      Seems geographical/not uniform. In UK some schools just pocket the gifted and talented funds and deliver nothing.
      • Broken_Hippo 2y ago
        It definitely isn't uniform in the US - it isn't even uniform in schools near each other. Schooling systems between countries are very difficult to compare. I just learned that some UK schools have gifted and talented programs and funds, for example.
        • arethuza 2y ago
          The UK doesn't even have a single education system (e.g. exams for university entrance and the length of first degrees).
    • strken 2y ago
      Mine was great. It had a normal amount of homework, a smaller class size (which was a happy but unintentional accident), and accelerated four years into three. We shared electives with the rest of the school and socialised widely. I was bullied pretty badly through my pre-teen childhood and the program provided a way out of that, which in turn taught me how to interact with a group of people who didn't physically and emotionally abuse me for social gain - something a lot of people take for granted. Which is to say that anecdotes are of course going to be mixed.
  • InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    The terror of the masses to join the molasses.
• jjmarr 2y ago
  I read this comment before the post, and now I feel bad. I watched a spy movie from the 1960s recently with someone. We got 20 minutes in before she was confused about why the movie is just about a depressed drunk who lost his job in a spy agency, before my movie-watching accomplice looked up the plot of the movie on Wikipedia. Spoiler alert, there's a twist, and the movie didn't tell the viewer that. It's interesting that modern movies have to make you think you understand something, before they pull the curtain back and reveal there's a twist. Otherwise people will get disengaged and stop watching before the twist occurs.
  • croisillon 2y ago
    So how’s the movie called?
    • tdrgabi 2y ago
      Probably "The spy who came in from the cold"
      • big_paps 2y ago
        The book and the movie are quite rough, raw and extradry - i don’t mean this in a bad way. The mood reminds me more of eastern productions like tarkowsky (stalker) and the like.
        • ted_bunny 2y ago
          "Bond for grownups"
          • jhbadger 2y ago
            Also called "stale beer" spy fiction to emphasize its lack of glamour and that settings like dive bars are more common in it than fancy casinos and cocktail parties. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpyFiction https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpyFiction
• renewiltord 2y ago
  You'll see this often on the Internet: proof? Proof? Citation? Boy, no one's going to do any work for you. If you believe the wrong thing, the consequences are your own. In fact, only people with no better use for their time will spend their time teaching you. This means you're being taught only by people whose time is worthless or for whom it is useful for you to believe in something. If you're not paying for the knowledge, you're not the customer, you're the product. I never elucidate for those beneath me in understanding. I only discuss with peers. Perhaps the only capable person I know who does different is Taleb but his pleasure appears to be in calling someone "imbecile" after proving them wrong.
  • wozniacki 2y ago
    I was waiting the whole time I read this to find a /s somewhere. Anywhere. Yikes.
    • hju22_-3 2y ago
      I will agree that it is big yikes. But I will, at least kind of, agree that you are more likely to meet more arm chair scientists than you are scientists and actual field experts online in this fashion. Though, obviously, there are actual scientists and field experts around. The issue, as always, is how to differenciate them from the not-so-obviously fake ones as a layman. But yes. Still big yikes.
    • bheadmaster 2y ago
      > Yikes. Proof? Citation? Jokes aside, I find that this sentence makes much sense, especially in the context of online forums such as HN or Reddit: In fact, only people with no better use for their time will spend their time teaching you. This means you're being taught only by people whose time is worthless or for whom it is useful for you to believe in something. Why do you think that is inaccurate?
      • hashiyakshmi 2y ago
        Because there are plenty of people who just enjoy explaining things or helping others understand, and to say the only two reasons for that behavior is that their time is worthless or they have an agenda is myopic.
• btilly 2y ago
  That is because the USA is low context while China is high context. For more about this and related topics, read https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00IHGVQ9I/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00IHGVQ9I/ref=tmm_kin_swatch....
  • lukan 2y ago
    "Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out." Oh, it is a book about stereotypes. Well, as a german it seems I have to get straight to the point, I do not think, thinking in stereotypes this broad is helpful for communicating.
    • forgotusername6 2y ago
      Did you read the beginning of the book or just read that one quote? The first chapter on a story about meeting etiquette in Chinese business culture is actually quite insightful. It certainly resonates with me a least. I wish I had a manual so I knew how to behave in a meeting with people from different cultures. We are not all the same and there is no one size fits all way of behaving in a meeting.
      • lukan 2y ago
        I stopped at that quote. There are no doubt interesting anecdota inside, that might be insightful and there is no doubt some truth to some clichés, but I seriously doubt a box so big as "asians" has much value. And even for "small" boxes like "germans", there are for example great differences between east and west germany (seperated by the iron curtain and different systems for over 40 years) - but more so for the older and less for the younger generation. Etc. So reading in general about cultural differences when meeting someone from that culture can be surely be helpful - but in my experience it is not useful for taking such advice by the letter.
• fhe 2y ago
  my Chinese teacher supplied me with this supposedly ancient piece of Chinese scholarly wisdom: read any book a hundred times, and its meaning will be obvious. i have found this to work amazingly well -- particularly with poorly written technical papers. your comment also reminded me of this one time I was hanging out and watching the Matrix (for the 100th time probably) with a film maker friend. and he was pointing out to me that American film editing guides you with a rather heavy hand on where to look on the screen, whereas European films did little of that and the viewer has to search for what to pay attention to in a scene. after he showed me the editing techniques it all made sense, and explained why i could mindless follow hollywood movies, whereas watching an european film i'd get lost if not paying attention.
  • lqet 2y ago
    > American film editing guides you with a rather heavy hand on where to look on the screen There are notable exceptions, and I think the most commercially successful US director who largely ignored this advice was Francis Ford Coppola. In the "Godfather" trilogy, nothing is spelled out. You are not guided to anything. If you miss a minor detail in some scene, you are on your own, and you might not be able to follow the plot to the end.
  • mannykannot 2y ago
    That is probably what it will take for me to finally understand Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch.
  • germinalphrase 2y ago
    aka ‘intensified continuity editing’ which is the modern evolution of the ‘Hollywood style’. David Bordwell out of UW-Madison did a lot of work on this.
• lqet 2y ago
  I work in academia, and the pessimistic/cynic standpoint is that university is not about teaching, but about filtering. Making a lecture "fun", comprehensible, or even "innovative" may not have the desired effect of improving the level of understanding among all students, because a fun and easy course is a worse filter than a hard course. Personally I always learned the most in courses that were very hard and had a nerdy teacher/professor who did not care at all whether you could follow the stuff on the blackboard / in the presentation. Theses courses required work on your own: you had to read the actual literature again and again to even remotely understand the topics on the weekly exercise sheets, or to pass the exam. This "learning by yourself" lead to a much deeper understanding than just memorizing some concepts from a streamlined lecture.
  • infinitezest 2y ago
    If you're putting in all of the effort to make the material make sense to you, what is the role of the educator? If the way to learn things is to read a book a bunch of times, what value does my tuition money get me? A syllabus? The ability to ask questions of a possibly poor communicater?
    • lqet 2y ago
      The cynic answer would be: a highly standardized and comparable filter and testing environment. A more realistic answer: you are guided through and exposed to topics, motivated by exams, and in the end you will have proof that you understand the topics you received grades on. You also have - often direct and personal - access to top-level people in your field.
    • gyomu 2y ago
      I paid all this money to get to a beautiful surf spot, and you’re telling me I have to paddle and stand up on my own?!
    • wavemode 2y ago
      > If the way to learn things is to read a book a bunch of times, what value does my tuition money get me? The real answer? You gained a piece of paper which certifies that you are educated in a field. Depending on the school you may also gain access to an insular professional network. That's pretty much it. The notion that university degrees are worth anything more than that is moderately outdated.
• lloydatkinson 2y ago
  > If a reader can't follow the argument, it's automatically the author's fault and a waste of the reader's time. Heaven forbid the reader might need to exert some effort and grow in the gleaning. I've experienced the receiving end of this a couple of times on HN. I once posted a blog post and it was extremely obvious that the detractors (who, despite toxic being a bit of an overblown word now, were being toxic and breaking HN rules and got away with it) hadn't even read perhaps a third or less before getting angry in the comments. I don't care if people don't like the suggestion but I believe blocking should be implemented.
• rvba 2y ago
  Oversimplification is bad, but there is a reason why Western/US universities are so much better at teaching students. Imagine your professors and textbooks werent there to teach you, but they were there to show off their knowledge or to prove you that you know nothing. A very known problem in my country is that a professor is not making a lecture to teach you something or to explain you something, the professor wants to show off his knowledge - that he is the king and you are a nobody. Then you get unreadable textbooks full of big words (sometimes you think authors dont grasp them)... which are just plain student unfriendly. I remembet that I had borrowed some statistics books from USA - and they were easier to read in English than the crap I had in my own language. They were easier to read and easier to understand. No big words. Just explanations and examples. On a side note, they taught us physics with English abbreviarions. When most students didnt know English. Think you are in 5th grade and they nake you memorize things like: d = s x t You have to figure out that it is distance, speed and time. Note that those abbreviations have nothing to do with the local language. Also why even use abbreviations? Lazy teacher (AND lazy textbook) could have used full words at least. In own language, not English. Most people from US dont realize how much easier you have. For starters you dont spend a lot of time learning English as a foreign language. Then the non-Americans can get books that are written to teach you something* not to show that the author is great. (* although now I think most textbooks are written for profit).
  • Xfx7028 2y ago
    This sound ls very much like the experience of Greeks according to some friend.
    • protomolecule 2y ago
      While other countries use Greek letters for variables and functions)
  • kaba0 2y ago
    I think this has more to do with budget. In many countries, professors are not paid specifically to write books, but if no proper book exists in the local language then they sort of have to do it one way or another. It usually ends up as some hodgepodge document, each chapter written by a different professor - whose are experts at their fields, but not at book writing!, which is a specific skill. Some or better at it, others absolutely suck. Then they just print it some way without any lecturing, unification of styles, references and use it as the course book, because they were sorta forced to. In English, there is competition and people with actual experience can publish books, which will be used by multiple universities, if it becomes famous than multiple generations of students from multiple universities and years have criticized it making the nth version better, etc. This is very different from the budget solution my med university (of which 4 exists in this language alltogether) could reasonably come up with. Nonetheless, there were smaller topics, documents, chapters which easily surpassed the same found in any English language book, especially in mathematics (the Soviet block used to be famously good at mathematics, so the level was much higher than the west’s), for these small gems it does worth speaking obscure languages.
• exe34 2y ago
  the problem is how much shite there is out there to read through. you could read all the monad tutorials in the world but it won't help until you start using them yourself. (admittedly I'm going a step further from your point, not against it). however, I'd say if I can't understand what an authors trying to say, it makes more sense to find one that I can understand first, and then go back to the more abstruse one.
• mannykannot 2y ago
  If this is true in general, it might have been a factor in why the scientific and technological 'revolutions' of the so-called Enlightenment occurred in the West.
  • parthianshotgun 2y ago
    How?
    • mannykannot 2y ago
      I feel the most apposite response, given the topic of the post I was replying to, is to leave it as an exercise for the reader.
• electrodank 2y ago
  >In paintings, it is known that the viewer can get out more than the painter put in. There’s something very much “Dabblers and Blowhards” about this statement that I can’t quite put my finger on it. [0] Try painting, I mean really painting, before spouting nonsense. It wreaks havoc on the rest of your comment. [0] https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
• GuB-42 2y ago
  I am all for the "western" side, where the speaker has to provide the understanding, motivation and entertainment, especially in the modern day where information is easily accessible. It doesn't mean that no effort should be expected of listeners, more like unnecessary effort should be minimized. An example of unnecessary effort would be using a foreign language listeners have no particular interest in learning. Personally, I would rather have my math class in a language I am at least fluent it, so that I can focus my attention on the math and not on the language. I also like my teach when they have an understanding of the psychology of learning, so that I can learn more effectively. Entertainment and motivation is part of it. It is spoon-feeding, but that's also how you get people to focus on the heart of the matter. At higher levels, it becomes less of a consideration, not because it is unimportant, but because at high level, knowledge itself becomes scarce, so you'd be lucky to find someone who really knows his stuff, even if he isn't the best at making it easy for people to understand. So the listen can spare some effort as it is the only way to get that knowledge. In the old days, knowledge in general was scarce so it made sense to tip the balance in favor of the speaker as you'd be lucky to have a knowledgeable speaker at all. But now, almost everything is a few clicks away on the internet, and the entire point of having a speaker is to present the information is an easily digestible manner. If you want to go "the hard way" you can do it by yourself, papers, textbooks, etc... are everywhere on almost every subject at almost every level, even more so if you embrace piracy. As for painting, or meaningful art in general, it is also part of the artist job to guide the viewer, not just dump a random idea on canvas, this is just lazy (on the part of the artist). Leave some clues leading to the big idea. Think like a puzzle. Puzzles are designed to be challenging, but they also involve guiding the player so that in the end, they can solve a more difficult challenge than they would have been able to with no help. Another thing to consider is that in a speaker-listener relationship, there are usually more listeners than there are speakers, so it is more efficient to have the speaker spend the effort being understood than having the listeners spend it understanding.
  • sfink 2y ago
    I didn't intend to claim that the "Eastern" way is unconditionally better. I'm just used to the Western way of thinking, so it's a novel perspective that I keep finding applies in more situations than I expect. Making things understandable is good. It's just not always the right thing to optimize for. Which is very different from saying that complexity is always better. Or as you said it: > It doesn't mean that no effort should be expected of listeners, more like unnecessary effort should be minimized. If all the information that needs to be conveyed is in the material, then making it accessible, understandable, and digestible probably is most important. Again, as you said: > it is more efficient to have the speaker spend the effort being understood than having the listeners spend it understanding. But it's kind of the difference between a sack of gold and the proverbial Golden Goose. For some things, you can't get all the benefit at once. As someone else here brought up with the idea of reading a book 100 times, some books/lectures/whatever give you more, and something different, every time you go back to them. It's like you need to incorporate the previous pass into your head before you can peel back a layer and grasp the next one down. It's a weird experience; with the same Chinese teacher I mentioned, I've many times had the experience of re-listening and hearing something totally different than I remembered. I sometimes doubt that I've ever listened to that one before. I think partly that's because the information is not coming just from the material, it's coming from the interaction between my mind and the material, and my mind is changing all the time. (Not necessarily for the better, but I'll leave that aside...) So I disagree that this applies universally: > But now, almost everything is a few clicks away on the internet, and the entire point of having a speaker is to present the information is an easily digestible manner. It really isn't. A lot of stuff is, so much that we get overwhelmed and blinded by it to the point that we assume that it must cover everything. But some things are not out there, or at least not out there for easy picking. Nobody has yet been able to write up such a clear and accessible description of how to ride a bicycle that someone could read it and then ride off on a bike their very first time. And that's the rule, not the exception, even with cerebral subjects like calculus or programming or whatever. It's not the difficulty that provides the extra value; you're not going to communicate more by making it artificially hard (as with your foreign language example)[1]. What helps is getting the learner to process more deeply, or apply the knowledge, or practice, or "use it in anger", or compete with it, or whatever way you want to say roughly the same thing. Our brains are not landfills of facts that benefit from the more you dump into them. They are coordinated systems of knowledge and behavior, where truly adding to one place requires adjusting everything else a little or a lot to accommodate. [1] Actually, you might, but only because it slows the reader down enough for things to sink in. Any other mechanism would work as well, and a mechanism that adds something else to the mix like tests or reviews is going to be overall more effective and efficient than artificial friction.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• eruci 2y ago
  with Poetry, the onus is still on the reader to get something out of it, even in the west. I recently read "Pale Fire". (without the preface and Nabukov's commentary). I enjoyed it thoroughly, without understanding a lot, which is fine.
• ryanjamurphy 2y ago
  The important thing I take away from this comment is that before you choose what to read, it's crucial to be able to identify which readings contain the most useful and valuable takeaways that are worth the effort of reading them. It's true that modern mental models of reading and writing train us to only seek out the stuff that's easy to read, but the real problem is that there's so much to read that we have to prioritize, leading to a tendency to read the easy stuff because it's a guarantee you'll get something out of it. Then there's a sort-of market dynamic leading to the success of the easy stuff and the dismissal of the hard. If that dynamic means that we miss out on the readings that are truly transformative, we've lost. So perhaps the strategic differentiator between readers is to actually have a really powerful theory of prioritization, and useful mechanisms to prioritize (such as the curated references of a good university course or a social network that shares only the most important resources, regardless of how difficult they are to understand).