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I am all for the "western" side, where the speaker has to provide the understanding, motivation and entertainment, especially in the modern day where informatio

by 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.

by GuB-42 2y ago

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.