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I noticed this phenomena in my own writing and I think I know where it comes from. In Polya's list of heuristic (from How to Solve It) he writes about the the t
by oskarth 11y ago
I noticed this phenomena in my own writing and I think I know where it comes from. In Polya's list of heuristic (from How to Solve It) he writes about the the two rules of teaching:
> The first rule of teaching is to know what you are supposed to teach. The second rule of teaching is to know a little more than what you are supposed to teach.
When we learn something and then write about it to teach others, oftentimes we are excited about the things we just learned, so we write about that, even if we don't fully understand it yet. Then we add an introduction to the "meat" (i.e. the limits of our current understanding) which is very clear, precisely because we are "overqualified" to teach it. Another way to state Poyla's rule for teaching is as follows:
Being overqualified in knowledge is a prerequisite for being qualified as a teacher of that knowledge.
One way I like to picture knowledge is as a dark room. You might step into one but that doesn't mean you know every corner of it. For example, imagine a proof or a technique. Unless you can know by heart why each assumption is there, or when the technique fails, you don't fully understand it. If you are guiding someone through a dark house, as you go from room to room, you are only qualified to give someone directions about the room you already been in, not the one you are in right now - even if that's what is on your mind.
Note that this isn't unique to people writing technical blogs, it happens in academia a lot too. There's a reason Feynman's lecture on "undergraduate physics" attracted the attention of graduate students.
- agumonkey 11y agoYour comment resonates very weirdly with my experience. College teachers are guilty of the exponential wall. Easy and lengthy intro then steep but short core material (often cut short because the bell is ringing). Impossibly annoying. The dark room exhaustive search is exactly how I ended up learning about learning. Through music though, as a self taught I had to visit every possible spots, even if most of them were holes. And most of the time, most things only 'make sense' because the other things just don't work. Now if you teach a topic to someone by listing what 'make sense', unless that person is very easy on remembering or extremely creative, it will be a meaningless burden to rote learn. On the other hand, knowing all the wrong parts, makes you very good at teaching someone since as the student will ask why his intuition is failing, you know how it feels and you know what to do about it, how to try other ideas, patterns, revisit things that he might have overseen. Douglas Crockford said that once you understand monads, you suffer the curse of not being able to explain it anymore. I really wonder how often this happen, how many students learned shortened and polished stuff in books without the whole story, the whole experience of the actual researcher ? This tiny offset in understanding, repeated generation after generation .. might lead to large divergence. Saying this after watching (too many?) A. Kay talks about how people ignore the past, they ignore it because it's not taught that is all.