

Extreme thinking, by Michael A. Nielsen - zkz
http://www.michaelnielsen.org/blog/archive/tough-learning/tough-learning-final.html

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skmurphy
This is a great essay. The core tensions that he outlines for developing a
sense of purpose really resonated for me:

    
    
       "I believe that the key to developing a strong sense of purpose and meaning is
        to balance three activities.
        o The first is development of a common understanding with a large group of people
          with whom one is later able to feel a common sense of community.  
        o The second is development of abilities which are not common to your community, 
          and which eventually give you the ability to make a unique contribution
          to your community.
        o The third is making a creative contribution to your community, 
          to something larger than yourself."

~~~
10ren
The second ( _abilities unique in your community_ ) is hard, though one way is
to learn them from another community where they are common, i.e. cross-
disciplinary.

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10ren
At the end of the first and second principles, I was reminded of thoughts by
two other writers... who were mentioned in the immediately next passage (Kay
and Covey, respectively). It seems like a clear nod to the audience.

But I'll mention my first thought anyway: abstract ideas that are difficult to
reason about can be made easier to work with by finding a better
representation. Hopefully one exists. Alan Kay compared multiplication with
Roman numerals (in Roman times, only geniuses could do it) with today's
positional numerals (in modern times, children can do it). _We haven't got any
smarter_ , he said, _we've just changed our representation system. Inventing
better representation systems is something important that we do as
programmers._ This was Kay's explanation of "point of view is worth 80 IQ
points" that Nielsen mentioned.

Perhaps, in the context of teaching, this itself was an example of the
communication technique where you set up a trigger for the audience - a
striking image to evoke their own memory, or a puzzle to provoke their own
reasoning - so that they take ownership of the message, and it makes more
connections to their own network of pre-existing ideas. The "nod", or implicit
punchline, is confirming for those who caught the reference; is completing for
those who half caught it (filling a gap is another way for increasing
memorableness); and just plain informing for those new to the topic. Or am I
reading too much into this physicist's writing, and he has quantumed me out?

~~~
Arun2009
I myself have thought quite a bit about the better representation issue.

I once read somewhere that all human concepts are fundamentally associative in
nature. If you see the halftone image of an apple, you don't have to work
through pixel by pixel to figure out the concept, "apple". The concept apple
with its related features naturally occurs to you.

Taking this further to learning, it would seem that we all go through a stage
where our knowledge is of a deliberate, serial nature and once a certain
degree of habituation is reached, the knowledge gets coded enough to be
associative in nature. Consider solving problems in Mathematics - initially,
we all have to consciously do a state-space search to figure out the right
method to solve the problem. To expert problem solvers, however, the method to
solve the problem becomes immediately apparent just from the patterns in the
problem. Ditto for chess, etc.

Lets call knowledge that's serial in nature second-order knowledge and the
knowledge that's associative, first-order knowledge. I think there's immense
promise in investigating whether the transformation from second-order to
first-order can be made systematic. I.e., consider learning as a _new subject
in itself_. I am pretty sure that research has been done on this though.

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RK
It seems that a more appropriate title might have been "Effective Learning".
It's an excellent essay.

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narag
How is the card game and the bar game the same? If a man is obviously old, he
can drink alcohol or other kind of drink. In the case of cards, there is only
an answer.

~~~
ekiru
In the card game, the rule is that if a card has a vowel on one side, it must
have an even number on the other side. Replace "the card has a vowel on one
side" with "a person is drinking alcohol" and "it must have an even number on
the other side" with "he or she must be over eighteen". Since a card with a
vowel must have an even number on it, if a card has an odd number, one must
check whether the other side has a vowel to know whether the card follows the
rule. Similarly, if a person is under eighteen, one must check whether they
are drinking alcohol to know whether they are following the rules.

If we refer to either "a card has a vowel" or "a person is drinking alcohol"
as P and either "a card has an even number" or "a person is over eighteen" as
Q, we can describe the four cards/people in both situations as:

1\. P 2\. ¬P 3\. Q 4\. ¬Q

The rule can be described as P implies Q. P implies Q is equivalent to "Q or
¬P". Therefore, in cases 2 and 3, P implies Q is known to be true without
needing to know the value of the other proposition. In the remaining cases,
you don't have enough information to know whether P implies Q. In case 1, P
implies Q if and only if the value of Q is true when one checks it. In case 4,
P implies Q is true if and only if the value of P is false when one checks it.

~~~
narag
Sorry, but I still think that checking what a very old person is drinking is
stupid, no matter how much notation you add to it.

~~~
mbrubeck
Yes, that's the point. The bouncer _doesn't_ need to check the old man, and
the card player _doesn't_ need to check the third card.

This is obvious when given the bar context, but less obvious when the same set
of rules is taken out of any human context.

