Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn’t lossless compression, I hadn’t considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that “Thinking Fast and Slow” continue to use the words “fast” and “slow”. As such, these were quite novel points:
they don’t immediately and easily seem like you already understand them if you haven’t been exposed to that particular source
they don’t overshadow people who do know them into assuming that the names contain the most important features
The notion of using various examples to “triangulate” a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a Venn diagram with 3 circles, each representing an example. I don’t think I have mental models for several aspects of learning. Gwern’s write up on spaced repetition gave me an understanding about how memorization works, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a similar gap in my model (or lack thereof) for how understanding works.
(I’m not sure the triangulation metaphor lends much additional predictive power. However, an explicit model is a step up from a vague notion that it’s useful to have more examples with more variety.)
Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn’t lossless compression, I hadn’t considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that “Thinking Fast and Slow” continue to use the words “fast” and “slow”. As such, these were quite novel points:
The notion of using various examples to “triangulate” a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a Venn diagram with 3 circles, each representing an example. I don’t think I have mental models for several aspects of learning. Gwern’s write up on spaced repetition gave me an understanding about how memorization works, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a similar gap in my model (or lack thereof) for how understanding works.
(I’m not sure the triangulation metaphor lends much additional predictive power. However, an explicit model is a step up from a vague notion that it’s useful to have more examples with more variety.)