The post gives a lot of useful material even if I don’t accept as-is a lot of it.
Trying to do specific concept building is very efficient if you are on point with your guess with details of the readers mental architechture. However if your guess is off the result can be actively harmful.
In particular I got seriously stuck with “blizzard is -$100”. This is a pretty alien way to express things to me. And it seemed to be somewhat analogous to the concert grounding which seems that kind of thing might admit to rewording but the rewording didn’t really succeed in my mind. Now I am tangled with problems with the auxillary tools and the point is obscured. Allthought it can be good in being spesific the possible issues are out in the open. If we stayed at more abstract level then my disagremeent on the details would not similarly interfere.
While it is good to be relevant and it is bad to leave the reader in a helpless state, I think there is a case not to subtitue the readers own participation. Mathematical style text where you are supposed to read very little very carefully can be completely approriate. It gets to the point. The long version while it didn’t use that much memory took some time to read. A text that takes long to get gives you a better impression where the thing is going while text tha tis long one starts skimming or trying to guess where the text is heading.
I am reminded a lot about how in languages like C++ you CAN do your own memory management and it can be more efficent than standard automatic hanglng. But just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Giving advice that you should always handle your own memory leads to cases where you spend a lot of routine work to get similar level performance that the automatic would get. And when the automatic solutions get better your code stays at the same level. Leaving out details means that an expert on them can get them better than you. As an author you main job is to say something interesting, to have a point.
In this way people have genuine cognitived diversity and not everyone work like the typical mind. Not spesifying your text to a narrow neuro/cognition type allows you to be polymorphic and be relevant for more people. It’s also very differnt thing to provide hooks for differnt types to actively manage integration of your content than micromanage a very straight and narrow path.
In particular I got seriously stuck with “blizzard is -$100”. This is a pretty alien way to express things to me. [...] Now I am tangled with problems with the auxillary tools and the point is obscured. [...] If we stayed at more abstract level then my disagremeent on the details would not similarly interfere.
But if you’re stuck on how to model driving through the blizzard as having a utility-value of -$100, it means that you would have been stuck on any explanation of “avoid the sunk-cost fallacy” until you understand how that kind of utility-scoring works.
So the specific example was superior to the general statement in revealing where the remaining hole in your understanding is.
Now you can patch the hole yourself by looking up utility-scoring. Alternately, I could have anticipated that not all readers would know about utility-scoring, and explained that in an “earlier chapter”, but it doesn’t fundamentally undermine the value of specificity and mind-anchors to teach concepts better.
I have serious reservations that any experience that can’t be traded on a market has any value that can accurately be dominated in dollars.
It triggers an impulse in me that this is a minor technical flaw that should be overlooked but it increases my cognitive burden and lowers my confidence that the author knows what they are talking about. Sticking your neck out is great. But making the thing long and the parts depend on each other makes errors compond.
In making a claim of “you would have been stuck on any explanation of “avoid the sunk-cost fallacy” until you understand how that kind of utility-scoring works” you are implying that it can not be explained without such scoring. I guess I couldn’t in reality read the explanation of the fallacy on a clean slate because I already know about it beforehand. But science popularisers sometimes make misrepresentations in making curves straight. The good intention doesn’t make up spreading misinformation.
The post gives a lot of useful material even if I don’t accept as-is a lot of it.
Trying to do specific concept building is very efficient if you are on point with your guess with details of the readers mental architechture. However if your guess is off the result can be actively harmful.
In particular I got seriously stuck with “blizzard is -$100”. This is a pretty alien way to express things to me. And it seemed to be somewhat analogous to the concert grounding which seems that kind of thing might admit to rewording but the rewording didn’t really succeed in my mind. Now I am tangled with problems with the auxillary tools and the point is obscured. Allthought it can be good in being spesific the possible issues are out in the open. If we stayed at more abstract level then my disagremeent on the details would not similarly interfere.
While it is good to be relevant and it is bad to leave the reader in a helpless state, I think there is a case not to subtitue the readers own participation. Mathematical style text where you are supposed to read very little very carefully can be completely approriate. It gets to the point. The long version while it didn’t use that much memory took some time to read. A text that takes long to get gives you a better impression where the thing is going while text tha tis long one starts skimming or trying to guess where the text is heading.
I am reminded a lot about how in languages like C++ you CAN do your own memory management and it can be more efficent than standard automatic hanglng. But just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Giving advice that you should always handle your own memory leads to cases where you spend a lot of routine work to get similar level performance that the automatic would get. And when the automatic solutions get better your code stays at the same level. Leaving out details means that an expert on them can get them better than you. As an author you main job is to say something interesting, to have a point.
In this way people have genuine cognitived diversity and not everyone work like the typical mind. Not spesifying your text to a narrow neuro/cognition type allows you to be polymorphic and be relevant for more people. It’s also very differnt thing to provide hooks for differnt types to actively manage integration of your content than micromanage a very straight and narrow path.
But if you’re stuck on how to model driving through the blizzard as having a utility-value of
-$100, it means that you would have been stuck on any explanation of “avoid the sunk-cost fallacy” until you understand how that kind of utility-scoring works.So the specific example was superior to the general statement in revealing where the remaining hole in your understanding is.
Now you can patch the hole yourself by looking up utility-scoring. Alternately, I could have anticipated that not all readers would know about utility-scoring, and explained that in an “earlier chapter”, but it doesn’t fundamentally undermine the value of specificity and mind-anchors to teach concepts better.
I have serious reservations that any experience that can’t be traded on a market has any value that can accurately be dominated in dollars. It triggers an impulse in me that this is a minor technical flaw that should be overlooked but it increases my cognitive burden and lowers my confidence that the author knows what they are talking about. Sticking your neck out is great. But making the thing long and the parts depend on each other makes errors compond.
In making a claim of “you would have been stuck on any explanation of “avoid the sunk-cost fallacy” until you understand how that kind of utility-scoring works” you are implying that it can not be explained without such scoring. I guess I couldn’t in reality read the explanation of the fallacy on a clean slate because I already know about it beforehand. But science popularisers sometimes make misrepresentations in making curves straight. The good intention doesn’t make up spreading misinformation.