I think this depends on your audience. If you want to explain to one person, look for Mind-Hangers. There’s a chance they don’t get it, but then you go to a replacement. This is faster than explaining from the ground up. If you use text to explain to many people, each Mind-Hanger is going to lose you that portion of your audience which isn’t familiar with it. You’d have to design a conversation graph for people to follow, browsing through Mind-Hangers until they find one that fits them. This is faster for the reader than if you’d explained from the ground up, but slower for you. Reconciling the models so you can continue telling everyone the same stuff is an extra step that wouldn’t be necessary in a one-on-one conversation. Keeping the models separate multiplies your work and hinders the economies of scale Web 2.0 grants us.
In the “Teach With Examples First” section, I make Gowers’s point that sliding down the ladder of abstraction is a good source of universal mind-hangers.
I think this depends on your audience. If you want to explain to one person, look for Mind-Hangers. There’s a chance they don’t get it, but then you go to a replacement. This is faster than explaining from the ground up. If you use text to explain to many people, each Mind-Hanger is going to lose you that portion of your audience which isn’t familiar with it. You’d have to design a conversation graph for people to follow, browsing through Mind-Hangers until they find one that fits them. This is faster for the reader than if you’d explained from the ground up, but slower for you. Reconciling the models so you can continue telling everyone the same stuff is an extra step that wouldn’t be necessary in a one-on-one conversation. Keeping the models separate multiplies your work and hinders the economies of scale Web 2.0 grants us.
In the “Teach With Examples First” section, I make Gowers’s point that sliding down the ladder of abstraction is a good source of universal mind-hangers.