1) There is a risk in looking at concrete examples before understanding the relevant abstractions. Your Uber example relies on the fact that you can both look at his concrete example and know you’re seeing the same thing. This condition does not always hold, as often the wrong details jump out as salient.
To give a toy example, if I were to use the examples “King cobra, Black mamba” to contrast with “Boa constrictor, Anaconda” you’d probably see “Ah, I get it! Venomous snakes vs non-venomous snakes”, but that’s not the distinction I’m thinking of so now I have to be more careful with my selection of examples. I could say “King cobra, Reticulated python” vs “Rattlesnake, Anaconda”, but now you’re just going to say “I don’t get it” (or worse yet, you might notice “Ah, Asia vs the Americas!”). At some point you just have to stop the guessing game, say “live young vs laying eggs”, and only get back to the concrete examples once they know where to be looking and why the other details aren’t relevant.
Anything you have to teach which is sufficiently different from the persons pre-existing world view is necessarily going to require the abstractions first. Even when you have concrete real life experiences that this person has gone through themselves, they will simply fail to recognize what is happening to them. Your conclusion “I showed three specific guesses of what Michael’s advice could mean for Drew, but we have no idea what it does mean, if anything.” is kinda the point. When you’re learning new ways of looking at things, you’re not going to immediately be able to cache them out into specific predictions. Noticing this is an important step that must come before evaluating predictions for accuracy if you’re going to evaluate reliably. You do have to be able to get specific eventually, or else the new abstractions won’t have any way to provide value, but “more specificity” isn’t always the best next step.
2) It seems like the main function you have for “can you give me a concrete example” is to force coherence by highlighting the gaps. Asking for concrete examples is one way of doing this, but it is not required. All you really need for that is a desire to understand how their worldview works, and you can do this in the abstract as well. You can ask “Can you give me a concrete example?”, but you could also ask “What do you think of the argument that Uber workers could simply work for McDonald’s instead if Uber isn’t treating them right?”. Their reasoning is in the abstract, and it will have holes in the abstract too.
You could even ask “What do you mean by ‘exploits its workers’?”, so long as it’s clear that your intent is to really grok how their worldview works, and not just trying to pick it apart in order to make them look dumb. In fact, your hypothetical example was a bit jarring to me, because “what do you mean by [..]” is exactly the kind of thing I’d ask and “Come on, you know!” isn’t a response I ever get.
3) Am I understanding your post correctly that you’re giving a real-world example of you not using the skill you’re aiming to teach, and then a purely fictional example of you imagine that the conversation would have gone if you had?
I’d be very hesitant to accept that you’ve drawn the right conclusion about what is actually going on in people’s heads if you cannot show it with actual conversations and at the very least provoke cognitive dissonance, if not agreement and change. Otherwise, you have a “fictitious evidence” problem, and you’re in essence trusting your analysis rather than actually testing your analysis.
You say “Once you’ve mastered the power of specificity, you’ll see this kind of thing everywhere: a statement that at first sounds full of substance, but then turns out to actually be empty.”, but I don’t see any indication anywhere that you’ve actually ruled out the hypothesis “they actually have something to say, but I’ve failed to find it”.
Well, the whole example is a fictional pastiche. I didn’t force myself to make it super real because I didn’t think people would doubt that it was sufficiently realistic. If you want to know a real example of a Steve, it’s me a bunch of times when I first talked to Anna Salamon about various subjects.
Okay, I thought that might be the case but I wasn’t sure because the way it was worded made it sound like the first interaction was real. (“You can see I was showing off my mastery of basic economics.” doesn’t have any “[in this hypothetical]” clarification and “This seemed like a good move to me at the time” also seems like something that could happen in real life but an unusual choice for a hypothetical).
To clarify though, it’s not quite “doubt that it’s sufficiently realistic”. Where your simulated conversation differs from my experience is easily explained by differing subcommunication and preexisting relationships, so it’s not “it doesn’t work this way” but “it doesn’t *have to* work this way”. The other part of it is that even if the transcript was exactly something that happened, I don’t see any satisfying resolution. If it ended in “Huh, I guess I didn’t actually have any coherent point after all”, it would be much stronger evidence that they didn’t actually have a coherent point—even if the conversation were entirely fictional but plausible.
If it ended in “Huh, I guess I didn’t actually have any coherent point after all”, it would be much stronger evidence that they didn’t actually have a coherent point—even if the conversation were entirely fictional but plausible.
Ok I think I see your point! I’ve edited the dialogue to add:
Steve thinks for a little while...
Steve: I don’t know all the exploitative shit Uber does ok? I just think Uber is a greedy company.
1) There is a risk in looking at concrete examples before understanding the relevant abstractions. Your Uber example relies on the fact that you can both look at his concrete example and know you’re seeing the same thing. This condition does not always hold, as often the wrong details jump out as salient.
To give a toy example, if I were to use the examples “King cobra, Black mamba” to contrast with “Boa constrictor, Anaconda” you’d probably see “Ah, I get it! Venomous snakes vs non-venomous snakes”, but that’s not the distinction I’m thinking of so now I have to be more careful with my selection of examples. I could say “King cobra, Reticulated python” vs “Rattlesnake, Anaconda”, but now you’re just going to say “I don’t get it” (or worse yet, you might notice “Ah, Asia vs the Americas!”). At some point you just have to stop the guessing game, say “live young vs laying eggs”, and only get back to the concrete examples once they know where to be looking and why the other details aren’t relevant.
Anything you have to teach which is sufficiently different from the persons pre-existing world view is necessarily going to require the abstractions first. Even when you have concrete real life experiences that this person has gone through themselves, they will simply fail to recognize what is happening to them. Your conclusion “I showed three specific guesses of what Michael’s advice could mean for Drew, but we have no idea what it does mean, if anything.” is kinda the point. When you’re learning new ways of looking at things, you’re not going to immediately be able to cache them out into specific predictions. Noticing this is an important step that must come before evaluating predictions for accuracy if you’re going to evaluate reliably. You do have to be able to get specific eventually, or else the new abstractions won’t have any way to provide value, but “more specificity” isn’t always the best next step.
2) It seems like the main function you have for “can you give me a concrete example” is to force coherence by highlighting the gaps. Asking for concrete examples is one way of doing this, but it is not required. All you really need for that is a desire to understand how their worldview works, and you can do this in the abstract as well. You can ask “Can you give me a concrete example?”, but you could also ask “What do you think of the argument that Uber workers could simply work for McDonald’s instead if Uber isn’t treating them right?”. Their reasoning is in the abstract, and it will have holes in the abstract too.
You could even ask “What do you mean by ‘exploits its workers’?”, so long as it’s clear that your intent is to really grok how their worldview works, and not just trying to pick it apart in order to make them look dumb. In fact, your hypothetical example was a bit jarring to me, because “what do you mean by [..]” is exactly the kind of thing I’d ask and “Come on, you know!” isn’t a response I ever get.
3) Am I understanding your post correctly that you’re giving a real-world example of you not using the skill you’re aiming to teach, and then a purely fictional example of you imagine that the conversation would have gone if you had?
I’d be very hesitant to accept that you’ve drawn the right conclusion about what is actually going on in people’s heads if you cannot show it with actual conversations and at the very least provoke cognitive dissonance, if not agreement and change. Otherwise, you have a “fictitious evidence” problem, and you’re in essence trusting your analysis rather than actually testing your analysis.
You say “Once you’ve mastered the power of specificity, you’ll see this kind of thing everywhere: a statement that at first sounds full of substance, but then turns out to actually be empty.”, but I don’t see any indication anywhere that you’ve actually ruled out the hypothesis “they actually have something to say, but I’ve failed to find it”.
Re (3):
Well, the whole example is a fictional pastiche. I didn’t force myself to make it super real because I didn’t think people would doubt that it was sufficiently realistic. If you want to know a real example of a Steve, it’s me a bunch of times when I first talked to Anna Salamon about various subjects.
Okay, I thought that might be the case but I wasn’t sure because the way it was worded made it sound like the first interaction was real. (“You can see I was showing off my mastery of basic economics.” doesn’t have any “[in this hypothetical]” clarification and “This seemed like a good move to me at the time” also seems like something that could happen in real life but an unusual choice for a hypothetical).
To clarify though, it’s not quite “doubt that it’s sufficiently realistic”. Where your simulated conversation differs from my experience is easily explained by differing subcommunication and preexisting relationships, so it’s not “it doesn’t work this way” but “it doesn’t *have to* work this way”. The other part of it is that even if the transcript was exactly something that happened, I don’t see any satisfying resolution. If it ended in “Huh, I guess I didn’t actually have any coherent point after all”, it would be much stronger evidence that they didn’t actually have a coherent point—even if the conversation were entirely fictional but plausible.
Ok I think I see your point! I’ve edited the dialogue to add: