Anecdotally, this post interested me in direct instruction; none of yours did. Going back and looking, I finally found (16 paragraphs into the “quick sketch of the basic theory” section, and 7 pages of text into the post) a sentence that hinted at the intriguing description in this post: “This is why I say that a huge part of the basics of DI is ‘guided-induction’ (my term, not used in the field).”
Remember that, inductively, every sentence I read without knowing what I’m reading about or becoming interested lowers my belief that I will eventually find out what I’m reading about and become interested. The “show, don’t tell” maxim in writing helps to defend against results like 7 pages of sharing your enthusiasm before giving any clue as to what distinguishes the subject of your enthusiasm from the closest 100 enthusiasm-gathering subjects.
At this point, I have nothing more detailed to respond to that than, “I am now extremely aware of that, but thank you for telling me again, because the extra repetition couldn’t hurt my chances of remembering to thoroughly apply it in the future.”
Oh no, I know DAMN well I could’ve done WAY better if I’d been less stupid in the first place! Although if I had to communicate with my past self, I think the best thing I could have told him would be just to put a note at the beginning of the original post saying explicitly that it was a draft with many, many problems, but that I was pretty damn sure DI was a super-important topic to bring to the attention of LW, so if anyone would be so super-cool nice as to give me some feedback on how to make it more presentable...
There’s no way I could communicate the things I’ve learned so far to him more effectively than his resulting experience would teach him.
Anecdotally, this post interested me in direct instruction; none of yours did. Going back and looking, I finally found (16 paragraphs into the “quick sketch of the basic theory” section, and 7 pages of text into the post) a sentence that hinted at the intriguing description in this post: “This is why I say that a huge part of the basics of DI is ‘guided-induction’ (my term, not used in the field).”
Remember that, inductively, every sentence I read without knowing what I’m reading about or becoming interested lowers my belief that I will eventually find out what I’m reading about and become interested. The “show, don’t tell” maxim in writing helps to defend against results like 7 pages of sharing your enthusiasm before giving any clue as to what distinguishes the subject of your enthusiasm from the closest 100 enthusiasm-gathering subjects.
At this point, I have nothing more detailed to respond to that than, “I am now extremely aware of that, but thank you for telling me again, because the extra repetition couldn’t hurt my chances of remembering to thoroughly apply it in the future.”
Sorry to f5 it, then—I just got the impression you were thinking inferential distance was the main problem.
Oh no, I know DAMN well I could’ve done WAY better if I’d been less stupid in the first place! Although if I had to communicate with my past self, I think the best thing I could have told him would be just to put a note at the beginning of the original post saying explicitly that it was a draft with many, many problems, but that I was pretty damn sure DI was a super-important topic to bring to the attention of LW, so if anyone would be so super-cool nice as to give me some feedback on how to make it more presentable...
There’s no way I could communicate the things I’ve learned so far to him more effectively than his resulting experience would teach him.
Uh, does this seem like an interesting idea?