I feel like you’ve taken a useful insight (“We can help people understand things more easily if we can translate them into a form they’re already familiar with”) and gone way too far with it, or, at the very least, failed to sufficiently explain your reasoning. You’ve provided a lot of examples, but the analogy you provided in the first few paragraphs doesn’t necessarily work with all of them, so the reader is left to fill in the blanks and guess at what you mean.
A self-taught singer can translate from heard notes to sung notes, but can’t translate either to notes on a staff; a self-taught guitarist is missing a different subset of those skills.
What skills? “Music skills”? Knowing how to play a guitar and knowing how sing are both subsets of “music skills”, and neither requires the ability to read music, but could you really argue in good faith that someone with an extensive voice performance education doesn’t “understand” music just because they don’t know how to play a guitar?
You can be good at translating other people’s facial expressions to emotional states, but lousy at translating them to pencil sketches; your friend is the opposite; which of you “understands” human faces better?
I do, because I can extract more information from them. I think you would be hard-pressed to convincingly argue that the ability to recreate something in a different medium demonstrates “understanding”.
A bilingual person can translate a Japanese sentence with the word “integral” to English, without knowing what integral means.
This is a fairly trivial assertion, and I’m not exactly sure how it contributes to your overall point.
I’d be interested to read more about this in the event you were to flesh out and expand on your thoughts a bit more.
but could you really argue in good faith that someone with an extensive voice performance education doesn’t “understand” music just because they don’t know how to play a guitar?
I think you would be hard-pressed to convincingly argue that the ability to recreate something in a different medium demonstrates “understanding”.
It wasn’t my intention to argue such things. I’m not trying to answer the question “does someone understand X?” Instead, I’m saying we might not need that question, because it’s not as informative as “can they translate X to Y?”
Please forgive me if I sound obtuse here, but the title of your post is “Understanding is translation”, which sounds like you are saying that the two are equivalent. If, in your formulation, the two are equivalent, then “Does someone understand X?” and “Can they translate X to Y?” are equivalent questions.
I meant more like the answer to “do they understand X?” is best viewed not as a simple “yes” or “no” or a scalar quantity in between, but a combination of answers to “can they translate X to Y?” for many different Y. These answers can be surprisingly independent from each other, with some people better at translating X to Y1 and others better at translating it to Y2 etc.
Edit: maybe the post is unnecessarily confusing if you don’t know the phrase “two-place word”, which is LW jargon but not very well known otherwise. My bad.
Yes, given your explanation, I do understand what you’re trying to say, and I don’t feel that you’ve sufficiently made your case. For example, how would your formulation handle tacit knowledge, given that such knowledge is inherently difficult or impossible to translate?
Or, to give a different example: suppose I have a puzzle with four pieces. The puzzle’s edges do not form a regular polygon, and each piece is a simple geometric shape, such that the correct orientation of the pieces is ambiguous without already knowing the correct orientation. I have a picture of the completed puzzle which shows how all of the pieces are arranged, and I am tasked with explaining to someone else how to arrange the puzzle. They cannot see the picture, and I cannot see them or their puzzle pieces. If I am unable to explain how to successfully arrange the puzzle to them, does that indicate that I lack some understanding of the puzzle? Surely not, since by having the picture of the correct orientation, I have all of the information there is to know about the puzzle, do I not?
That’s a fair objection. But to give another analogy, when a non-artist looks at a human face, they think they have all the information too, but they don’t. An artist’s skill isn’t just wielding a pencil, it’s mostly noticing facts about the face. (For example, do you know what percentage of head height is above the line of the eyes?) Similarly, if you practice explaining puzzles to people, you might get better at noticing facts about the puzzles. Or at least in my experience, trying to explain something often makes you more aware of how it works.
For tacit knowledge, I guess the only way to salvage the post is to strain the analogy a bit and say that it’s “translated” into action. Take that for what it’s worth :-)
I feel like you’ve taken a useful insight (“We can help people understand things more easily if we can translate them into a form they’re already familiar with”) and gone way too far with it, or, at the very least, failed to sufficiently explain your reasoning. You’ve provided a lot of examples, but the analogy you provided in the first few paragraphs doesn’t necessarily work with all of them, so the reader is left to fill in the blanks and guess at what you mean.
What skills? “Music skills”? Knowing how to play a guitar and knowing how sing are both subsets of “music skills”, and neither requires the ability to read music, but could you really argue in good faith that someone with an extensive voice performance education doesn’t “understand” music just because they don’t know how to play a guitar?
I do, because I can extract more information from them. I think you would be hard-pressed to convincingly argue that the ability to recreate something in a different medium demonstrates “understanding”.
This is a fairly trivial assertion, and I’m not exactly sure how it contributes to your overall point.
I’d be interested to read more about this in the event you were to flesh out and expand on your thoughts a bit more.
It wasn’t my intention to argue such things. I’m not trying to answer the question “does someone understand X?” Instead, I’m saying we might not need that question, because it’s not as informative as “can they translate X to Y?”
Please forgive me if I sound obtuse here, but the title of your post is “Understanding is translation”, which sounds like you are saying that the two are equivalent. If, in your formulation, the two are equivalent, then “Does someone understand X?” and “Can they translate X to Y?” are equivalent questions.
I meant more like the answer to “do they understand X?” is best viewed not as a simple “yes” or “no” or a scalar quantity in between, but a combination of answers to “can they translate X to Y?” for many different Y. These answers can be surprisingly independent from each other, with some people better at translating X to Y1 and others better at translating it to Y2 etc.
Edit: maybe the post is unnecessarily confusing if you don’t know the phrase “two-place word”, which is LW jargon but not very well known otherwise. My bad.
Yes, given your explanation, I do understand what you’re trying to say, and I don’t feel that you’ve sufficiently made your case. For example, how would your formulation handle tacit knowledge, given that such knowledge is inherently difficult or impossible to translate?
Or, to give a different example: suppose I have a puzzle with four pieces. The puzzle’s edges do not form a regular polygon, and each piece is a simple geometric shape, such that the correct orientation of the pieces is ambiguous without already knowing the correct orientation. I have a picture of the completed puzzle which shows how all of the pieces are arranged, and I am tasked with explaining to someone else how to arrange the puzzle. They cannot see the picture, and I cannot see them or their puzzle pieces. If I am unable to explain how to successfully arrange the puzzle to them, does that indicate that I lack some understanding of the puzzle? Surely not, since by having the picture of the correct orientation, I have all of the information there is to know about the puzzle, do I not?
That’s a fair objection. But to give another analogy, when a non-artist looks at a human face, they think they have all the information too, but they don’t. An artist’s skill isn’t just wielding a pencil, it’s mostly noticing facts about the face. (For example, do you know what percentage of head height is above the line of the eyes?) Similarly, if you practice explaining puzzles to people, you might get better at noticing facts about the puzzles. Or at least in my experience, trying to explain something often makes you more aware of how it works.
For tacit knowledge, I guess the only way to salvage the post is to strain the analogy a bit and say that it’s “translated” into action. Take that for what it’s worth :-)