You can point at goal factoring and turbocharging, and recognize ways in which the first person in each example is sort of missing the point. Those first three people, as described, are following the rules sort of just because—they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, because they’re supposed to do it, without ever pausing to ask who’s doing the supposing, and why.
This might just be nitpicking, but given that the very same post is also talking about how valuable it is to get genuinely curious about why people might not be learning well, it seems worth mentioning...
My first reaction reading those examples was not that the people in question were missing the point. Rather I took it to mean that they were at a stage of their learning where they were learning the basic technique and did not yet have it automated enough to have any working memory to spare to also think about the big picture. At such a point, it doesn’t seem clear to me that stopping to ask questions about the big picture even would be beneficial; procedural “how” understanding and conceptual “why” understanding usually develop hand-in-hand, so you can’t reason about the “why” very well before you have enough of the “how” down (and vice versa).
Of course it’s possible to get stuck in only the “how” and not even try to understand the “why”, but to me the examples as written don’t convey that these people are making that particular mistake.
This might just be nitpicking, but given that the very same post is also talking about how valuable it is to get genuinely curious about why people might not be learning well, it seems worth mentioning...
My first reaction reading those examples was not that the people in question were missing the point. Rather I took it to mean that they were at a stage of their learning where they were learning the basic technique and did not yet have it automated enough to have any working memory to spare to also think about the big picture. At such a point, it doesn’t seem clear to me that stopping to ask questions about the big picture even would be beneficial; procedural “how” understanding and conceptual “why” understanding usually develop hand-in-hand, so you can’t reason about the “why” very well before you have enough of the “how” down (and vice versa).
Of course it’s possible to get stuck in only the “how” and not even try to understand the “why”, but to me the examples as written don’t convey that these people are making that particular mistake.