On a similar note, I’ve heard that professional golfers fear teaching another person, because doing so can ruin your game forever. Fine motor control is pretty much impossible to put into words, and whatever they decide to give as instruction they are tempted to follow themselves.
I think you got wrong what sort of things are easier to learn/do than to teach. Anything done primarily by the subconscious could well be forever out of the understanding of your conscious. If you can’t understand how you do something, how can you expect to teach it? For example, we’ve been trying for decades to teach a computer how to think, something every human can do but we all do it subconsciously. Nor can we teach another human who, due to localized brain damage, has lost an ability.
Note that our minds are massively parallel calculators that don’t necessarily require language, yet our instructions are sequential and language-based.
Note that our minds are massively parallel calculators that don’t necessarily require language, yet our instructions are sequential and language-based.
Not all teaching is sequential and/or language based. It’s just the most popular way to teach. Especially for people who believe that reductionism is useful.
NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) is for example not taught in a sequentlial fashion if you learn it from Richard Bandler or students of Bandler.
That makes conversations about whether it’s backed up by scientific evidence hard, because the idea of science is that you can test sequential step to see if they work.
yet our instructions are sequential and language-based.
Care to elaborate on that?
Edit: OK, I realize why I was confused by this. The act of instruction in a subject, as opposed to a metaphor for elements of thought as computer instructions?
Sure. Our brains contain millions of neurons working in parallel. Our spoken words come one at a time; thus the natural way to speak is one word at a time, one after the other, which in computer lingo is sequential instruction. While it is entirely possible to say thinks like, “the first thousand things you do are these, the second thousand things are those, …” I can guarantee you no human will be able to follow that instruction, not in the requisite number of milliseconds anyways. Besides which, instructions of this nature will also be out of reach of the instructor’s consciousness, so he too will be unable to understand how he does it.
Like Lumifer said, you can still teach such things, but you do it differently. You don’t explain how much to twitch each of the hundreds of muscles you have to maintain balance, you plunk your kid on a bicycle and steady the bike and let him figure it out on his own. Ironically, tasks like these that would be impossible to verbally teach or understand, are simple enough that you can do them without thinking about it.
If you can’t understand how you do something, how can you expect to teach it?
By pointing out the path to be followed. Knowing how to acquire a capability is different from understanding how that capability works. Easy example: riding a bicycle.
On a similar note, I’ve heard that professional golfers fear teaching another person, because doing so can ruin your game forever. Fine motor control is pretty much impossible to put into words, and whatever they decide to give as instruction they are tempted to follow themselves.
I think you got wrong what sort of things are easier to learn/do than to teach. Anything done primarily by the subconscious could well be forever out of the understanding of your conscious. If you can’t understand how you do something, how can you expect to teach it? For example, we’ve been trying for decades to teach a computer how to think, something every human can do but we all do it subconsciously. Nor can we teach another human who, due to localized brain damage, has lost an ability.
Note that our minds are massively parallel calculators that don’t necessarily require language, yet our instructions are sequential and language-based.
Not all teaching is sequential and/or language based. It’s just the most popular way to teach. Especially for people who believe that reductionism is useful.
NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) is for example not taught in a sequentlial fashion if you learn it from Richard Bandler or students of Bandler.
That makes conversations about whether it’s backed up by scientific evidence hard, because the idea of science is that you can test sequential step to see if they work.
Care to elaborate on that? Edit: OK, I realize why I was confused by this. The act of instruction in a subject, as opposed to a metaphor for elements of thought as computer instructions?
Sure. Our brains contain millions of neurons working in parallel. Our spoken words come one at a time; thus the natural way to speak is one word at a time, one after the other, which in computer lingo is sequential instruction. While it is entirely possible to say thinks like, “the first thousand things you do are these, the second thousand things are those, …” I can guarantee you no human will be able to follow that instruction, not in the requisite number of milliseconds anyways. Besides which, instructions of this nature will also be out of reach of the instructor’s consciousness, so he too will be unable to understand how he does it.
Like Lumifer said, you can still teach such things, but you do it differently. You don’t explain how much to twitch each of the hundreds of muscles you have to maintain balance, you plunk your kid on a bicycle and steady the bike and let him figure it out on his own. Ironically, tasks like these that would be impossible to verbally teach or understand, are simple enough that you can do them without thinking about it.
By pointing out the path to be followed. Knowing how to acquire a capability is different from understanding how that capability works. Easy example: riding a bicycle.