You really do have to gesture vaguely, and then say “GO DO THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO”, and guide them to reflect on what they’re doing when they don’t know what they’re doing.
This is pretty much what I’m referring as the “mystery”, it’s not that it’s fundamentally obscure, it’s just that the expected contract of teaching of “I will tell you how to do what I expect you to do in clear language” breaks down at this point, and instead you would need to say “I’ve been giving you many examples that work backwards from a point where the problem has already been recognized and a suitable solution context has been recalled or invented. Your actual work is going to involve recognizing problems, matching them with solution contexts, and if you have an advanced position, coming up with new solution frameworks. I have given you very little actionable advice for doing this part because I don’t know how to describe how it’s done and neither do other teachers. I basically hope that your brain somehow picks up on how to do this part on its own after you have worked through many exercises, but it’s entirely possible that it fails to do that for one reason or another and then you might be out of luck for being able to work in this field.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a teacher actually spell things out like this, and this doesn’t seem to be anything like a common knowledge thing.
That’s definitely a thing too, but I’m saying that “I don’t know how to describe how it’s done” isn’t the only factor here. Often you do know how to describe how it’s done, and you can converse in great detail about exactly how it’s done with others who “get it”, but teaching is difficult because the student lacks the prerequisites concepts so they cannot assemble them.
So for example, say I wanted to teach you how to make an apple pie, but you didn’t know what an apple was. If I’m lucky, I could describe it’s shape/size/color/taste and you’d say “Ah! I know those! We call them something else.”. If I’m unlucky, I say “Well, it’s a round fruit..” and you cut me off to say “Wtf is ‘round’. Also, wtf is ‘fruit’”. At some point, if you just don’t have language at all, I’m going to have to go get an apple and point to it while saying “apple!”. Then I’m going to have to go get another different apple, and point to that too. And then point to a nectarine and shake my head while saying “No apple!”.
It’s not enough to have a language to describe what I’m doing, if you do not share it. I simply cannot describe to you the recipe for making an apple pie until you have a concept for the individual ingredients, so if you don’t have a concept for those, and you don’t have the concepts for the sub-ingredients necessary to build the ingredients, then I’m going to have to start pointing and saying “yes apple” or “no apple” until I’m pretty sure you know what an apple is.
It can get tricky sometimes when people think that they have the necessary ingredients, but actually carve up the conceptual space wrong—especially if the carving is kinda similar in a lot of ways, but lacks the underlying structure that connects it with the pieces you’d like to teach.
It’s tricky because it’s not about a single tree of categories. There are multiple types of relationships (A causes B, A build B, A manages B, A does something to B, A describes B, etc.) which form multiples hierarchies (a holarchy). This means that the space of concepts (objects/categories) is multidimensional, sort of around 10-dimensional (exact number is irrelevant, just to illustrate). As a result, people cannot perceive/imagine the holarchy (and there actually are overlapping and conflicting alternative holarchies) the way they can a category tree. They also can’t easily think about all the dimensions (since their number is bigger than the “magic number”). And there is also no way to really talk about this. System thinking, ontologies, etc. are not good enough at the moment.
What happens as a result is that you need people to spend decades building their own understanding of this world (essentially do something similar to what Chapman calls remodeling—https://metarationality.com/remodeling ). Example of LW understanding of this is in Rationalism before the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/?commentId=oZtsFc5oCMA9Zk5Tg , but I would argue that the LW and the rationalist community still hasn’t integrated the existing thinking (all the threads) on the topic, including stuff that has been out since the 1960s. Which is an interesting problem/opportunity.
This is pretty much what I’m referring as the “mystery”, it’s not that it’s fundamentally obscure, it’s just that the expected contract of teaching of “I will tell you how to do what I expect you to do in clear language” breaks down at this point, and instead you would need to say “I’ve been giving you many examples that work backwards from a point where the problem has already been recognized and a suitable solution context has been recalled or invented. Your actual work is going to involve recognizing problems, matching them with solution contexts, and if you have an advanced position, coming up with new solution frameworks. I have given you very little actionable advice for doing this part because I don’t know how to describe how it’s done and neither do other teachers. I basically hope that your brain somehow picks up on how to do this part on its own after you have worked through many exercises, but it’s entirely possible that it fails to do that for one reason or another and then you might be out of luck for being able to work in this field.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a teacher actually spell things out like this, and this doesn’t seem to be anything like a common knowledge thing.
That’s definitely a thing too, but I’m saying that “I don’t know how to describe how it’s done” isn’t the only factor here. Often you do know how to describe how it’s done, and you can converse in great detail about exactly how it’s done with others who “get it”, but teaching is difficult because the student lacks the prerequisites concepts so they cannot assemble them.
So for example, say I wanted to teach you how to make an apple pie, but you didn’t know what an apple was. If I’m lucky, I could describe it’s shape/size/color/taste and you’d say “Ah! I know those! We call them something else.”. If I’m unlucky, I say “Well, it’s a round fruit..” and you cut me off to say “Wtf is ‘round’. Also, wtf is ‘fruit’”. At some point, if you just don’t have language at all, I’m going to have to go get an apple and point to it while saying “apple!”. Then I’m going to have to go get another different apple, and point to that too. And then point to a nectarine and shake my head while saying “No apple!”.
It’s not enough to have a language to describe what I’m doing, if you do not share it. I simply cannot describe to you the recipe for making an apple pie until you have a concept for the individual ingredients, so if you don’t have a concept for those, and you don’t have the concepts for the sub-ingredients necessary to build the ingredients, then I’m going to have to start pointing and saying “yes apple” or “no apple” until I’m pretty sure you know what an apple is.
It can get tricky sometimes when people think that they have the necessary ingredients, but actually carve up the conceptual space wrong—especially if the carving is kinda similar in a lot of ways, but lacks the underlying structure that connects it with the pieces you’d like to teach.
It’s tricky because it’s not about a single tree of categories. There are multiple types of relationships (A causes B, A build B, A manages B, A does something to B, A describes B, etc.) which form multiples hierarchies (a holarchy). This means that the space of concepts (objects/categories) is multidimensional, sort of around 10-dimensional (exact number is irrelevant, just to illustrate). As a result, people cannot perceive/imagine the holarchy (and there actually are overlapping and conflicting alternative holarchies) the way they can a category tree. They also can’t easily think about all the dimensions (since their number is bigger than the “magic number”). And there is also no way to really talk about this. System thinking, ontologies, etc. are not good enough at the moment.
What happens as a result is that you need people to spend decades building their own understanding of this world (essentially do something similar to what Chapman calls remodeling—https://metarationality.com/remodeling ). Example of LW understanding of this is in Rationalism before the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/?commentId=oZtsFc5oCMA9Zk5Tg , but I would argue that the LW and the rationalist community still hasn’t integrated the existing thinking (all the threads) on the topic, including stuff that has been out since the 1960s. Which is an interesting problem/opportunity.