I’m going to the effort of telling you this because, due to the value of the comment, I want to encourage similar feedback from you in the future.
I’ll be sure to criticize you in the future, then.
And I’ll be sure to strive to make your job much smaller. =]
After rereading your last comment here, I just wanted to make clear: I do care very much.
Thank you making an excellent, explicit, compressed list of everything I did wrong. (...Where else than LW would that be obviously non-sarcastic? :P)
It is very valuable and I will be using it to improve. If I had a printer, I’d print it out and put it by my computer. (As it is I’ll just have to save it to a file I use a lot.)
I’m going to the effort of telling you this because, due to the value of the comment, I want to encourage similar feedback from you in the future.
...And if I had never made the attempt, I never would have gotten that feedback from you either. :P
Yes, I realize that you can’t just say, “Well, it’s all right, cuz I learned a valuable lesson!” and then keep doing the same dumb thing, but… whenever I have done a dumb thing, it’s cuz I haven’t learned that lesson yet! So long as you’re not twisting that into an excuse to keep doing the dumb thing, or to avoid trying to learn faster not to do different dumb things in the future, you’ve got it right, right?
So I still think “Just Try It” was good advice.
Problem is that the DI world, in terms of the actual experts on the theory rather than just people who deliver programs, is very small, and most of those experts work together in person rather than communicating online.
So it might take a while to get a response.
Heh, I actually just realized that I’ve been using some non-transparent LessWrong jargon in some of my communications with the DI community, like “inferential distance”.
The problem is that, once you understand the concepts common both on LW and in DI theory, there is so much overlap in meaning that it takes a little bit of conscious thought to remember which way of expressing an idea is appropriate in which context.
[I mean getting the context of LW and DI people confused, of course. In the context of individual sentences, it’s obvious which is most apt, hence why I need to stop myself from switching back and forth without thinking about it.]
No no no! Please don’t mistake my tone! I am so happy that you’re asking me for detailed help with this! Responding to you is not onerous, but joyful!
Writing a “Complete Guide to Task Analysis for Beginners!” is something I’d love to do! I just know it won’t get done very soon.
I’m sorry I keep forgetting to examine my jargon that seems intuitively transparent to me and try to over-estimate how much explanation it needs. From now on I will start compiling a glossary of terms.
But yes, you raise a very important question:
“How much practical use can I get out of DI theory without actually studying it in depth?”
It is true that it is not like a magic item you can just put in your inventory and thereby receive extra points to your teaching ability, but an entire complex, well, theory, for engineering complex educational machines, which you have to understand and master the use of to create such machines yourself.
But still, there must be at least a few quick equivalents to things like pulleys and levers that I could distill for you.
The hardest part of that will be simply noticing what’s not already obvious to you...
How about if I submit the question to the DI community for you?
Ah! Sorry, I was thinking maybe you had understood some of the contents of that thread already before I mentioned it in this one.
Anyway, sorry this reply took so long. I was having scanner issues.
Here’s the first page of Chapter 12 in ToI, “Programs Derived from Tasks” [edit: fixed from accidental link to section of the AthabascaU module]. A definition of “Task Analysis” is, of course, under that heading.
There are details in the definition that rely on knowledge of concepts covered earlier in the book, but as a whole, does it help?
I just realized that page starts the heading “Strict Task Analysis” but I didn’t scan “Transformed Task Analysis” since that’s on the next page, and that’s what you need.
But honestly, it is reasonable of me to direct you to the book yourself, right? Rather than trying to write a ” Complete Guide to Task Analysis for Beginners!” right now?
Indeed.
The reason I did not, rightly or wrongly, was because you have to start off doing this by showing how it applies in the most basic context, like in the AthabascaU module.
This results in a very technical analysis of something that initially seems trivial and pointlessly detailed, and unrelated to the amazing-looking results from studies like Project Follow-Through (which, remember, the meta-analysis says are representative).
I remember glazing over that section in the AthabascaU module myself the first time I read it. And several times after that. Only my emotional experience with the Michel Thomas lessons made me keep focusing on it until it clicked. Way later.
Now, many people on LW surely have much quicker intelligences for such things than I do.
But see the last paragraph of this comment from prase, in which he, at least, is having the same ‘this seems trivial and pointlessly detailed’ reaction after reading the AthabascaU module.
Why was he sticking with it? I believe because he had heard my emotional enthusiasm, and wanted to find out if I was just a crank, or if there was actually a rational reason for all that gushing “this thing is important!”
I believe that in the future, when detailed knowledge of DI has become a common thing on LW among people who never read my original post, some of those people will go back and read it, and go, “Huh? Makes perfect sense to me!” making it an excellent case study of how someone can have read Eliezer’s “Expecting Short Inferential Distances”, marked it in their mind as very true and very useful, studied DI theory, and still had to go and run smack into the brick wall, knowing explicitly that that was what they were doing, before truly emotionally understanding that, yes, it actually does apply to them.
I appreciate your willingness to have an in-depth discussion of this topic with me, and if I had infinite time, I would gladly take you up on it. But since I don’t, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to bow out of discussing the subject of me in order to have more time for the subject of DI.
I have already learned lots of things I think I could apply to better accomplishing similar goals in the future. And I don’t anticipate having to introduce another such wide, deep, complex topic as DI from scratch again.
Again, thank you, and I hope to see more of you in the DI discussion.
I would love to help, of course. Right exactly now I have some stuff from my internship I should bump to the top of my priority list (there were some minor problems last week with the kindies not following the proper procedures for asking for my help when I’m helping someone else, and I need to whip up a short script to model the expectations with the other teachers—Honestly, a huge percentage of behavior problems with kids, especially the youngest ones, are just from them honestly not knowing what you want from them).
But that kind of project is nowhere near as demanding as this, so yeah. Please do use me as a resource. I’m a lot easier to understand in a real-time discussion format.
But I think we might want to hold off on putting this on the main page for a little while, although that might just be because I’m so familiar with the depths of how far DI goes that even a very deep introductory piece seems shallow to me. It’s everyone else’s decision, obviously, since people who aren’t super-familiar with it are the audience.
I… this is one of those issues that if I am in the wrong, I will have to take a break and apply some more intense techniques for getting around my own defensiveness than I usually need to use.
But I really honestly feel no “small note of discord” in my mind that should make me expect to find that I am wrong.
At any rate, since it’s over and done with now, what say the both of us just put the issue far in the back of our minds to allow any potentially useful new thoughts to crystallize by themselves, and refocus our attention on the future of what we need to write about DI?
Oh no, I didn’t mean “Is that all you need?” as in “subtext: I’ve given you enough, go away”. :P
I meant: “I know I need to give you more information. Tell me where I should start.”
I linked to a scanned page of Theory of Instruction here in this comment thread
Ha ha. See here.
Please see “I wasn’t contemplating suicide per se”. I knew in advance that I would decide to keep fighting, as I always do. It is actually a technique I use to cheer myself up, rather like being underwater, and dipping down just a bit so that you can kick off the ground in order to spring back to the surface.
I certainly know I’m very careful thanks to my own experiences to avoid causing unnecessary pain to others, and in fact to try very hard to make people happier.
But I am not fragile. I hurt, but I never break.
I thanked people for their harsh criticism, remember.
I wasn’t contemplating suicide per se, I was just wondering seriously whether the reason I wasn’t was essentially a form of akrasia.
And I have major past issues. I have an intellectual belief that I will one day be able to share true mutual understanding, love, and trust with other people. Relationships that make life worthwhile.
However, due to some traumatic experiences with people I thought I had that with just completely disappearing, even though I can see in retrospect how to discriminate such unreliable people from the real deal, it takes a lot of mental pumping for me to keep up the corresponding emotional belief.
LessWrong is my HOPE. A community that makes me feel that I could expect to find that understanding, love, and trust.
So I certainly wasn’t being “contemptuous of peoples’ time” on purpose, and given that my original post had 20 upvotes at one time, I don’t think the community feels that way either.
If you understand where I’m coming from now and have changed your mind that I did make the right choice, please tell me that.
The first obvious thing that comes to mind is to learn to use task analysis. If you’re going to be working in an environment where the instruction hasn’t been designed to contradict misrules before the students develop them, you’re going to need to do lots of correction.
Remember that unless you actually get one of the DI programs like “Connecting Math Concepts”, anything you do will be just little chunks of big-DI fading off into little-DI at the edges. Doesn’t mean it won’t help you do better than average, but it’ll be way below what’s really possible.
Is that useful? Anything in there unclear? Like how to learn task analysis?
[Edit: sorry, you said “usually a high school age kid”. There’s no high school level “Connecting Math Concepts”]
No, I’m on a full time internship as an elementary teacher. The theory I’m studying by myself.
I’m surrounded by people who know how to deliver DI programs, how to do superb classroom management, etc, but not by anyone who could read Theory of Instruction in one weekend and write a report on it (How many posts of lorem ipsum would Misha have to make for me to upvote for the karma system to accurately reflect the props he deserves :P).
But yeah, “Just Try It”, right?
And it’s the LW community that I have a strong emotional desire to get involved in, and the eventual intended audience anyway.
Editors are feedback. The only place I was gonna find suitable editors was LW. Rather than PMing people, I posted it to the section called “discussion”.
For heaven’s sake, what else was I supposed to do?! :P
That would (I’d have thought) take quite a lot more than CDN$20 worth of time. (Unless I were just skimming through it rather than reading it thoroughly enough to be any use.) Though I’d presumably expect some nonzero benefit from reading the book, at least in the “99%” scenario, and that would need factoring in.
I already thought of all that. You know I’m just trying to get you to read the books. :P
Obviously, we’d both have to give our bets (well, my money and your promise) to a respected public figure, someone like Eliezer being an obvious candidate in the context of LW, of course.
The other thing besides just trying to get you to read is that I’m annoyed that you still have such a ridiculously high estimate of me being involved in scientology as 1%. I think that from what you know of me now, and what I know of you, I should have a higher estimate of you being involved with the CoS :P
We’d get it settled by a respected public figure. Someone like Eliezer obviously springs to mind in the context of LW.
And believe me, I thought of how me just offering the bet should update him above his current level. I’m just trying to get him to read books, obviously :P
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.”