Detecting And Bridging Inferential Distance For Learners
Roughly: How to notice when someone has more levels of expertise than you do in some area and then effectively and ethically acquire their skills/wisdom/knowledge.
Don't forget the problem from the other side, too: how to detect and bridge inferential distence for knowledge-havers, i.e., how to find the knowledge-gap and convey the information to them. (That was actually the long-delayed article I'm working on, given my success in teaching others and my difficulty in getting others to convey knowledge to me when the roles are reversed.)
EDIT: Nevermind, I didn't read the discussion before saying that.
(The use of the term "knowledge haver" rather than "teacher" was deliberate.)
Less Wrong is a large community of very smart people with a wide spectrum of expertise, and I think relatively little of that value has been tapped.
Like my post The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, this is meant to be a community-driven post. The first goal is to identify topics the Less Wrong community would like to read more about. The second goal is to encourage Less Wrongers to write on those topics. (Respecting, of course, the implicit and fuzzy guidelines for what should be posted to Less Wrong.)
One problem is that those with expertise on a subject don't necessarily feel competent to write a front-page post on it. If that's the case, please comment here explaining that you might be able to write one of the requested posts, but you'd like a writing collaborator. We'll try to find you one.
Rules
You may either:
or...
I will regularly update the list of suggested Less Wrong posts, ranking them in descending order of votes (like this).
The List So Far (updated 02/11/11)