Responding to Silas's comment about the learning side of the equation. He wrote:
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.)
(The use of the term "knowledge haver" rather than "teacher" was deliberate.)
Yes, I used the activity oriented "learner" over the institutional role of "student" specifically because I was trying to emphasize general life skills.
I think it says something about our culture that there doesn't appear to be a common term to describe "one who conveys a lesson" but that doesn't have the connotations of "teacher" in that it is something people do for money. When I suggested an article for "teachers" I used the best non-neologism I could think of. Having thought about this some more I'm wondering if I "mentor" might be a better term than "teacher"?
The trick with mentoring is that its a long term process and is less about delivery of pre-specified lessons and more about delivering supplementary insight into the mentee's ongoing currently articulated life processes.
Thinking about the terminological issues, it strikes me that these conceptual framing issues have implications for what kinds of learning/teaching are actually possible. Perhaps a lot of the skills here involve having a realistic model of a normal person's willingness and capacity to learn? Maybe you just can't teach/mentor/tutor very well without long term insight and life-driven discovery of knowledge gaps? Maybe other languages cut the world in better ways? For example there's senpai and kohai in Japanese, but that also carries baggage about organizational status hierarchies rather than transmission of specialist expertise itself.
I agree that there's no commonly used term for what you want to describe, and "knowledge haver" is just as problematic. Ideally, people will alternate between being a mentor and learner throughout their lives -- the process never ends.
Btw, though my article on this matter is ballooning, the advice for "teachers" amounts to:
a) Actually understand the subject matter yourself, in the sense of having a model that connects to your understanding of everything else. (Obligatory plug: that means Level 2.)
b) Identify the nearest point of common...
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)