[NOTE: This was a discussion post asking if anyone would mind giving feedback on a very rough draft in progress.
If you are downvoting it because you do not want to see discussion posts asking for feedback like this, then by all means, that's a valid use of a downvote.
But if you are downvoting it in order to express your opinion of the quality of the draft, I urge you to reconsider]
This is another work in progress coming at the DI issue from a somewhat different direction. It's contained in the comments of the original, and I'm posting this to ask for more wonderful beta-reader critics to tell me if it's a step in the right direction. (It's still very informal writing, but it's the ideas I'm dealing with now.)
And about what I'm looking for in the LW audience, someone asked me in a private message:
... who is the audience, here? Are you hoping that LW readers are school administrators, who will introduce DI into their schools? Are you hoping that they are teachers, who will introduce DI into their classes? Are you hoping that they are students, who will be able to seek out instructors using DI? ...
I'm personally interested because I have an interest in alternate education methods; I think the method sounds promising and what I know matches up with what I know about solid epistemology. The people who are interested in epistemic rationality (another group you could tailor posts towards) would probably be interested in learning about epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others.
And I said:
Oh, I dunno about DI involving "epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others". The founder recently wrote a book about what John Stuart Mill could have done for education, so that's the epistemology that DI is applying.
So actually, another reason I keep using Newton's laws analogies is that I suspect there's an analogious 'general relativity' to be found.
So what I really want is for the people from the LW audience to learn DI theory themselves, because I think they could improve the theory.
Well, that's the major part of what I want that's important here. I also had to add:
you remember how I mentioned 'creative strategic twists' [for how we could help DI win, and how DI could help us win], and indicated that the inspiration for that came from comparing the Michel Thomas lessons with DI proper (the internal details of each and their separate histories)?
That's another long-inferential distance topic...
But that's not important here (except to disclose that is where I'm coming from). LWers would first have to understand DI to fully grasp that. And I am significantly less certain of my current beliefs about those 'strategic twists' (although still pretty certain), and LWers proficient in DI would be the best to evaluate the ideas.
I... if I had to list a million different things I expect I might one day be asked, I don't think "Are you from the church of scientology?" would ever occur to me. I have no idea what 'Narconon" is.
Well, DI is a way of applying a classification of knowledge to creating effective communications of other knowledge, but that's not the point. The analogy wasn't meant to be expanded beyond that, because it's not an argument by analogy, just explaining what this difficulty feels like from my perspective.
And the only obvious possible way I've been able to see around the difficulty so far, the only thing that could make it easier to convince you that DI is awesome than it would be to convince a Roman general (who thinks ballistas are the apex of possible military technology) that physics is awesome is that you already have generalized concepts of things like "science" and "rationality" that I can activate with verbal tags like "science" and "rationality".
So I'm trying to leverage that.
The only thing I'm trying to sell you is that you try to get a copy of Theory of Instruction yourself from a local university library and at least try to start reading the section/chapter summaries. And even if you can't get it at a library, the book is forty dollars at the ADI store, which is a damn cheap text book.
The reason you should care if DI is effective is that showing you the results from the Project Follow-Through graphs and the quote from the meta-analysis is the only quick clear way I've been able to think of to convince you that doing so is worth your time.
(And yeah, I solemnly swear that I'm not getting a cut of that $40 bucks in any way, shape, or form. I bloody well hope that if I ever tried to scam people I'd be able to come up with more effective ways than this...)
I'm pretty certain (say, 98%) that (1) you aren't a member of the Church of Scientology and (2) the CoS has nothing to do with "Direct Instruction", but it seems worth pointing out that after Jem asked you whether you are a member of the CoS you replied with something that strongly suggests you aren't without actually saying so. Just for the sake of explicitness, would you care to answer the question? :-)