DanArmak comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 03 April 2012 12:42AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (858)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: matt 13 April 2012 03:50:38AM *  14 points [-]

Your claim is too large for the evidence you present in support of it.

Teaching someone math who is not good at math is hard, but "will in all probability never understand matrix calculus"!? I don't think you're using the Try Harder.

Assume teaching is hard (list of weak evidence: it's a three year undergraduate degree; humanity has hardly allowed itself to run any proper experiments in the field, and those that have been run seem usually to be generally ignored by professional practitioners; it's massively subject to the typical mind fallacy and most practitioners don't know that fallacy exists). That you, "in your youth" (without having studied teaching), "once" tutored a woman who you couldn't teach very well… doesn't support any very strong conclusion.

It seems very likely to me that Omega could teach matrix calculus to someone with IQ 90 given reasonable time and motivation from the student. One of the things I'm willing to devote significant resources to in the coming years is making education into a proper science. Given the tools of that proper science I humbly submit that you could teach your former student a lot. Track the progress of the Khan Academy for some promising developments in the field.

Comment author: DanArmak 23 April 2012 01:13:30PM 1 point [-]

list of weak evidence

Some of it is weak evidence for the hardness claim (3 years degree), some against (all the rest). Does that match what you meant?

Comment author: matt 24 April 2012 07:28:04AM *  1 point [-]

I'd intended a different meaning of "hard". On reflection your interpretation seems a very reasonable inference from what I wrote.

What I meant: Teaching is hard enough that you shouldn't expect to find it easy without having spent any time studying it. Even as a well educated westerner, the bits of teaching you can reasonably expect to pick up won't take you far down the path to mastery.

(Thank you for you comment - it got me thinking.)