[SEQ RERUN] Teaching the Unteachable

MinibearRex

Today's post, Teaching the Unteachable was originally published on 03 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are many things we do that we can't easily understand how we do them. Teaching them is therefore a challenge.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Unteachable Excellence, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Teaching the Unteachable was originally published on 03 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are many things we do that we can't easily understand how we do them. Teaching them is therefore a challenge.

Vague thought, drawing on (!) Betty Edwards' approach to drawing: it seems that communication between people is verbal by default. Betty Edwards has some anecdotes suggesting that groups can learn some things from communicating to each other visually (drawing representations of their thoughts) that they can't easily learn from communicating to each other verbally. Have people followed up on this idea? It seems like potentially valuable lowish-hanging fruit in improving interpersonal communication, especially for people who don't think primarily verbally.

(I asked Val if CFAR had done anything along these lines. Apparently the 2011 megacamp had a drawing portion and then it was never tried again. He didn't know more about why though.)

Drawing can be also used to teach a skill of "being specific".

Divide students in pairs. The students sit with their backs to each other, no one can look at what the other one is doing. Prepare a picture and give it to one student. The student is supposed to describe it and the other student is supposed to draw the same picture based on the description. At the end, compare the two pictures. Then look at the pictures produced by other pairs, and discuss why sometimes things went right or wrong.

(An example of a typical mistake: One student says &quo... (read more)

3Vaniver13y

Some of the expert elicitation stuff I've read recommends having experts draw distributions for some uncertain variable, then show each other their distributions, and then talk about why they did what they did- this'll often reveal where they have different information quickly and easily, and this works much better than having them compare point estimates or verbal descriptions. Similarly, drawing causal models and Bayes nets of situations seems like an easy visual representation of things that may be difficult to quickly convey verbally. What sort of things are you imagining communicating?