AlanCrowe comments on Guessing the Teacher's Password - Less Wrong
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I've just bumped into a fun link about guessing the teachers password. It is only 184 words so here it is:
The meat of the comment is "the handler has to go blind". It took me a while to work out what is being said here. My understanding:
You take up the sport. You hide the scented qtip yourself. You train your dog to sniff it out. Your dog does good. You go to the competition. The judge hides the scented qtip and you don't know where. Your dog does bad. Explanation: Your dog never learned to sniff out the scented qtip, he learned to read you and the tells you gave away when he sniffed near where you knew the qtip to be.
Why is this fun? Well, John Holt's book How Children Fail has a lovely story about guessing the teachers password
Dogs do this too!
The relation of my comment to Eliezer's point is delicate. It is not correct to decenter and imagine yourself as the teacher; Eliezer is not writing pedagogy. You have to decenter and imagine yourself as the sniffer dog. You train hard, winning lots of praise and treats from your owner. You wag your tail happily. Then you go to the competition and discover that you haven't learned the skill that you were supposed to learn, at all!