JackV comments on Don't teach people how to reach the top of a hill - Less Wrong

30 Post author: PhilGoetz 04 March 2014 09:38PM

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Comment author: JackV 07 March 2014 11:24:16AM 3 points [-]

I think this is a useful idea, although I'm not sure how useful this particular example is. FWIW, I definitely remember this from revising maths proofs -- each proof had some number of non-obvious steps, and you needed to remember those. Sometimes there was just one, and once you had the first line right, even if there was a lot of work to do afterwards, it was always "simplifying in the obvious way", so the rest of proof was basically "work it out, don't memorise it". Other proofs had LOTS of non-obvious ideas and were a lot harder to remember even if they were short.