Drake comments on The Simple Math of Everything - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 November 2007 10:42PM

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Comment author: Drake 19 November 2007 05:16:28PM 2 points [-]

The dangers of a "little learning" are easily offset by pointing out the ways the relevant "simple math" fails in a given case. Cf. Feynman's (for example) use of analogies. He'd state the analogy, then point out the ways in which the analogy is wrong or misleading, the specific features that fail to map, etc. This strategy gets you the pedagogical benefits of structure mapping while minimizing the risk (that Bill Swift warns against, supra) that a little learning will be mistaken for a great deal.