Explain, accurately and briefly but with enough detail that someone could give the method a go if they wanted, just what the hell Direct Instruction actually is.
I haven't done so not because it hasn't occurred to me to try, but because if it's even possible (which I doubt), it's hard enough to do that I still haven't figured out how.
Did you read my short analogy explaining how this difficulty feels to me from my perspective? It feels like trying to explain what physics is and why it's so powerful as well as interesting in itself, to someone who has never seen physics, hasn't grown up in a world filled with obvious examples of the amazing engineering it makes possible, etc.
Really really really try yourself to: "Explain, accurately and briefly but with enough detail that someone could give the method a go if they wanted, just what the hell physics actually is", keeping in mind that your audience is someone who has never heard of it or seen anything other than pre-physics level technology.
I wish I could find the exact source for this, but I remember once reading a quote of some famous Roman general saying that military technology was at the highest limit it could reach, with the ballista or something representing the absolute apex of possible achievement.
Imagine you're addressing this to contemporaries of that guy.
The main difficulties in giving an accurate and brief statement of what physics is for someone who's never seen anything like it are (1) that physics is a very big subject and (2) that your stipulation about the audience seems to be intended to assume they don't know any mathematics to speak of either.
Are you claiming that DI is a hugely varied subject like physics? (If so: How is that even possible, given how recent it apparently is?)
Are you claiming that DI depends on a large and conceptually very difficult substrate, as physics does with mathematics? (I...
[NOTE: This was a discussion post asking if anyone would mind giving feedback on a very rough draft in progress.
If you are downvoting it because you do not want to see discussion posts asking for feedback like this, then by all means, that's a valid use of a downvote.
But if you are downvoting it in order to express your opinion of the quality of the draft, I urge you to reconsider]
This is another work in progress coming at the DI issue from a somewhat different direction. It's contained in the comments of the original, and I'm posting this to ask for more wonderful beta-reader critics to tell me if it's a step in the right direction. (It's still very informal writing, but it's the ideas I'm dealing with now.)
And about what I'm looking for in the LW audience, someone asked me in a private message:
And I said:
Well, that's the major part of what I want that's important here. I also had to add:
But that's not important here (except to disclose that is where I'm coming from). LWers would first have to understand DI to fully grasp that. And I am significantly less certain of my current beliefs about those 'strategic twists' (although still pretty certain), and LWers proficient in DI would be the best to evaluate the ideas.