[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:
... who is the audience, here? Are you hoping that LW readers are school administrators, who will introduce DI into their schools? Are you hoping that they are teachers, who will introduce DI into their classes? Are you hoping that they are students, who will be able to seek out instructors using DI? ...
I'm personally interested because I have an interest in alternate education methods; I think the method sounds promising and what I know matches up with what I know about solid epistemology. The people who are interested in epistemic rationality (another group you could tailor posts towards) would probably be interested in learning about epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others.
And I said:
Oh, I dunno about DI involving "epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others". The founder recently wrote a book about what John Stuart Mill could have done for education, so that's the epistemology that DI is applying.
So actually, another reason I keep using Newton's laws analogies is that I suspect there's an analogious 'general relativity' to be found.
So what I really want is for the people from the LW audience to learn DI theory themselves, because I think they could improve the theory.
Well, that's the major part of what I want that's important here. I also had to add:
you remember how I mentioned 'creative strategic twists' [for how we could help DI win, and how DI could help us win], and indicated that the inspiration for that came from comparing the Michel Thomas lessons with DI proper (the internal details of each and their separate histories)?
That's another long-inferential distance topic...
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.
...Okay, that is honestly an impressively rapid bit of writing in its own unusual context (as a summary of newtonian particle mechanics to someone who had college math but had somehow never heard about physics, like you said.)
But my original analogy was never meant to be expanded, because it was never an argument by analogy in the first place, as I told Jem
OK, so the only point of your analogy was to explain how you feel about being asked to explain what DI is? Fair enough. Then all I can say is: It doesn't seem to me that you've successfully communicated how you feel about that, since apparently you find it unreasonable to be asked to explain what DI is, whereas if I try to imagine myself in any genuinely-analogous situation then I don't find it unreasonable to be asked the corresponding question.
I'm also rather confused about what your actual problem with explaining what DI is is. You say it's kinda like t... (read more)