I would respond with a mildly self-deprecatory comment that simultaneously ironically highlights the strange, unnecessary harshness and lack of humor one may find surprisingly commonly on LW, but I expect it would just get a bunch of downvotes and be a silly waste of time, amusing no one but myself.
What do you mean by "have access to"?
Hm, yeah, that's a really weird way to phrase it unless you have certain... historical things in mind. Strictly speaking, everyone "has access" to all the books and other resources you need. It's just really unlikely for anyone to notice that it's something worth focusing on.
Okay, I wrote my response to Technoguyrob to double as a response to you. I'll get back to you in a few days.
Yes.
Minimum Viable Products have been done, hence the excitement... just built mainly for markets where the ultimate "consumers" have pretty much no influence over "purchasing policy"... and stuff ...
It's not a theory of learning, but a theory of instruction...
As to "smarter than me", I didn't develop the theory, and it's largely dumb luck I came across all the puzzle pieces in a way that made it perfectly obvious how much of a Big Deal the implications could be...
A year ago, I'd've talked your ear off at this point trying to ...
Thank you very much! You are cool and I like you and I will look into those some time! :3
I don't think I have to worry too much about "insight porn". The closest I get is obsessively sampling the products of the nearest thing we have to "competition", noting details of all the ways they screw up and how to avoid those problems (and making sure to hit the few points they ever get right!)...
I'm basically forcing myself to spend these next few weeks landing some cheap-or-free rent and other pre-move preparations.
The theoretical and enginee...
Yeah, I actually just discovered that I've gone completely off the deep end, so your sane and measured advice is completely useless to me, sorry. xD
(
I think I'd edit in a notice to the top of the post so other well-meaning folks like you don't get tricked into wasting your time trying to talk sense into a total nutcase like me. :)
(I appreciate all y'all, though. ^^ )
... Yes, the winner is you.
Our answer to 2, from the depths of our souls, can only be: Hell. Fucking. Yes.
Now, Paul Graham is awesome (he has left me in a state of complete conviction that LISP is the One True Way, to which I must aspire), but that's... alot of essays. (An entire herd of alots, majestically migrating across vast prairies of prose.)
And I think our "startup" is going to be a lot different from what is normally meant by the term, so... I'ma sketch said differences, and you can tell me what you think is relevant, if you want.
Our &q
...
Do you know who the voyageurs were?
They were men who had to work in a massive wilderness where the only "infrastructure" was a bunch of rivers.
So they would just build a goddamn boat right there in the middle of nowhere with some bark they ripped off a tree, and canoe across a fucking continent. And where they couldn't paddle, they would get out and carry the damn thing, even when it was loaded down with a mountain of beaver skins.
Nobody "dismisses" these guys.
I'll tell you who we do "dismiss": The aristocratic assholes bac...
All that said... how would you respond to question 4?
You can kind of tell that it was the question I came to realize was key, through the process of writing the post...
Should I even bother with this "investment" stuff right now, or just move the whole 13k sum to a simple savings account and worry about reinvesting it in a year?
Hm.
Well, I just did a quick google search for developing economies and looked for graphs that seemed to deal with the comparison I'm interested in.
For instance:
http://carnegieendowment.org/images/article_images/decoupleR1.gif
http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/prospects/charts/nl33cj23.sn0/chart-small.png
http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2011/9/4/saupload_trendr1.png
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/4771449749_7c63d01bdc.jpg
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/images/dervis2.jpg
And my dad put the majority of investments in "Canada&quo...
Interestingly enough, the study with the highest effect size in the meta-analysis (2.44) involved non-basic skills. Actually I think I'll just type up the summary:
...This study analyzes the use of the Earth Science videodisc program with elementary education majors who traditionally have had negative attitudes towards science teaching. One group received the DI program and the other group received the traditional approach [random assignment, of course] during a one-semester science course. The DI group had significantly higher posttest knowledge scores (91
Thank you for your offer of help with feedback (I'll def take you up on that) and papers (there are some papers referenced in "Research on Direct Instruction" I might like to get my hands on), and the sympathy on my ma.
I'm interning at a DI school in Baltimore (City Springs). Currently working with the kindergarteners on the language program (I'm supposed to move on to also doing math and reading soon, and teach older kids as well).
The National Institute For Direct Instruction (NIFDI) placed me here. It usually takes a minimum of two years for so...
Yes, but we're not talking about long-term research here. It wouldn't be hard at all to get a bunch of volunteers interested in learning a language, and randomly assign them to one of the various different treatments popular in the industry (MT, Pimsleur, Rosetta, traditional classroom instruction, whatever). It would take less than a year, probably.
(Various choices would be up to the experimenter, like whether they wanted to control time so all groups spent, like, an hour a day or whatever, or examine the time students chose to spend themselves as one of ...
Yes, and I should make clear that Solity didn't say, 'The MT courses work well, wherever they work well, due to approximating DI'. He presented DI more as one of many interesting little connected pieces (many of which were pretty much fluff), rather than as an overarching explanation.
The interpretation that, "If dalmatians are metaphorically the gold standard, then the MT courses are mangy mutts in an industry where everyone else is painting black spots and pinning floppy ears on chickens," is mine.
Yeah, and all of what Cainntear was talking about later in that post with "teach confusable things separately" is covered in Chapter 10 of ToI, "Introducing coordinate members to a set".
[And yes, there's a typo in the table on the first page. Awareness of abstract feature "C" rules out example 6. It doesn't have to wait until feature "(D)" is brought to attention.]
I really think both the places where MT follows DI principles, and the places where he fails, should jump out to anyone familiar with both.
Which makes me w...
No, although I'd like to. I've just been really inactive the past couple weeks. Settling in to the internship and making sure I'm actually learning what I'm supposed to be learning there is still taking most of my energy during the week, and then I found out my mom had cancer (she just had a little bit, they got it out completely, and the chances of it coming back are apparently 'virtually nil' with just five weeks of radiation... but still, totally killed my productivity for one weekend), and then lazing around with a cold the next weekend. Yeesh.
The most...
I should also note that MT was not merely poor at meta-teaching how to use his eponymous 'Method' itself; He was actively secretive about it.
I believe the reason he claimed was something like fear of the establishment stealing it and claiming credit? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Was that the 'real' reason, or a rationalization for some traumatic after-effect of his war experience, or what? Not really a question I'd expect a high chance of success or high returns on answering.
Summary: Nice for beginners and people with bad learning experiences ...
Actually, this strikes me as a bit weakly worded. I think the MT courses are the best resource currently available for an English speaker looking to start learning French or Spanish, by a significant margin.
Unfortunately there are no scientific studies comparing the effectiveness of various different 'teach yourself' programs and traditional classroom instruction, so I can't find any direct evidence on that question beyond my own anecdotal experience.
But still, what with that and the much more indirect evidence available, I'd still be very surprised if this wasn't true.
However, according to several DI proponents the reason MT works so well is that it applies (an approximation of) DI techniques.
Wait, 'several DI proponents'? Are you sure? Because I know of no-one in the DI world who is aware of MT (unless I were to count myself as properly 'in the DI world', which I do not yet).
The only place I found the connection was in the book "The Learning Revolution" by Jonathan Solity (2008). This was where I found the first reference to DI period, setting me off down this long path. However, it isn't really the focus ...
Yes, Project Follow-Through had some problems, but I don't think it's likely that those problems provided a systematic bias towards DI sufficient to explain away the huge differences as non-significant, especially since similar results were replicated in many smaller studies that were in a situation where better random assignment etc was possible.
"Research on Direct Instruction" (Adams and Engelmann, 1996) goes into much better detail on Follow-Through and those other experiments.
Actually, it basically covers three different types of studies:
Th
Wow, nice work!
Just one note for now: On the MT courses being approximations: Yeah, the way I usually think of it now references an article by Zig Engelmann called "The Dalmatian and Its Spots" (contextual prologue here).
To summarize the most here-relevant message of the article:
Thinking that programs with certain features [eg, some focus on 'phonemic awareness' and 'phonics' in a reading program] will be successful because research shows successful programs have those features is like thinking something with spots must be a dalmatian because re...
Hmmm, there could be lots to reply to in that post, but I'll try to keep it brief...
Can you give me a few specific examples of actual tasks that your students have problems with most commonly? Like, show me exactly what the students are presented with.
With that, I might be able to do a transformed task analysis, and develop an example cognitive routine.
Actually, factoring is used as one illustration of a cognitive routine in Theory of Instruction. I'll scan that section when I get time.
Thanks! I did think it sounded annoying for commenter, and I don't want to try the general audience's patience much further at this point. Hence why I'm just asking a few people what they think of it in the comments.
Being able to calibrate myself objectively is an extremely attractive idea, though.
DI is a theory of instruction, not of learning.
If you're interested in judging in greater detail how DI might offer any ideas on AI that are both useful and original, the place to start would be Inferred Functions of Performance and Learning (Engelmann and Steely, 2004), which does attempt to set out a theory of learning (and the logically necessary things that must be going on inside of any system that performs a given behavior, whether learned or unlearned).
Please see this comment.
Yes, this post is just an introduction to the very basics of DI (technically to just the very basics of one half of it, the 'stimulus-locus analysis').
Theory of Instruction goes into detail on those fundamental principles and how they apply to teaching the most basic concepts. It then shows how the basic concepts can be built up into more complex ones, and therefore how more complex ones can be analyzed to reduce them into parts for teaching.
Once you understand the details, you'll probably just say, "Oh, right, reductionism. Of course that also applies here."
Considering that you didn't even try to see if I was making a bluff by offering to bet me one cent against my $2000...
S=probability of scientology involvement
2000S<0.01(1-S)
2000S<0.01-0.01S
2000.01S<0.01
S<0.000004999
Again, assuming I didn't make any embarrassingly simple math errors, that's an over 99.9995% confidence that the 'scientology-related' hypothesis was wrong.
Not that this is factoring in the hassle for both of us of setting up the judging and so on, but still, right? :P
Oh no, I know DAMN well I could've done WAY better if I'd been less stupid in the first place! Although if I had to communicate with my past self, I think the best thing I could have told him would be just to put a note at the beginning of the original post saying explicitly that it was a draft with many, many problems, but that I was pretty damn sure DI was a super-important topic to bring to the attention of LW, so if anyone would be so super-cool nice as to give me some feedback on how to make it more presentable...
There's no way I could communicate the...
Most excellent Gwern!
I have a proposition!
So, I've begun writing a new post, “A dry presentation of some empirical evidence on DI's effectiveness”. (An attempt to replace that intended function of my original post with as high-quality a replacement as Misha's post was for the intended function of the 'theory sketch' section.)
KPier very kindly offered to help me with editing, so I sent her the first seven-ish paragraphs I had written. She found one change to recommend, somewhat ambivalent herself over which way was best. I wasn't sure either, and found myse...
Some other thoughts: perhaps you could give me some examples of specific teaching goals you have, and specific problems you often encounter?
Honestly, I suspect most of the problems high-school students have are due to lack of mastery of the basics. That they are weak enough on such things as adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing fractions and working with exponents that they are likely to make mistakes on those even if they aren't having their cognitive resources split between trying to track that shaky foundation and learn the details of the new thing y...
After rereading your last comment here, I just wanted to make clear: I do care very much.
Thank you making an excellent, explicit, compressed list of everything I did wrong. (...Where else than LW would that be obviously non-sarcastic? :P)
It is very valuable and I will be using it to improve. If I had a printer, I'd print it out and put it by my computer. (As it is I'll just have to save it to a file I use a lot.)
I'm going to the effort of telling you this because, due to the value of the comment, I want to encourage similar feedback from you in the future....
Problem is that the DI world, in terms of the actual experts on the theory rather than just people who deliver programs, is very small, and most of those experts work together in person rather than communicating online.
So it might take a while to get a response.
Heh, I actually just realized that I've been using some non-transparent LessWrong jargon in some of my communications with the DI community, like "inferential distance".
The problem is that, once you understand the concepts common both on LW and in DI theory, there is so much overlap in mea...
No no no! Please don't mistake my tone! I am so happy that you're asking me for detailed help with this! Responding to you is not onerous, but joyful!
Writing a "Complete Guide to Task Analysis for Beginners!" is something I'd love to do! I just know it won't get done very soon.
I'm sorry I keep forgetting to examine my jargon that seems intuitively transparent to me and try to over-estimate how much explanation it needs. From now on I will start compiling a glossary of terms.
But yes, you raise a very important question:
"How much practical use...
Ah! Sorry, I was thinking maybe you had understood some of the contents of that thread already before I mentioned it in this one.
Anyway, sorry this reply took so long. I was having scanner issues.
Here's the first page of Chapter 12 in ToI, "Programs Derived from Tasks" [edit: fixed from accidental link to section of the AthabascaU module]. A definition of "Task Analysis" is, of course, under that heading.
There are details in the definition that rely on knowledge of concepts covered earlier in the book, but as a whole, does it help?
I jus...
Indeed.
The reason I did not, rightly or wrongly, was because you have to start off doing this by showing how it applies in the most basic context, like in the AthabascaU module.
This results in a very technical analysis of something that initially seems trivial and pointlessly detailed, and unrelated to the amazing-looking results from studies like Project Follow-Through (which, remember, the meta-analysis says are representative).
I remember glazing over that section in the AthabascaU module myself the first time I read it. And several times after that. Onl...
I appreciate your willingness to have an in-depth discussion of this topic with me, and if I had infinite time, I would gladly take you up on it. But since I don't, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to bow out of discussing the subject of me in order to have more time for the subject of DI.
I have already learned lots of things I think I could apply to better accomplishing similar goals in the future. And I don't anticipate having to introduce another such wide, deep, complex topic as DI from scratch again.
Again, thank you, and I hope to see more of you in the DI discussion.
I would love to help, of course. Right exactly now I have some stuff from my internship I should bump to the top of my priority list (there were some minor problems last week with the kindies not following the proper procedures for asking for my help when I'm helping someone else, and I need to whip up a short script to model the expectations with the other teachers - Honestly, a huge percentage of behavior problems with kids, especially the youngest ones, are just from them honestly not knowing what you want from them).
But that kind of project is nowhere ...
I... this is one of those issues that if I am in the wrong, I will have to take a break and apply some more intense techniques for getting around my own defensiveness than I usually need to use.
But I really honestly feel no "small note of discord" in my mind that should make me expect to find that I am wrong.
At any rate, since it's over and done with now, what say the both of us just put the issue far in the back of our minds to allow any potentially useful new thoughts to crystallize by themselves, and refocus our attention on the future of what we need to write about DI?
Oh no, I didn't mean "Is that all you need?" as in "subtext: I've given you enough, go away". :P
I meant: "I know I need to give you more information. Tell me where I should start."
I linked to a scanned page of Theory of Instruction here in this comment thread
Please see "I wasn't contemplating suicide per se". I knew in advance that I would decide to keep fighting, as I always do. It is actually a technique I use to cheer myself up, rather like being underwater, and dipping down just a bit so that you can kick off the ground in order to spring back to the surface.
Well?