From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Dec 10 2002 - 09:07:32 MST
I wish I had time to reply to all the excellent posts
(not a single worthless one) on this thread this morning.
Robert writes
> You always have to tie "understanding" to the foundation that exists
> in the personal experience of an individual. One of the problems with
> one-to-many communication is that you have little knowledge of the
> experience of each individual. One has to speak to the common denominator.
> Very difficult, IMO.
It certainly is. I actually spend several hours a week
either explaining physics and math to twelve year olds
or playing the instructor in a Moore-style point set
topology class to them. Yes, Vonnegut vastly oversimplified.
But he had a great point.
I am vastly more experienced at giving chess lessons than
teaching math. So I have known for decades just where the
student is liable to have difficulty, and am seldom surprised.
Teaching other things never goes so smoothly, for I am
constantly amazed at the way that some extremely intelligent
students have failed to see a particular point (in their case
it is exactly my fault that I skipped something). This is
exactly what Hawking encountered as Hubert described when
his editor didn't understand something that Hawking believed
he had made perfectly clear.
> How does one bridge the gap between people who have one's
> knowledge base (say the extropian reading list -- which
> even I haven't read completely) and the people who have
> no knowledge of the "culture" of that list?
The difference between a student and a typical person
is that the student is wagering that he or she should
concentrate and spend time to absorb the thinking of
a field or instructor or speaker. Few of us are students,
and even then we are students only in a few areas. I don't
have the time and patience to become an expert on
post-modernism, for example, but I keep chugging away
at general relativity. We most of us have to make our choices.
Casual readers of extropian materials will either be
drawn in or they won't be. One can either try to explain
one's ideas or our ideas---ideas that took most of us
years to absorb fully---as one would try to explain to
a diligent eight year old, or one can unleash all the
non-technical ideas and hope that something appeals.
> This is related to the problem I think Eliezer may be speaking of which
> seems to be more along the lines of how do technically adept people
> communicate with those who are much less so? Can one develop analogies
> that bridge the gap?
I am sure that such analogies can always be found.
Every good explanation is, in a sense, a good analogy.
Lee
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