tjhorton@csri.toronto.edu (Tim Horton) (08/30/88)
In article <527@metapsy.UUCP> sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) writes: >... failing to clear up fuzzy or unfamiliar concepts as one goes through a >text is deadly, especially in a "linear" subject such as a scientific one, ^^^^^^ >where comprehension of item C involves comprehension of item B, and >comprehension of item B involves comprehension of item A. Bingo. But what you call "linear" perhaps we should call "deep". Some knowledge, like knowledge of a language which you take for an example, is not particularly deep. In these shallow cases, we can comprehend most of the information without building up a lot of the rest. But in the deep cases, there is the requirement of a large supporting structure. That, I take it, is the intent behind many university degrees. One can learn something like 1% of 1% of the knowledge in a field like microwave engineering, and yet have much of the supporting structure for the rest of the knowledge. A good education gives you that foundational basis upon which to approach the rest. And foundations are not easily built to hang in thin air. When the knowledge is shallow, there's a lot less to support. In fact, if there isn't much depth to the structure, much of the structure is often not terribly important for comprehension. Have you ever listened to someone with a faultering understanding of English, and yet clearly understood their English? Me think you understand what me talks you about. You can't build some abstract unattached netherworld, unattached to anything else you know, and expect to use it to do much anything useful. And surely kids learning a language are *not* doing any such thing. I agree with the original poster that information is useless UNTIL a relationship is established to the rest of a person's universe-model. And before that, it gets in the way. There is plenty of evidence that our minds have some sort of semantic organization. What of information that has no semantics at all? >But, unless you think there is a limited storage capacity, I can't see the >harm in it. For most of us, unattached information leaks out our ears when we lay down on our pillows at night. Much faster than the attached variety. Have you ever read some of these memory-improvement techniques, or listened to one of those guys who remembers everyone's name and what they are wearing in an audience? From what I've hear, memory systems involve explicitly attaching things in one's mind. Like attaching some guy named "Derrick" with a mental oil rig, etc. >So I don't think the data supports your view that it would be deleterious to >immerse a child in a mass of uninterpreted information. You may be >underestimating the human potential for extracting meaning from the world >around him. I agree that people are great at building a shallow understanding of the world around. But people come up with the screwy notions of commonsense physics, not the laws of Newton. (For instance, the apparently common prediction that a ball rolled down a spiral ramp will continue to move in a circle when it comes down onto a flat surface). Anyways, what's the point in all this? It used to anger me to no limit that profs would teach things the way they understood them; with abstract notions hanging in space unattached to anything, then work their way back to specifics if they had the time for it. In my undergrad, we learned crazy abstract theory about quantum mechanics in semiconductors, then on around 4th year learned what transistors behaved like in circuits. Kind of like learning finite element combustion analysis long before getting any idea of what a car is or what it does or how it works. Well, they didn't want us to be like technicians who learn exactly how to handle problems a-z, they wanted us to understand principles, and I can understand that. The problem is that nobody had a clue what the principles were, they just had these equations and techniques. It's as though having some sort of example to start from would pervert us. It's been my experience that people are *extremely good* at abstracting away from examples. What they learn about one rattle-snake applies very quickly to other rattle-snakes, other snakes, and other reptiles. It seems that the same holds for mathematical and scientific notions. Teach someone what "integration" means with one mathematical example, and they aren't exactly starting from scratch with the next example. Examples certainly do not block people from grasping abstract principles! What I am saying is given a few attachments to the world, a person can often make many more on his own. But really abstract uniterpretable knowledge is about as useful to most of us as an 8 page logic-proof is to a 3 year-old.