Comment by elcritch

Comment by elcritch 4 months ago

What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though.

> The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. Often there’s an underlying pattern that the novice can pick up through careful observation, even if neither the expert nor the novice can properly articulate this pattern.

That explains part of it well. It's also an effect you can observe with graduate students of nobel prize winners tending to be "related" to professors who won nobel prizes or were part of their labs, etc. There's lessons imparted far beyond the structured material which is often available.

Things like mindset, culture, and more are shared this way.

Remote work is great, but it does limit these free form personal interactions which can be so invaluable. I'm a big fan of the potential for VR and AR to enable these experiences with remote work.

elcritch 4 months ago

Chicken "sexing" is a fun example of how expert knowledge can be transferred without either expert or novice being able to explain it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OgZdxRnog&t=174

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nyanpasu64 4 months ago

I've read that birds used to have penises (and paleognaths and waterfowl still have them today), but the Galliformes (including chickens) developed atrophied penises which are difficult to see (hence chick sexing and feeding males to the meat grinder), and the Neoaves lost them entirely. Though https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_20... suggests the exact nature is more variable between birds in lineages that "have" them

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philipswood 4 months ago

You don't need to wait for AR/VR. For computer work the real space of interaction is currently the screen. Unstructured pair programming for two remotes with a shared screen and audio and chat is a way more effective interaction than most things you could do together at the office.

Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask the AI, spelunk the codebase for related relevant features or try one-liners.

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beyarkay 4 months ago

(author here) it's a pity that there's no way to emulate an office's "just peer around your screen and ask your colleague" dynamic. Having your video camera always on is too creepy, and constantly being in a voice call with your peers still feels a bit weird.

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elcritch 4 months ago

Certainly more effective at short term GTD, but less so at sharing intangibles or lowering the barrier to more general or spontaneous communication.

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beyarkay 4 months ago

(author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.

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skydhash 4 months ago

I'm reading a book that's partly inspired by academia settings and one thing that jumped to me is the papers vs lab interactions in learning. All the things that you need to know is already in the papers, but the link between the concepts is rarely explained and that's what gives you the solution for a given problem.
The MDN is a very comprehensive documentation for all things about programming a web application. But for a given task, the subset of docs you want and the link between them is not on MDN, it's found in the experience you have in dealing with similar things. And that's what you can give junior, the recipe for all the ingredients they need for a solution.
Letting them try first is for them to get to know the ingredients and kinda the general steps. By the time you tell them the recipes, they can just focus on the precise steps and measurements.

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