Source: Patterns in confusing explanations by Julia Evans
Heavily linked with research debt. What makes for effective teaching and knowledge distillation?
- Games + interactive content (a constructionist approach) > just reading
- How can we create worlds for people to explore on their own? How do we give agency back to students?
- How do we create content that caters for all levels of understanding? Possible relation to a thing in project list where I thought about creating multi-level blogs
Confusing Explanations
Top things to avoid in explanations and blog posts
- Inconsistent expectations of the reader’s knowledge: it might explain in great detail how a
forloop works but the next paragraph immediately following implicitly assumes knowledge like howmallocworks for example. In this case, nearly zero people will understand howmallocworks without understanding how aforloop works. Pick 1 specific person and write for them - Strained Analogies: don’t try too hard to write a Big Complex Analogy, otherwise more energy will be spent by the user trying to figure out what exactly are the similarities and differences between the two
- Jargon without providing context
- Unsupported information and statements
- Explaining the “wrong” way to do something without saying it’s wrong
- “What” without the “why”