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Patterns in Confusing Explanations

jvns.ca

101–110 of 168 posts

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#101
post #59

A lot of this is caused by The Curse of Knowledge : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge That cognitive blind spot causes people to unwittingly write confusing explanations in all domains of life. It's frequently ironic when somebody writes a sentence following the rhetorical template: "Not really sure what the confusion is with . It's really simple. [blah blah blah...] And that's it." Whether it's attemp…

Man, the bit about neural networks hits close to home. I'd kill for a NN tutorial that doesn't go "Anyway, as you can see, by multiplying the derivative by a small value we can eventually find the local minima of this curve. Anyway, just use these exact tensorflow functions with the parameters we give you and you're all set!"

Have you seen 3Blue1Brown video about it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#102
My favourite: back in 2005 when I finished my Bachelors degree I did some work setting up web payments for a local web shop.

I followed the instructions exactly, used every trick I had learned and then some but got stuck several days somewhere around page 20 in the documentation on how to compile the module for Apache, something just didn't work but there was always just more thing I could try, and I assumed the fault was mine since I was just a student.

One day I just gave up and mindlessly continued reading.

Around page 100 there was a line something like:

"This is how we used to do it, these days, just download this file, put it on this folder and use it like this: "

Worked immediately.

Now, I knew already back then that one should always read through the instructions before starting, but I usually think that means one chapter at a time, not the whole book :-)

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#103
post #12

Another pattern I usually encounter is explaining the how but not the why. Trying to understand how a complex mechanism works is hard, but it’s harder if you don’t know why the mechanism exists in the first place. It would be madness to start studying how an airplane engine works without knowing it is used to impulse a flying machine.

I love, "Learning by invention". Basically, you start with a problem, than the teacher "helps" to come up with a solution, (by hints / guides), which casually ends up at the solution implemented. I think it's one of the reasons people love to reinvent the wheel. When they invent something themselves they truly know it inside out. You can somewhat do it yourself, if say, you want to learn a new library, by first tryin…

This is exactly how Syntax 1 was taught at UC Santa Cruz when I attended.

We started with a general question of "What is the simplest sentence you can think of?", and then moved to "How could you represent that symbolically? Generically?". With the professor's guidance, the solutions and systems of representation evolved over the course of the quarter to become more rich and complex, and just so happened to trace the development of syntactic theory from roughly the 50s to the 70s. Then you took Syntax 2 tracing roughly the 70s to the 90s, and by the end of that time, you were ready to look at modern problems.

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#104

The patterns Julia gives absolutely distill the bad practices when well-intentioned people try but fail to explain something. In particular, you can see examples of "inconsistent expectations of reader knowledge" and "starting out abstract" ALL THE TIME in stackoverflow. Someone will ask a specific question about a problem they're having but then have their question closed as dupe and referred to another related (or…

Yeah I guess that's because StackOverflow itself doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a Q&A site? A reference manual? A programming wiki? Who knows, but I guess we'll close your question just to be safe. :-)

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#105
post #48

One tip I picked up a while back is to be aware of the number of `it`s and other pronouns used. I realized that when my explanation were getting lengthy, I was tempted to avoid duplication by referring to previously mentioned nouns as `it`s, `they`s etc. This practice led to some very confusing sentences, where each `it` meant a different thing. My explanations got noticeably clearer once I started replacing the pron…

That's a good one, especially if using pronouns causes people to have to backtrack in their reading. Another pattern that personally annoys me is when people use "the former" and "the latter"; I'm forced to go back in the text to remember which one was mentioned first and which one was mentioned second.

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#106
post #58

> having inconsistent expectations of the reader’s knowledge I come across this one the most and suspect it's the most common reason people suddenly stop following an explanation. Whether it's in a book or a Wikipedia article. I guess when the author already knows something, it's a difficult skill to maintain the full perspective of the audience - some things they obviously don't know and are easy to explain, so they…

Wikipedia maths articles are really bad for that because articles are often written by people trying to show how smart they are so they write stuff in an extremely generic technical way using no examples and lots of unnecessary jargon.

I've seen people try to improve things only to be shut down because they view Wikipedia as a reference manual.

To pick a random example, imagine trying to understand matrix multiplication from this:

> In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the second matrix. The resulting matrix, known as the matrix product, has the number of rows of the first and the number of columns of the second matrix. The product of matrices A and B is denoted as AB.

Binary operation? Why is it talking about details like column numbers before it even explains what matrix multiplication is for?

It should be more like this:

> Matrices are 2D grid or arrays of numbers that can represent an operation on a vector. For example scaling or rotating it (or both). Two matrices can be multiplies together to form a new matrix that represents a combination of the operations of the input matrices. For example if A is a matrix that doubles the scale of a vector and B is a matrix that rotates it by 90deg, then the product AB will be a single matrix that both rotates and then scales the vector.

> The matrix product is calculated by summing the dot product of corresponding rows and columns of the inputs as shown in this illustration

And then jump straight to the Illustration section which is easily the most understandable part of the article.

But that edit would probably be reverted because some pedant will point out that matrices aren't only used for manipulating geometric vectors or whatever.

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#107

Am I the only one that appreciated strained analogies? They are meant to create a visual in the reader's mind so they can remember the pieces that are being shared. Of course, if the analogy is good, it won't feel strained. But it seems like the author is against any extended analogies at all, which I think is a mistake.

Strained analogies are bad enough, but a special award for teaching anti-patterns should go to analogies to some local features - e.g. to a sport that's popular only in some countries, or a local geographic feature or corporation.

To someone reading in Europe, explaining something by analogy to baseball innings, bases and pitchers reads: "think of it like dipping your youtiao in chashaojiang instead of haoyou"

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#108

Am I the only one that appreciated strained analogies? They are meant to create a visual in the reader's mind so they can remember the pieces that are being shared. Of course, if the analogy is good, it won't feel strained. But it seems like the author is against any extended analogies at all, which I think is a mistake.

Personally, when it comes to technical topics, I have not ever found an extended analogy that made a subject less confusing. Analogies are fine as a quick way to introduce the flavor of a topic -- saying "Kafka is like a river..." at least gets me started on the right footing. But when they extend onwards and onwards, I always just end up feeling like the analogy-creator is sort of reveling in a semi-poetic alignment…

There was recently some explanation of Kafka that was done as a children’s book about beavers or something. I found it utter baffling where most folks seemed to sing its praises.

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#109
post #56
post #48

One tip I picked up a while back is to be aware of the number of `it`s and other pronouns used. I realized that when my explanation were getting lengthy, I was tempted to avoid duplication by referring to previously mentioned nouns as `it`s, `they`s etc. This practice led to some very confusing sentences, where each `it` meant a different thing. My explanations got noticeably clearer once I started replacing the pron…

It can also be used to make text easier to understand, for example: The client connected to the server, then it crashed vs The client connected to the server, then the server crashed.

The practice of substituting pronouns can also be used to make text easier to understand, for example:

    The client connected to the server, then it crashed
vs

    The client connected to the server, then the server crashed.

Re: Patterns in Confusing Explanations

#110
post #48

One tip I picked up a while back is to be aware of the number of `it`s and other pronouns used. I realized that when my explanation were getting lengthy, I was tempted to avoid duplication by referring to previously mentioned nouns as `it`s, `they`s etc. This practice led to some very confusing sentences, where each `it` meant a different thing. My explanations got noticeably clearer once I started replacing the pron…

Yeah, I work with an English second language guy who uses pronouns excessively, leaving me clueless. In his case I expect he's saving processing power for translating the bigger ideas.
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