As the last 2 posts suggest, I’m becoming interested in training and practice.

I’ve long considered myself a skilled autodidact. I have successfully taught myself the programming skills I use to earn a living, as well as multiple languages. I’m (over-)confident of my ability to immerse myself in an unfamiliar academic discipline enough to find whatever information I need.

Pull back the camera, though, and it turns out I am very good at a small subset of learning. I can do studying, but have only the most rudimentary skill in practice or training. Or to put it in the terms of the previous post: I am good at gaining knowledge-of, bad at gaining knowledge-how.

This, I think, is because so much of my learning has happened alone. It is much easier to teach yourself than to train yourself. Training (or practice) requires a tight feedback loop, and it is harder to obtain that without a teacher. It’s hard to imagine a movie training montage without the wise mentor in the background.

And we approach new challenges with the tools we have used to deal with problems of the past. Self-directed learning means I have spent less time practicing, which in turn means it is not the first method which comes to mind when I am learning something new. I have got out of practice at practicing.

As I noticed this more over the past couple of years, I gradually realised its scope. Take cooking: I understood this to mean memorizing a collection of recipes, techniques, flavor combinations and the like, so I could pull them out of my mind at will. It occurred embarrassingly late to me that “knowing how to cook” might involve experience more than book-learning.

It’s not an accident that I came up with such a ridiculous approach to cooking. I was taking the mental toolkit I had, and applying it to the problem at hand. I have not previously learned much from practice, and so did not reach for that as an approach.

Humbling as it is to realise what I have been missing out on, it is also energising. Since I have overlooked an entire area of learning, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to be plucked. I suspect I’m now heading towards a phase of annoying over-correction, as I ask about everything: “how can I practice it?”

Stunt pilots, preparing for aerobatic routines, have converged on a fascinating form of rehearsal: they dance.

If you see a pilot before an airshow, they may well be doing the so-called “Aresti dance”. It’s a series of movements which encode the manouvers they will make up in the air.

Besides being a charming idiosyncracy, this makes total sense. Physical movement is a powerful aide to memory. It is one of many reasons for the role of dance in traditional rituals from any number of cultures. It is under-used in modern education partly because we are just overall bad at teaching, and partly because dancing does not fit obviously into a classroom.

The Aresti dance also deals with a problem more unique to aerobatics pilots: it is hard to get enough rehearsal time. Stunt flying is inherently dangerous and expensive. So as much work as you can do on the ground, should be done on the ground.

Online information about the Aresti dance is pretty scarce. It takes its name from Aresti figures, which are a standard nomenclature and digramming system for aerobatic manouvers. I have found plenty of videos of the dance, but no in-depth description of how it works.

Keith Johnstone’s Impro is ostensibly a book about iimprovisational theatre. Yet the book – in particular the introduction – goes both deeper and broader.

Here, for instance, is Johnstone on education:

People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities
[Improv, Keith Johnstone]

Johnson is absolutely correct for the kind of education he is thinking of – teaching art, or acting, or most situations where you could substitute ‘training’ for ‘teaching’.

He is, I think, only mostly correct when it comes to more academic education. The more the content resembles “one damn fact after another”, the more it can be taught by a bad teacher. If you attend a bad (but factually correct) history lecture, you will still come out with some basic information about the subject matter. Does that count as education? Debatable, but in my view it just barely clears the bar.

It helps to distinguish between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. Knowledge-that is factual knowledge which you can consciously explain. Knowledge-how is a skill, something you can do perhaps even without being able to explain it. I know that the Bastille was stormed on 14 July; I know how to ride a bicycle.

The academic system has a bias towards knowledge-that. A universtiy lecturer is arguable the highest-status teacher. Her work is one of the purest forms of teaching knowledge-that. The audience do not learn how to do anything more than sit on their bums and listen.

Yet, most of the value of a teacher is in teaching knowledge-how. I can skip a lecture and learn from a recording or a book. But if I skip an acting class, I will not be able to make up for it with time in the library.

The class where the teacher is most needed (acting, or dance, or woodwork) is also where a bad teacher can do most harm. Training a bad habit is more likely, and more harmful, than teaching a bad fact.

Knowledge-how is dangerous for the same reason it is powerful and wonderful. It changes how you see and understand and interact with the world, in a way that is hard to unpick. This is especially true of a topic like painting or drama, where the skill overlaps so completely with the rest of the self.

The Ethical Slut is one of the books most frequently recommended to anybody interested in polyamory. That is partly because, written over 20 years ago, it established its reputation at a time when there were few alternative resources. And it is partly because, even now, the alternatives are less than perfect. More than Two, another prominent book on poly, lost its lustre when it emergeed that one author had abused multiple women, including his co-author

When I mentioned to friends what I was reading, I heard much more criticism than praise. Similarly, once our book group held its discussion, we ended up with objections on all sides.

One complaint is the way that The Ethical Slut discusses other minority sexual groups. Despite being written by two bisexual/lesbian women, it feels very targeted towards a heterosexual couple considering opening up their relationship. When it discussed gay and lesbian communities, it is in a way that over-generalizes from the groups the authors have encountered.

A criticism I care less about is historical accuracy. The Ethical Slut includes a whirlwind tour of groups who have in the past practiced non-monogamy. Treat it as a historical treatise and you will be infuriated. I read it more as a reminder that the mid-20th-century American nuclear family is not the single model by which all human society has arranged itself.

Mostly, I feel the people in my circle who dislike The Ethical Slut want it to be something it is not. Somebody already deeply embedded in LGBT, kinky, and poly groups is unlikely to find the book frustratingly basic. But if you come to the book from the straight, monogamous mainstream, this is perhaps the introduction which you need.

Often, the autistic-spectrum folks in my life have the most interesting things to say about human interactions. Survivorship bias accounts for much of this. I’m only having these conversations with the autistic people who have not only learned how to socialize with neurotypicals, but to talk with them about people and emotions.

Anyway, such people tend to have incredibly astute and precise understandings of human behaviour. So I was thrilled to stumble upon this collection of Docs, which comprise a guide to neurotypicals for Autism-Spectrum Disorder people.

Some choice bits:

Anger at deities is almost always directed upwards, above a 45 degree angle, while thanks or prayer is usually directed downward and inward. In contrast, happiness at the self is directed outward randomly, while anger/fear/shame are shown by aiming all attention vectors together at a point roughly 2 feet in front of the person.

Curious what an ‘attention vector’ might be? Take the usual body-language idea that people turn to whoever they care most about, and break into down into component parts:

By pivoting your eyes, head, shoulders, hips, and feet, you can point them in different directions. These directions are three-dimensional for head and eyes, and mostly two-dimensional for shoulders, hips, and feet because it’s difficult to point those up or down while standing. Pointing your attention vectors at something is a signal that you’re paying attention to that thing

….

The reason I mentioned that there are five of them (eyes, head, shoulders, hips, feet), is that you can point them in different directions to indicate split attention. The reason I put them in that specific order isn’t just that it’s top-to-bottom, it’s that it indicates temporary-to-permanent attention…..The lower down on the body the attention vector, the more permanent its indication of attention.

Systems often seem pre-ordained until you understand your origins. When you find out how something got started, it’s often hard to take it quite so seriously.

Case in point: library classification. The Dewey Decimal system exists, in part, because John Dewey just really liked the number ten:

In March 1873, when he was still an undergraduate, Dewey had his third big idea, inspired by an 1856 pamphlet titled “A Decimal System for the Arrangement and Administration of Libraries”, written by Nathaniel Shurtleff, who worked at the Boston Public Library. As Dewey wrote at the time, “My heart is open to anything that’s either decimal or about libraries”. In fact, fifty years ltaer, Dewey would attribute the idea to order topics by decimal numbers to an epiphany during a Sunday sermon. Dewey was already infatuated with decimals. He wrote a school essay on the metric system when he was sixteen. When he was twenty-five he founded the American Metric Bureau to lobby for the adoption of the metric system within the United States. He even arranged his travel so that he would arrive on the tenth, twentieth or thirtieth day of the month…rationalism crossing over into superstition

[David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, p53-4]

Suggested music: The New Puritans yelling “what’s your favourite number” again and again. It’s like being accosted in the street by a gang of numerologists

The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills
…
‘It is obvious’, says Hadamard, ‘that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas…The Latin verb cogito for “to think” etymologically means “to shake together”. St Augustine had already noticed that and also observed taht intelligo means “to select among”’ [Koestler, The Act of Creation, p119-120]

I’m slowly rereading The Act of Creation, one of the formative books of my teenage years. Arthur Koestler sets himself the task of describing creativity across art, science, and humour. The core is what he calls ‘bisociation’, which means thinking simultaneously in two frames of reference.

He goes way too far in attempting to reduce everything to his one system. The picture on the right, from the book’s frontispiece, is an example of this. But the book has more than enough insight to make it worth reading.

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Grayson Perry has found himself a niche in the British media as a guide to modern art. In this short book he sets out to ‘answer the basic questions that might come up when we enter an art gallery’

Alas, the questions he answers are mostly about the art world, not about art. There is plenty about turf wars between gallerists and collectors, about young artists’ assigned role as accepted rebels, about the role of money in art.

What’s missing is any suggestion that art might have something to say about the wider world.

If I’m in an art gallery, I’ll be wondering something like “what feelings can this art inspire in me?”, or “will this change the way I look at the world?”. That kind of question doesn’t seem relevant to Grayson Perry.

From a report on how people read online:

the rise in popularity of comparison tables and zigzag layouts (where text and images alternate in each row on the page) has coincided with the development of a new gaze pattern.

On pages with distinct cells of content, people often process those cells in a lawn-mower pattern: they begin in the top left cell, move to right until the end of the row, then drop down to the next row, move to the left until the of the row, drop down the next row, and so on. (The name of this pattern is inspired by the way a lawn mower sweeps methodically back and forth across a field of grass. The mower moves from one side of the lawn to the other, then flips around and mows the next row of grass in the opposite direction.)

I love this because it so perfectly recapitulates a metaphor from ancient Greece.

Some early Greek manuscripts were written in a similar way. One line goes left-to-right. The next reverses everything (down to the shapes of the letters themselves) to be read right-to left. Then for line 3 you go left-right again. The reader’s eye can smoothly follow the text, without needing to jump across the page (or the tablet) to find the start of the next line.{:style=“float: right;margin-right: 7px;margin-top: 7px;”}

There were not many lawn-mowers in early Greece. But there were plenty of oxen. And you plow a field the same way you mow a lawn: all the way across the field, then turn and come back.

So this (soon-abandoned) form of writing was called ‘boustrophedon’, ‘like an ox turning’. I’m tickled pink to find it reborn online

I never hated Enterprise Software until I had to work with it.

I have always been in the open-source world – admittedly spending far less time contributing than being paid to build closed-source products on open-source foundations. Still I had a vague, theoretical distrust of enterprise software.

Now, for the first time, I get it. I’m working on a tiny project which is entirely subject to the half-baked API of an enterprise behemoth. On every side I’m faced by problems caused not by my own work or by logical limitations, but by the past decisions of a nameless somebody. Problems I cannot fix, no matter how hard I work or how cunningly I plan. Because here you don’t change anything by thinking. You change it by siting in meetings, persuading people, and perhaps having your boss write a five-figure cheque.

And so, I feel an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

These days I am not used to feeling powerless. It reminds me of home and school – of the last time I felt continuously, cripplingly, at the mercy of arbitrary rules. That my life since then has been relatively independent is of course the result of immense privilege. It’s also because, hating being constrained, I’ve cashed in some of that privilege running away from authority.

Now, with this sense of powerlessness in my head, I look at free software in a different light. I had seen it either in political or in practical terms – as the Right Way and the Best Way.

I had overlooked the psychological aspect. I had not really felt the frustratation of being trapped inside somebody else’s conceptual world, and the compulsion to break free.

The children of the revolution, I suppose, never quite understand the horrors of the ancien regime. So maybe I should appreciate my current situation as a teaching moment, a picture of how I Do Not want to live. For sure, it has motivated me to contribute more actively to free software.

Mostly, though, I just want it to be over.