[zelienople]

Why is learning anything so damned hard?

Mainly because we are monkeys to whom a reasonably accurate reductive analysis can be applied if we label the axes "asshole" and "idiot".

It was a good blog post by a reasonably intelligent monkey who seemed to score low on the "idiot" axis. But some other monkey pegged the "asshole" axis by preventing us from highlighting the text so we could right-click and search to answer the primary question, "What is it?"

Namely, what is functional programming? Even after besting the right-click hurdle, no one easy and succinct answer is available.

The meta-analysis of this blog post therefore circles back around to perform a second-phase adjustment of the author's "idiot" score once we realize that he has done exactly what he is complaining about; he is a bad teacher because he did not answer the "What is it?" question.

He seems like a reasonably nice person, so I think we have to leave his "asshole" score alone in the second phase.

The collective effort, however, scores high on both the "idiot" and "asshole" axes, and this is the core of the "bad teacher" problem.

I spent most of my long university career angry about this problem. Why is is that monkeys can't teach?

Partly, it is because they are arrogant assholes who don't want to weaken their position by making it easy for others to access their expertise.

And partly it is because they are monkeys who think more highly of themselves than is justified, and therefore they cover their ignorance with jargon, hand-waving, and obfuscation.

Other than extinction, I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but I'm sure that the first step is by starting every lesson by answering the "What is it?" question succinctly and concretely, and, more importantly, realizing that if you can't do that, you should shut the fuck up and go away.

[scns]

The experts blind spot comes to mind:

https://thevaluable.dev/expert-blind-spot-software-developme...

https://nscblog.com/continual-learning/understanding-underst...

Dropping the judgements, assuming positive intent and trying to see the situation might help.

[btkramer9]

To your point about others not teaching well to preserve their status, I'm sure it exists but not that prevalent. I think people who have known something for a long time just forget how to empathize with not understanding what they've known for so long.

For this reason alone I think this is why fellow students tend to be much better at tutoring/helping each other instead of their professors.