[10ren]

At the end of the first and second principles, I was reminded of thoughts by two other writers... who were mentioned in the immediately next passage (Kay and Covey, respectively). It seems like a clear nod to the audience.

But I'll mention my first thought anyway: abstract ideas that are difficult to reason about can be made easier to work with by finding a better representation. Hopefully one exists. Alan Kay compared multiplication with Roman numerals (in Roman times, only geniuses could do it) with today's positional numerals (in modern times, children can do it). We haven't got any smarter, he said, we've just changed our representation system. Inventing better representation systems is something important that we do as programmers. This was Kay's explanation of "point of view is worth 80 IQ points" that Nielsen mentioned.

Perhaps, in the context of teaching, this itself was an example of the communication technique where you set up a trigger for the audience - a striking image to evoke their own memory, or a puzzle to provoke their own reasoning - so that they take ownership of the message, and it makes more connections to their own network of pre-existing ideas. The "nod", or implicit punchline, is confirming for those who caught the reference; is completing for those who half caught it (filling a gap is another way for increasing memorableness); and just plain informing for those new to the topic. Or am I reading too much into this physicist's writing, and he has quantumed me out?

[Arun2009]

I myself have thought quite a bit about the better representation issue.

I once read somewhere that all human concepts are fundamentally associative in nature. If you see the halftone image of an apple, you don't have to work through pixel by pixel to figure out the concept, "apple". The concept apple with its related features naturally occurs to you.

Taking this further to learning, it would seem that we all go through a stage where our knowledge is of a deliberate, serial nature and once a certain degree of habituation is reached, the knowledge gets coded enough to be associative in nature. Consider solving problems in Mathematics - initially, we all have to consciously do a state-space search to figure out the right method to solve the problem. To expert problem solvers, however, the method to solve the problem becomes immediately apparent just from the patterns in the problem. Ditto for chess, etc.

Lets call knowledge that's serial in nature second-order knowledge and the knowledge that's associative, first-order knowledge. I think there's immense promise in investigating whether the transformation from second-order to first-order can be made systematic. I.e., consider learning as a new subject in itself. I am pretty sure that research has been done on this though.