Eliezer Yudkowsky: illusion of transparency

[gusl]

Earlier this week, I followed several links from this post by Eliezer Yudkowsky to previous posts of his. I've always known that he was a very smart guy, but that day, I really came to admire his mind. Here are some of the posts:

Expecting Short Inferential Distances: people tend to oversimplify things because they are skeptical of complex explanations.

Making Beliefs Pay Rent is about theoretical terms. It reminded me of why I'm not a mathematician.

Guessing the Teacher's Password

and my favorite:
Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You, which is about theory-of-mind, and how we are all deficient at it, since we assume that others see what we see (because that's the easy thing to do cognitively). At least one of the Keysar papers he linked to (out of 3) was fascinating. I can't tell which one, since my Acrobat is broken.

I left a comment:
<< Eliezer, the so-called "expert blind spot" is IMHO one of the most important problems in lecture-based education and even scientific communication. One of my dreams is to make AI that helps address this, via cognitive models of both experts and novices. This is one of my holy grails.
The AI would understand what was said, and "translate" the message to each novice individually, taking advantage of their pre-existing knowledge. In some cases, this "translation" would involve lengthy tutoring with new concepts and knowledge. >>

Comments

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Good blog. Added to my dailies.