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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

This article has taught me the concept of "discovery fiction" and, I'm sorry to say so, but I already hate it.

I get the idea of presenting concepts in a more natural flow and smuggling in some spaced repetition, but the whole story just felt extremely forced and artificial to me, sort of like a drawn-out sequence of expospeak.

There has to be a better way to include spaced repetition and discovery in teaching.

Edit: Note this correction by Michael Nielsen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30325048

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I also found the style in this article kind of annoying and difficult to follow, but I think "discovery fiction" usually means something different. The two examples Michael Nielsen gives are https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actu... and https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/why-bloom-filters-work-the-wa.... Another classic example is http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad....

You can see there's no dialogue; the idea is to frame an article as "how might you discover/invent this concept on your own", rather than just directly explaining how a thing works. You are given a fictional goal, and you "discover" the subject matter by building iterative solutions.

This example that explains kerberos is entirely dialog https://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dialogue.html Really helped me understand kerberos in a way other articles and technical documents had failed to.

One thing I've learned about pedagogy is that it's a fool's errand to try to create material that works for everyone, because everyone learns differently. In fact, the meta story here is supposed to be about Liz and Tim having different styles of learning -- Liz learns by exploring off the beaten path, while Tim prefers to stick to the course content. Neither are wrong.

Ok, I didn't realize this aspect of the story, this is actually pretty cool, I agree.

I also like that the story encourages experimenting and testing out your mental models, like Liz did.

It's just the particular way they discover things that feels forced to me. The story is all about them coming to their own conclusions and thinking up their own experiments, but - it being a story - you know, it's actually all guided beforehand.

Maybe what irks me is that this concept of a character discovering "on their own" some ostensible deep truth (which is really just the author's personal opinion about something) has been used for a lot of worse reasons in other stories - even though, in this case, the "truth" is perfectly harmless and beneficial.

Anyway, it's always easier to criticize than to create, so I won't say I really have better ideas of how to do it.

I've seen somewhere that "everyone learns differently" might not actually be true.

I found this video from Veritasium that explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

Exactly. This seems to be debunked: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....

This is saying that VARK method of describing learning styles is incorrect. This does not necessarily mean that there aren't differences in what are the best method's for different people learn. One issue with VARK is that it involves self-identification, as was the case in all studies mentioned in the video. There's no reason to assume that the way people prefer to learn is actually the best way for them to learn, it may be that people choose what seems right to them rather than what actually is. Another issue is, as is mentioned in the video, the domain you are studying also has an affect and multi-modal approaches are most useful. Whether learning styles exist or not, some information intrinsically is better presented as a diagram than a wall of text. And no matter if some people learn better in certain ways, it seem universally true that people learn better if information is presented to them in multiple forms instead of just one.

Which is all interesting, but mostly just disproves VARK and similar approaches to describing differences in how people learn. There are still so many different ways to teach someone something, they're just much more holistic ways of teaching than the simple VARK split. That some people learn better from X course of teaching and others learn better from Y course of teaching still seems likely to me(admittedly, just pulling from personal experience and the anecdotes of others on that ). That we don't have a neat way to categorize that might just mean it's too messy to do so, or could mean we just haven't figured out the right way to look at it yet.

>> I've seen somewhere that "everyone learns differently" might not actually be true.

Even if we assume that people all learn the same way, good learning integrates new facts or concepts into ones pre-existing mental model of the world. Not everyone has the same mental model - of this I am certain. Sometimes new information just hangs on the existing model, and sometimes the existing model needs to be updated. This can make the process seem like everyone learns differently, since different explanations can make more or less sense depending what's already in their head.

On top of that, I think some people have (maybe inherently) very different abilities in things like visualization, memorization, vocabulary, etc... So yeah, I think everyone learns differently even if at some neuronal level it's all the same.

I think “everyone learns differently” is an overblown claim and gets repeated ad-nauseum. It is an escape hatch to avoid deeper discussions of successful strategies, what it means to teach and learn. A sort of a deus-ex-machina of arguments. There are more universals about learning than differences. It effectively surrenders the failure of teaching to “Well, it must be because everyone learns differently”. This way, we can never learn to teach or even debate about it.

This is actually a failure of discourse in many areas of life – "X is hard to solve or haven't thought about it, so it must be that X is different for everyone". Nutrition, Product Reviews, etc. I've learned over years that anyone that claims "X is different for everyone" is most likely exhibiting a defeatist attitude.

A relevant HN discussion exploring effective learning strategies was posted ~7 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321632

The universals about learning, which I've taken away from the discussion, is that active learning and recall is generally effective, while passive learning (e.g. re-reading) is less effective. A good research paper that covers this (which I've mentioned in that discussion) is called "Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology" [PDF]: https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...

As others have pointed out (e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324567 ), the style in this article is not what I had in mind when I coined the phrase "discovery fiction". It also has nothing to do with spaced repetition or having a "more natural flow".

Sorry to drag you into this! I meant “inspired by” in the literal sense, not as a claim that it would fall under your definition. I mentioned so when I tweeted it, but not in the post itself https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1492923557801869318?s=21

No worries. I'm glad you're experimenting!

For myself - and I know others respond very differently - I usually want everything in an essay to serve the overarching point. So I find fictional asides pretty distracting. There are exceptions: Imre Lakatos did it well in "Proofs and Refutations", and Douglas Adams did it well too. But it's tough to pull off!

My first exposure to programming was a book my dad gave me called The Little Schemer, and I absolutely loved it. It's like discovery fiction without the fiction. It just asks a question and then immediately answers it; mostly composed of code with minimal explanation. It feels like a very natural progression of being exposed to something new, getting familiar with it, and starting to explore all the nuances.

I can imagine TFA re-written without the dumb story being really good. It makes use of spaced repetition, and it does a good job of introducing one piece of information at a time. But I agree; the story part of it is stupid.

I wholeheartedly concur about The Little Schemer, though well into adulthood when first exposed to it. It works so well due to combining a Q&A format with a respectful "tone" that never talks down to the student-reader. The authors' subtle sense of humor contributes too.

To be sure this article isn't in the same league at all. Great teachers are scarce no doubt because few are gifted with the requisite raw talent. It implies you're right, it's hard to produce top-quality written teaching material, after all excellent examples are uncommon, even vanishingly rare.

If you think this is forced, you should read one of “The Easy Way” math books, like https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/barrons-trigonometry-the-easy-...

Fictional kingdom discovers Trigonometry out of necessity.

Trigonometry The Easy Way, was brilliant! I wouldn't categorize it as forced in the manner of the OP. The book creates a fantasy backdrop to connect trigonometrical concepts in a fun way. I really enjoyed the book and it made trigonometry really stick in my brain!

It reminds me a bit of those recipe sites, where every recipe is preluded with a bunch of mostly irrelevant text. Low information-density.

I thought the story was pretty good, it's a nice change from the all-facts texts I usually read.

Other great examples (though in a whole other league) are the phoenix project and the unicorn project, where the characters learn along the way.

Of course the learning and story is "guided" by the author. Every story ever written was.

I personally just hated the long-form-journalism style of "okay, at the start, you have to wade through a ton of irrelevant crap about the settings and the coil-bound notebooks they're using".

I'm convinced lots of sites do this just to push out the actual content below the "please login / buy subscription to continue reading" point, or if it is a free article at least make you scroll through as many inline ads as they can.

For recipes, yeah, but this sounds like just the writer taking artistic license to write how they want.

I liked it, for what it's worth.

>I personally just hated the long-form-journalism style of "okay, at the start, you have to wade through a ton of irrelevant crap about the settings and the coil-bound notebooks they're using".

Yeah, I'm really glad this was the top comment. That style of journalism has become all pervasive today, and the grotesque self indulgence of it is honestly sickening. I refer to it as "college term paper journalism", because they all read like a sophomore English 102 essay.

I guess you wouldn't like Sophie's World either.

... and run away screaming from _Fall_ by Neal Stephenson ...

It came to my mind after writing that post :)

It's way too long since I read it, so I can't really compare, but I remember that the whole topic was actively discussed and reflected in the novel. That's something different.

Like, Sophie being a character in a novel was an important plot point of just that novel, if I remember correctly.

Haha entertaining. I rather like this style. I skipped till the first code and then the interludes were short. But I think I would have been annoyed if the first code block was not demarcated clearly so I could skip to it. The prelude was too long for me to read since I didn’t know if there was going to be payoff.

agreed. it's not useful for me as a more "tech experienced" person and having taught many people just breaking into the industry i don't think it would help them much, either.

people are often helped by metaphor (e.g. "a port is like a mail slot in a huge mailroom...") but i feel like this "discovery fiction" thing is like an inverse version of that... it allows your brain to be creative when thinking through the topic but just focused on the wrong part of the explanation.

annoys me also, but I'm old and like things without a lot of fluff. I'm sure plenty of people enjoy this style.

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