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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

A twist on step 2: write code about it.

When you teach, you can take the paths you're comfortable with and gloss over the fuzzier concepts. When you code, you have to take every path, and get it right.

I write about German taxes and bureaucracy. A few years ago, I wrote a detailed guide about German health insurance. It went through several rounds of revisions with help from a few different experts.

Yet building a health insurance calculator exposed big gaps in my understanding. This happened again with two more calculators I wrote. I had to revise so much content after the unit tests passed!

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This reminds me of the following quote from the Preface to "Structure And Interpretation Of Classical Mechanics" by Sussman and Wisdom [1]:

    When we started we expected that using this approach to
    formulate mechanics would be easy. We quickly learned though that
    there were many things we thought we understood that we did not in
    fact understand. Our requirement that our mathematical notations be
    explicit and precise enough so that they can be interpreted
    automatically, as by a computer, is very effective in uncovering puns
    and flaws in reasoning. The resulting struggle to make the mathematics
    precise, yet clear and computationally effective, lasted far longer
    than we anticipated. We learned a great deal about both mechanics and
    computation by this process.

[1] https://archive.org/details/StructureAndInterpretationOfClas...

I had many terrible teachers in college. The problem with teaching people as a "learning technique" is that people can fill in the gaps. Students will inevitably self-study to pass an exam, and have access to many alternate learning resources. I think, since not all teachers code, it is not more commonly known that teaching dumb computers requires that you understand more.

Great approach when trying to go into the weeds of a technical problem. I try to first build a conceptual diagram if it is about a process and then fill in the gaps. If it's a more logic based, coding (can be pseudo code too) has helped with understanding

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