Do "interesting details" really hurt learning? | Hacker News Reader

Do "interesting details" really hurt learning?

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28 pointssant0sk19 comments

I recommend the original post and related comments over the link provided above:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/12/against-interesting-pr...

Hard to tell if there is anything meaningful in the study. Like most psychological studies it used students as subjects. I am not surprised that the only thing they could remember was the remark about sex. Quite likely the "meat" wasn't anything of particular interest. Contrast that with a lecture to professional programmers on Hadoop. An OT story or remark would be just an ice breaker and not the main take-away.

Take-away here: psychological studies on students tell you something about students, not necessarily about the rest of us.

Agreed.

The same exact issue you cite is a major reason why I - as a usability professional - am always warning people against believing what Jakob Nielsen & others preach as a result of their usability studies.

I love the Overcoming Bias blog, so I was a little taken aback at how quickly they took this study at face value, & how nobody in the comments questioned the lack of connection between the main topic & the details, etc etc. That's not the kind of rigorous thinking I've come to expect from the blog dedicatd to dissecting biases!

FWIW, I wrote this blog post - but I sure as hell didn't expect to find it here on HN. It was simply the result of a moment of pique.

The counter-argument is as follows: what better subject group for a study about learning than a group immersed in learning activity (i.e., students)?

rp, in theory, that makes sense. But I think there's a category error possibly at work. Hung out with many average (read: normal) college kids lately? :)

I am starting a project that is pinned to present information that is based on the opposite philosophy: The goal isn't to properly summarize data to appeal to students, but to offer as much details as possible and let the 'consumer' of information to choose how they navigate it.

There are some questions that are representative of a science that can be presented in such a fashion and properly presenting details can be the closing of the gap between "getting it" and "not getting it."

This is both content and content presentation and I'm still chewing over the details. This is mostly based on how some people I've spoken to and myself learn and is inspired by writings/philosophy of data presentation from Tufte.

If anyone is interested in joining the effort or hearing me out, contact me. I feel fairly strongly on the topic.

Anecdotally: at university I observed that my fellow students tended to prefer philosophy lecturers who told interesting little stories, jokes and asides. But whilst entertaining at the time, I always preferred the lecturers who just got down to the arguments etc., because they provided a constant stream of substantive points and arguments for me to write in my notes. And getting relevant material written down is actually useful for learning and getting good grades, whereas thinking 'what a caution that lecturer is', and expanding one's repertoire of philosophy jokes and anecdotes isn't.

On the other hand, I did have a couple of maths lecturers who managed to combine getting down to the nitty-gritty with some effective crowd-pleasing moments, which afforded one a break from concentrating for a moment.

So, for my part, I would tend to agree that if helping people learn is the goal, tangential 'interesting details' should be minimised.

I don't agree with your unstated assumption that "interesting details" must necessarily be off-topic.

Of course, I still have a little collection of quotes from my old Photographic Design professor, including, among others, "That's why it pays to know your guano" and "There are as many types of breast as there are types of women." Useless bugger.

But as a writer and a speaker, I am always trying to take the basic facts and make them more interesting, more palatable, & more immediate by spicing them up -- with diagrams, pictures, good metaphors, whatever. Done right, these are both on-topic and helpful.

In my experience, it's often the interesting, flagrantly off-topic details that are remembered, and help me later on. Human beings are wired to remember the surprising, and I don't seem to be much different in this regard.

The absorption of material isn't really what I get from a lecture. Rather, like the taper in a train's wheels, I use it to gently pull my experimental wandering thought on track.

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