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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious on this. My gut would be that NOTHING transfers between contexts by default. Instead, learning to transfer something between contexts is itself a skill that needs effort.

As an easy example, just counting beats is clearly just counting. Yet counting beats and aligning transitions/changes on or off a beat is a skill you have to work on.

Indeed, the same counting can help people that are running to start to even breaths out. Simple meditations often have you count a breath in, and then count it out. Just because you can count doesn't mean you will automatically be good at any of these things.

There is also the question of what it means to count? Do you literally hear a voice in your head speaking the numbers away? Do you see a ticker? Do you have some other mental tally system?

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> My gut would be that NOTHING transfers between contexts by default.

Once you’ve learned to write, you can write with a pen between your toes (crudely because of a lack of fine motor control), with a chisel in wood, with a spray can, men can write while peeing into snow, etc.

> As an easy example, just counting beats is clearly just counting.

Agreed.

> Yet counting beats and aligning transitions/changes on or off a beat is a skill you have to work on.

But that’s not just counting, is it? It’s counting _and_ aligning transitions/changes on or off a beat, so it requires detecting transitions/changes while counting.

I'm not clear that writing with different tools is really the same as writing in different contexts? Writing in a different context would be that you have learned to write your letters, but now you are learning to write poetry. Different kinds of poetry, even.

My point for aligning changes on beats is that you are learning to count a mixed radix, effectively. We don't teach it that way, anymore, as positional numbers have grown to be what many of us think of as numbers. But mixed radix counting is the norm in the world in ways that people just don't realize anymore.

The idea of transferring knowledge being a separate skill reminds me of the Wason selection task[1]. I first learned about this in a course on education and it felt pretty shocking to see so many classmates struggling with the logic puzzle version of the question. But then if you set up the same task with a story about being a bartender then it becomes more straightforward to solve.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

> Once you’ve learned to write, you can write with a pen between your toes (crudely because of a lack of fine motor control), with a chisel in wood, with a spray can, men can write while peeing into snow, etc.

This is not accurate. Find a child who has just learned how to write an A, and ask them to write an A with their feet, or even their non-dominant hand. It will be just as hard as getting them to write a B. The connection between shape and motion is a relatively simple one, but your first attempt at writing a word with piss in snow is gonna look awful. Penmanship needs to be learned in the new context.

A fun example I like to bring up involves yelling in foreign languages. Even if you have an impeccable accent in your second language, if you've never practiced talking loudly, the first time you need to order lunch over the noise of a passing subway train, your accent will entirely fall apart as you try to say the same thing, but louder. (Yes, this is a personal anecdote, with a passable accent in my second language, as opposed to impeccable.)

What you describe is one of the fundamental “problems” of associative memories. Which is doing or recalling a thing in one context does not mean you are capable of doing or recalling the exact same thing in another context. Neurons light up based on all the current inputs, and if none of the current inputs light up the neurons that can trigger a skill, good luck doing that skill. This is why practicing in a wide variety of contexts is really important for mastery, you’re essentially increasing the odds that different inputs have a chance to trigger the knowledge that’s locked away in the structure.

Is that, essentially, what the article is looking at?

My curiosity is that this is my prior. The article is clearly framed in the opposite direction. Am I just putting too much emphasis on the headline?

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