User experience, information theory, documentation, and education: a thread on an imagined future for learning.

1/ I love the "If you could do one thing" question - there are so many variants that are interesting to think about.

A few notable ones:

2/

- if you could press a button and instantly learn something (a la The Matrix), what would you choose?
- if you could press a button and everyone in the world was skilled at X, what would you choose?

We'd all love to be an expert, but getting there takes time.

3/ What are experts though, exactly?

I view them as people who

- know how to do a particular set of things
- understand the relationships, at a granular level, between those things

However, when we hire an expert, most of that is irrelevant.

Why?

4/ We don't really care what things the expert knows - we just want our problem solved.

It's entirely possible (probable?) that we are hiring the expert for a small piece of his/her total knowledge.

If you have a degree - how much of it are you actually using at your job?

5/ In fact - for most common problems, e.g.

- I need a website built
- I need my spark plugs replaced
- I need my taxes done

there is almost certainly a youtube video that tells you, step-by-step, how to solve the problem.

Experts learned these fields took years to get there.

6/ To put it plainly, there's two things going on here:

1) You don't have to be an expert yourself to solve the problem. You just need to know the exact "steps" to take.

2) Proof of expertise is, arguably, not that you can complete some process (i.e. memorizing a test)

7/ The proof actually comes from the expert's ability to generalize. Their anti-fragility.

Here's what I mean.

Let's say you follow a youtube video to solve problem x.

It has steps 1 through 10.

You get to step 3, and it's not like the video. You're lost. Crap! What to do?

8/ If you know nothing about what you're doing, then you're toast.

You were relying on everything going right, which is extremely susceptible to entropy.

When you shove your headphones in your pockets, there's a trillion++ ways for them to be a mess when you pull them out.

9/ But there's only a few ways they can be neatly folded.

If that metaphor didn't click, it's almost like each time you take a step in the video, you're flipping a coin and hoping for tails.

There's only one way to win (heads heads heads..) and 1,000+ ways to lose.

10/ On the other side of the coin- if you're an expert, you've seen it all before.

You know what's going on. You know the theory and you have the experience.

If something goes wrong, you either

a) know how to fix it, or
b) know exactly how to isolate what you don't know

11/ This is where that "understanding the relationship between things" part of being an expert comes in.

It's also why becoming an expert takes so much time.

If you're trying to memorize n things, that takes n units of time - O(n).

12/ On the other hand, if you're trying to understand how

- everything fits into the big picture and
- how everything is related to everything else,

that scales quadratically with the number of things - O(n^2).

That's a whole different ball game.

13/ That's one of the best reasons to hire an expert.

You don't want to try fixing it yourself, get halfway through, and then realize you need to hire an expert anyway.

When they run into a problem, they know how to fix it.

Or, at least, what documentation will tell them how.

14/ Documentation is interesting from this point of view.

You could think of it as the last mile.

Experts get most of the way there. Documentation takes care of the rest.

Random thought, what if the documentation were *so good* that you didn't even need the expert?

15/ What if any lay person could just pick up a schematic/manual/handbook, find out what they need to know to solve their problem, and then solve it?

What are the road blocks standing in the way of this?

16/ Well, it basically comes down to the "relationships between everything" thing.

You read the documentation, but you have no idea what any of it means. You don't know what you don't know.

17/ Current documentation often tells you *what* something is, but I've never seen any that tells you what its *relationship* is to *every other* thing in that field.

Could documentation that did both solve this? I think so.

18/ If you had both at your finger tips, you'd have everything the expert has (in theory).

You'd be able to point at something and quickly identify

1) what it is, and
2) how it relates to everything else

19/ If you're expert following this thread, you're probably *really* skeptical.

"Yeah, right. You think you can just replace me with documentation?"

Consider thinking about it this way:

You're not an expert. You're a solution to a problem.

You're an API, essentially.

20/ The client could watch a youtube video. True. We've made that knowledge available online.

But then they'd get stuck and call you.

At which point you'd come over, use a *different* set of knowledge (but still knowledge, nonetheless), and solve the problem.

21/ The key point here: We've figured out how to digitize that first set of knowledge (those brittle, step by step guides on youtube) with a nice user experience.

We haven't figured out how to digitize that *different* set of knowledge with a nice user experience.

22/ But it's coming. I have a few ideas on how to do it.

I'm not saying it'll be easy, but I know it's possible. It's just a matter of figuring out the architecture, the data structures, and the user experience.

There will be some AI involved in there, too. :)