Hit the nail on the head, you did.
1 Like
Well, I wouldnāt quote ckās sentence as a standalone phrase there. The āBeyond thatā is crucial. You can be a phenomenal teacher, but if you donāt have any relative advantage in terms of expertise, thatās irrelevant.
- Being stronger is necessary, but not always sufficient.
- Being able to tailor your message to your audience (in turn necessary, but not sufficient criterion for being a good teacher) is not always necessary (some people learn well enough with minimal guidance), but always helpful.
- Being āa skillful teacherā is similarly helpful, but neither necessary nor sufficient. It depends on who the student is.
LZ for example is a mostly horrible teacher, and yet players learn from it.
4 Likes
Actually, Iām not so sure about that.
From what Iāve seen of Pros trying to provide wisdom even to SDKs/DDKs let alone TPKs is that they are not very good at it. Iām sure there would be exceptions, but I think you need to have some empathy with the student, and todayās Pros can barely remember what it was like not to know how to play, and when they were being taught it was in very different circumstances to a new player on OGS.
1 Like
Is there evidence of that? I mean, DDK/TPK players in particular (Iām sure pros learn from it)
This is actually a trick question because TPK players are in fact unteachableā¦ They have not lost their 50 games yet. 
1 Like
As you may have noticed, I didnāt say āDDKs learn from itā, but since you agree that pros learn from it, Iāll rest that case.
On the other hand, if two groups of players (say ~25 each) were to play 1000 games per person, group A playing people of their level (at any given point in time) and group B playing LZ, if both groups were to compete against each other, Iād bet on the LZ group to win. In other words, If all players completed 1000 games in the same timeframe and no players quit, I would expect group B players to achieve a higher rating on average than group A players.
1 Like
Right, but the question was teaching TPKs. Iām not sure that TPKs really learn from LZ in practice, though I do agree your extreme thought experiment would likely have the outcome you describe
Again, the question wasnāt how good of a teacher someone has to be in order to teach 20k+ players or whether students would/could learn from someone, but āwhat levelā (i.e. how strong) the teacher should be.
Now, Iām not sure if it shows, but that particular post was a reply to Kosh, who quoted ck. I pointed out that teaching ability sans Go skill isnāt going to do anything. To elucidate this point, I brought up the comparison between Go skill (necessary but not always sufficient) and teaching ability (neither necessary nor sufficient, but conducive). LZ is the examplum gratum in this case, the apex of Go skill combined with the nadir of teaching ability.
You lost me in the words there, but I think one point is similar to one you made earlier: level is necessary but not sufficient to teach.
However, level itself is also not sufficient, as LZ āthe nadir of teachingā acknowledges.
Or at least so I assert: I assert that TPKs will not learn from LZ in practice (as a āteacherā), proving that level itself is not sufficient to teach.
I italicised āteachā because I want to give it some meaning. Experience itself is could be described as a teacher in some sense, and thatās why the 1000 games thought experiment is valid: 1000 games with LZ would be better experience than 1000 games with a TPK.
This doesnāt mean that LZ is āteachingā in any real sense other than just providing experience.
To actually āteachā ā¦ provide structured learning ā¦ one has to be able to provide structured learning Level (subject matter expertise) alone is not sufficient.
It may be late in the debate to be defining terms, but hopefully not too late 
OMG, wouldnāt the time better spent to play teaching games to TPKs instead? 
Mh, but itās the opposite. Skill is occasionally sufficient, as LZ illustrates.
I think I would say that skill can provide experience, which can over time result in learning.
But teaching expertise is required to teach
If you cannot teach without teaching expertise,
you cannot acquire teaching expertise without having teaching expertise.
That argument seems awfully circular to me.
Who said this?
How do you think teachers are trained today?
I got my teaching expertise by being taught how to teach.
smurph 
1 Like
I see. So presumably, your teaching-teacher was taught how to teach by someone who taught him how to teach as well, then, etc.
If so, letās go back to the first-ever teaching-teacher. Who taught him?
Being taught is not the only way to learn, obviously.
Another way is trial and error - also known as ālearning by experienceā. This is slow and error prone, probably painful.
Being taught is better because the act of teaching encapsulates the previous slowly obtained experience and presents it in a more readily absorbed learning framework. That basically is what teaching is.
Presumably the art of teaching was originally learned by experience. āI need to help this person learn what I learned the hard way, letās see how to do thatā
Premise 1. Teaching expertise is required to teach.
Premise 1 implies that teaching expertise cannot be acquired without having teaching expertise, because in order to acquire expertise, you would have to engage in teaching, which requires expertise, whichā¦
Ignoring the circular reasoning, let us assume you could acquire expertise by being taught how to teach.
- Teacher N exists, his initial expertise was imported from teacher N-1.
- Teacher N-1 existed. He taught teacher N. His initial expertise was imported from teacher N-2.
- Teacher N-(N-1) existed. He taught teacher N-(N-2). Unfortunately, he could not have had a teacher from whom to import his initial expertise, as there are N-N=0 teachers who could teach him teaching expertise. Therefore, he must have acquired teaching expertise without having been taught. Unfortunately, that is impossible, due to premise 1.
This seems needlessly semantic.
Surely GAJās intent was that teaching expertise is required to teach well. Anyone can teach badly, or at least attempt to teach. As with any skill, sufficient practice will develop expertise, and with sufficient practice teaching badly, someone can eventually figure out how to teach passably.
1 Like
Well, we all āsort of knowā what other people mean, but the fun here was to take each otherās words and wrapper logic very seriously.
The take-home-message is that you need to be sure player T is stronger than player S in order to make it likely that his moves and strategies are systematically preferable to player Sā moves and strategies. Even if Tās explanations (if any) werenāt entirely correct, at least the material would have some merit. The stronger T relative to S, the better. However, there may be diminishing returns. At some point, a skill difference thatās larger by 1 unit of measurement may be less important than a 1-unit increase in Tās teaching ability.
We could summarize this roughly asā¦
benefit_to_student = constant * log(1+skill_difference) * (1+teaching_ability)