Ideal Learning and Ideal Teaching

This post is a continuation of Learning as Self-hacking.

Self-guided learning - learning in the absence of a teacher - has certain advantages. Learning to learn is at least as important as learning any single subject of study. Independent study is a "sink or swim" strategy for learning to learn. In the process, the independent student will learn valuable lessons about how to learn. These lessons can never be learned in the absence of a root desire to learn, the kind of desire that motivates the gamer to learn the controls of a highly anticipated new game, for example.

Self-hacking is one of the lessons I have learned from my adventures in self-guided learning. I will not enumerate here the many kinds of self-hacks that I have learned along the way. Today, there is a growing movement of minimalists, "mind hackers", "life hackers" and so on. But what happens when we generalize the patterns of self-hacking? I assert that these generalizations are what Dennett calls intuition pumps. Independently discovering and applying these self-hacking patterns - intuition pumps - is a slow process. It is a trial-and-error process, at best. Obviously, it would be much faster to copy off of someone else, whenever possible. Reading and applying the hacks of others does not count as "copying" in the sense of ideal teaching because it still requires the costly and error-prone step of independently internalizing new hacks.

There are two criteria in order for the copying of abilities from the teacher to the student to be ideal - to proceed as efficiently and thoroughly as possible:

• The teacher must have a thorough grasp of learning itself, learning as self-hacking, as well as a thorough grasp of the imparting of abilities to another through teaching (others-hacking).
• The student must have a thorough trust of the teacher and complete confidence in the teacher's abilities at self-hacking and others-hacking

Ideal instruction - that is, ideal learning and ideal teaching - is like surgery, except that the student is awake and participating and the anaesthetic is not 100% effective. The student must learn to cut and puncture, stitch and cauterize himself, as the teacher directs. The reason that the student must trust the teacher is that ideal instruction is a live process, it is something that requires moment-by-moment assessment and judgment on the part of the teacher. The efficiency of ideal instruction cannot be achieved with half-measures. This is similar to one of the core tenets of self-hacking ... you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get the desired results.

Like self-hacking, ideal instruction only ever deals in the real. No bullshit, no ulterior motives, no comfortable lies in order to avoid the uncomfortable, objective truth. There is no room for self-gratifying boasting or gloating on the part of either teacher or student. There is no room for humiliation, degradation, pointless punishments, and so on.

Ideal instruction is more efficient than other kinds of learning because it is really guided self-hacking. At the end of the day, learning is always something that you do to yourself. Ideal instruction facilitates the student's learning by making it more efficient than it could ever be, unaided. By contrast, the rote systems of education employed in schools - whether strict, lax or moderate - is always sub-optimal. Invariably, the students have not even learned how to learn and many of them do not care to learn. Likewise, most teachers have never learned to learn or teach. Only a self-hacker can cooperate with another self-hacker to attain ideal instruction in the form of imparting new abilities.

Sometimes, the measures involved in self-hacking can become grotesque. To focus on or obsess over these measures it to lose one's way and fall into sadomasochism. The point of short-term pain or self-mutilation is always to attain some other end that is worth it. This end must be constantly in mind and every step must add up to definite progress towards the desired end. For this reason, ideal instruction can only occur between acting individuals, that is, individuals capable of forming and implementing plans on the basis of means-end analysis. Intuitively, we all do this for very short-range goals but it is only long-range goals that require elaborate processes.