Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

"It's Time to Learn Like Experts" by Jay Jacobs

I want to call attention to a new, important and short article by Jay Jacobs.

This article is a call to action to break the reliance on unvalidated expert opinions by raising awareness of our decision environment and the development of context-specific feedback loops.

Everyone in the New School is a fan of feedback loops of one form or another. Hypothesis testing, learning, and calling out superstition are all forms of feedback loops.

One thing that Jay brings in that I hadn’t seen is the idea of kind and wicked learning environments. A kind environment is one in which you can quickly get good feedback on things experts agree will help you improve. (Did you fall off the bike?) An unkind environment is, amongst other things, one where feedback comes later, if at all. Jay has a table. It’s on page 2.

You should find Jay’s article here: “A Call to Arms: It’s Time to Learn Like Experts“, or his short blog here.