Life In 19x19

daal wrote:Not having had a good teacher for a "non-trivial" amount of time is also not evidence
that people don't see their reading skills as poor.
It is rather an indication that they either
a) don't want to invest that kind of money in improving their go skills or
b) they are not convinced that a good teacher is necessary.

Yes, in many cases either (a) or (b) is true, or both are true --
I agree with you there, but that's not my point.
The issue is the binary-ness of the situation: either someone "sees" it, or they "don't". No in-between.
That's not the reality.

In reality, like so many things in this thread, it's a huge continuum.
It's a huge continuum of "knowing how much or how little we know and don't know."
Somewhere online there are a few Venn diagrams depicting our "knowledge" (I cannot find them ATM) --

• 1 How much we think we know.
• 2 How much we think we don't know.
• 3 How much we actually know.
• 4 How much we actually don't know.
• 5 How much we don't even know we don't know.

For most people, most amateurs, who have never had a good teacher for a non-trivial amount of time,
they have some understanding of (1) and (2).
For example, they may have some ideas about
their basics level, and their fighting level -- at (1) and (2).

This can change, sometimes greatly, if we meet a good teacher.
We find out, perhaps not at first, but after some "non-trivial" amount of time with the teacher --
Oh, we didn't realize previously we missed (3) through (5).

We thought we know very little about something (say, basics and fighting),
then, after some time (say 1 to 3 years), we realize --
Oh No! We had no idea how little we know,
and we had no idea there's so much more we didn't even know we didn't know.
This level of understanding is not so easy without a good teacher.
It does happen -- some people do figure this out all by themselves --
but those cases are not the majority, I believe.

Knotwilg wrote:Whether someone asks a specific or a generic question, answering "the basics" or "the fundamentals, it's huge" or "that", is not helpful. Such answers are either telling a person that there is something you know and they don't without telling them what it is, or being mystical about Go for whatever reason.

Uberdude wrote:

Knotwilg wrote:Whether someone asks a specific or a generic question, answering "the basics" or "the fundamentals, it's huge" or "that", is not helpful. Such answers are either telling a person that there is something you know and they don't without telling them what it is, or being mystical about Go for whatever reason.

Also saying "basics/fundamentals" can be rather demeaning on condescending: it's not intermediate or advanced stuff you fail at, but basic stuff: you're such a noob! What are the basics? Anything you don't know that I do and think you should know? Do they change on the rank of the reviewer and/or player? "You need to work on your intermediate level Go techniques" might not have the same ring as "You need to work on your basics" but that doesn't make it wrong.

To stress the basics is not demeaning.

Bill Spight wrote:

Uberdude wrote:

Knotwilg wrote:Whether someone asks a specific or a generic question, answering "the basics" or "the fundamentals, it's huge" or "that", is not helpful. Such answers are either telling a person that there is something you know and they don't without telling them what it is, or being mystical about Go for whatever reason.

Also saying "basics/fundamentals" can be rather demeaning on condescending: it's not intermediate or advanced stuff you fail at, but basic stuff: you're such a noob! What are the basics? Anything you don't know that I do and think you should know? Do they change on the rank of the reviewer and/or player? "You need to work on your intermediate level Go techniques" might not have the same ring as "You need to work on your basics" but that doesn't make it wrong.

First, I do not think that Ed is adopting a superior attitude. That does not fit with what I have observed of him here (which is the only place I know him from). Second, his first response to Tami which brought up the question of the basics ( http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 83#p174083 ) makes a good point. To paraphrase it, when an amateur is frustrated (puzzled, confused) about a certain kind of situation, the problem often lies elsewhere, in some gap in basic knowledge or technique. Nearly all amateurs have such gaps. Take care of the basics and the puzzling situations disappear. (To be replaced by other puzzling situations, OC. ) Now, without a good teacher, the amateur is somewhat at a loss, because she or he does not know what to work on to alleviate the perceived problem. That is one reason why I advise people to study everything. And, I suppose, why Ed focuses on the basics.

snorri wrote:The whole godots analogy is interesting, but one thing I think it doesn't surface sufficiently is the difference between knowledge and conditioning. When an SDK misses an important atari due to a lack of attention, we don't say: ah, let me explain this basic you must be ignorant of because you ignored it. It's called atari, and it happens when...

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ . . . O . X . . .
$$ . . . O . X . . .
$$ . . . . . X X . .
$$ O O O O . O X . X
$$ X X O X . O X X .
$$ . . X . 1 . O . X
$$ -----------------[/go]

For example, the question about the best joseki to play in a certain situation is not the most important question to ask if one fails to count liberties while playing out the joseki.

Knotwilg wrote: As much as I hate analogies for their obscuring effect, I must harvest from my recent immersion in table tennis.

Knotwilg wrote: Analogies are always a sign of running out of arguments

Knotwilg wrote: For example I could use "young kids (should) start on small fields with small goals in football" to advocate that "beginners should start playig go on small boards". But football is a physical sport and young kids are physically small, so that overall size reduction may be a good measure in football. It is not proven that beginners have smaller sized brains which thrive more on small boards. I should use go arguments, not football arguments.

snorri wrote:But what really happens is that you have to eat the same dot dozens (if not thousands) of times before you can digest it. The first few times you try to eat it, you just spit it up...

Different people also have different rates of digesting;
for example, some children can digest faster than some adults.

I'm still working on an analogy for bad habits.

Something like this: some of the go-dots are good; some bad (bad-dots, or lemons. )
But they look very similar, especially to some beginners.
Over time, if we don't have good guidance, we've collected
many of these lemons. We grab one from our backpack, load it to our stun-gun,
and it's a dud. We need guidance to differentiate the good-dots from the
lemons. This takes time. And even with guidance, some people
will learn more quickly to tell them apart. Others will need more time
to slowly purge the lemons from their inventory, one by one.

And of course, the sooner we have guidance after we've started Go-Man,
the sooner we learn to distinguish them, so we keep more good-dots, and
discard more lemons, resulting in fewer lemons in our backpack,
which in turn means we can advance to higher levels faster.

Polama (post 67) wrote:He needs more, but he can go back to the 5kyu level and pick them up with comparative ease.

It takes work to digest the good-dots and to remove the lemons.
This may help visualize why it may not be so "simple and easy" to go back.
Because we are also carrying lots of lemons in our backpack,
unbeknownst to us when we first picked them up. Now, it takes more time
and effort to fish them out and unload them.

My anecdotal evidence for bad habits, and for how difficult it is to get rid of
them, comes from experience in various fields. Including, the literal weeds --
the vegetation, which is where I noticed the similarities between weeds and
bad habits: without an active external force, weeds and bad habits just grow
and grow; and the longer we've had them, the deeper their roots, and it's
really a ton of work to remove them -- they are a real pain.

The backpack analogy has another function: to help understand
why game reviews are important -- but that's for another post.

snorri wrote:Maybe godots is okay. But what really happens is that you have to eat the same dot dozens (if not thousands) of times before you can digest it. The first few times you try to eat it, you just spit it up...

Uberdude wrote:Also maybe he calls things basics which I don't consider basics. For example is a snapback basics? Even though I've seen loads of them I still think they are pretty cool and clever and am not sure I would classify them as basics. Maybe everyone else would. On the other hand something like "extend to make a base" I would call a basic idea, though of course the exact place to extend, when and how is far from basic. His favourite shape of the ripped keima I would also call a basic, and yes this comes up a lot in kyu reviews here so I understand focusing on it, but also one cannot blindly apply the ripped keima detector or else it will stop you playing good moves, it is not basic/simple to see when it is ok to allow. The basic instincts like blocking a push I would consider prototypical basics, but there can be multiple moves that are all "basics" (e.g. hane or extend) and choosing which one is best is far from basic so it's not useful to just say "learn basics" when they do the wrong one.