Saturation, Distillation, Improvisation: A Story About Procedural Knowledge And Cookies

The worst cooking I have ever had came from a person who seems to lack any sort of ability to criticize food. It's not that she didn't have the skill to be a good cook. She simply could not tell when her cooking was bad. Being a good critic is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary.

how to formalize and train the art of learning

I agree that this is a really interesting question. A couple of half-baked thoughts:

1. Alicorn's formulation here is basically a search algorithm. The first two stages (Saturation and Distillation) are ways of using existing information to find decent initial values; the final stage (Experimentation) is the stepping algorithm. Thinking about it this way, it's immediately obvious that there's a lot more that could go into this last part: how to carve up the search space, how to decide which direction to step, whether to accept a step, etc. all of which have been explored extensively in other contexts. (Note: I'm not suggesting that this makes the problem trivial, or we should just think about this in terms of existing search algorithm paradigms; merely that thinking about things in this way could provide useful insights.)

2. One interesting facet of this sort of problem is that the precise mode of "failure" of a particular experiment can give information about where to step next. At a very basic level, you have things like burning, which, as most people will realize, suggest cooking at a lower temperature or for less time. At a higher level, you have things like the failure to form peaks, which, unless you can get more information from elsewhere, or you have a good understanding of food chemistry, you probably won't have much of an idea how to fix.

IMO, it has to involve -- amongst other things! -- personal practice of the sort I describe in the following.

If you want to avoid falling into mental 'traps' (not to make assumptions, not to fall victim to biases, etc), then you have to be able to spot when you are about to, or just have, commited one.

You need a highly-refined "bullshit detector". And it is crucial that you can use it automatically. When you're in the midst of thinking about something you can't just sit back and consciously reason about your own thinking in order to spot every mistake. You have to be really good at automatically spotting them.

If it needs to be automatic then it has to come from practice. So I say get as much practice as you can: anywhere and anyhow.

Always have it as a consicous priority to want to avoid falling into any mental traps. Always consider how what you're thinking could possibly be wrong. The same for anything you hear anyone else say. And in particular, for anything that you read. I always have a pencil with me when I'm reading things and whenever I think I've found someone falling into some sort of mental trap I try to note the details of it.

(This is about having a pretty constant critical attitude but it doesn't mean being a jerk who has a negative outlook on life, or who needlessly attack others' views in public, or who shows off by pointing out mistakes, etc.)

Over time, you'll build up a more substantial toolkit, and those capabilities will become more automatic.

Procedural knowledge is often initially constructed out of propositional knowledge. But once procedural knowledge is had, it also incorporates things like body memory and pure automatic habit, which, when observed in oneself, are just as likely to be rationalized after the fact as they are to be antecedently planned for sound reasons. It's also easy to forget the initial propositions about a mastered procedure. I am likely to forget why I separate eggs with spoons at some point, until and unless I decide to go back to doing it by hand and get the corresponding poor results: I will just reach for the silverware drawer and set about separating eggs. (This is probably a bad example, since by mentioning in the post above my reasons for changing methods, I've cemented those reasons in my mind. However, I'm sure there are a dozen things I do automatically in the kitchen that have no cognitively occurrent relationship to the reasons I started doing them in the first place.)

I think the clearer examples (of procedural knowledge) tend to be things like physical skills that we can learn to reliably perform, but without necessarily being able to articulate how it is that we perform them. In that sense it wouldn't be accurate to say it's simply a subset of propositional knowledge; it's more that the two may intersect to some extent, and the boundaries of each can move as we learn to articulate what it is that we're doing, or to think about what we're doing in propositional terms. (EDIT: or, as Alicorn suggests, forget the propositional reasons why we did things a particular way in the first place.)

I tend to view procedural knowledge as being infered from propositional knowledge. You have the map (propositional), draw the route (procedural) and then store/transmit essentially only the route without the map (the how without all of the justufucation, although some does leak in). Mentions to automatic habit etc. can essentially be considered caching that persists even after the propositional knowledge has been discarded.

I view Alicorn's method as essentially 1. gathering a lot of (procedural) routes to similar goals, 2. reverse-engineering propositional knowledge from them by using (mostly) voting and 3. adding extra knowledge through experimentation and the current circumstances. This arrives at a new procedure that reaches a goal in cookie-space that is satisfying to Alicorn's taste, constrained resources available to her, in short, an Alicorn-optimized procedure.

(when I say 'some sort of universal translation mechanism' what i mean is, something that applies to all the different sets of instructions for performing that task, not something that applies to any instructions for any possible task)

This is more or less my technique as well. Sometimes I use a slightly different version:

1. Saturation

2. Fermentation: I form old ball theories explaining my new knowledge until I come upon one I like (completely unscientific)

3. Test.

I'd say half of my cooking adventures turn out badly... but the other half are quite edible. My worst attempt, by far, has been sauerkraut. Anything that involves genuine fermentation is probably something that isn't going to be figured out so easily with half-baked search methods.

People who already know how to do something tend to be no longer aware of all the little things they learned as they were developing that capability.

On the other hand, people with lots of experience teaching newbies often have quite a detailed knowledge of the most common failure modes for beginners, and can be very useful for precisely this reason. As a second best, people who have only recently learned how to do things often remember their own learning experience sufficiently well to be useful (provided there aren't so many distinct failure modes that their individual experience is unlikely to be representative).

My advice for cooking is to choose a cookbook intended for beginners that includes a lot more information than just recipes (eg, the Joy of Cooking). This might generalize to other fields. The concept of a recipe is so clear that it's easy for a beginner to recognize a book doing something else; this may not be so easy in other fields, even if the beginner thinks to look--and people don't seem to look for cooking instruction beyond recipes.

Go try to figure out how to make great sourdough bread from information you read on the Internet. You'll find there's tons of information, written by people that know what they're doing and have had success doing it, but it's still damn hard to learn how to get it right yourself.

It's easy to experiment if you know what to change. Having a variety of recipes will suggest things to change--like time/temperature combinations. But I see a lot of variation in how well my eggs whip. It never occurred to me to worry about oil from my hands. (and I doubt that's my problem, but at least it's something new to try)

I think you have this backwards: cooking experiments are more expensive. Talking to people is free, ingredients aren't.