Intellectual Masturbation

Here is my million dollar question of the moment (and I do have one for each moment, really, I do) -- Do academics get off on making things sound more complicated than they really need to be?. I started wondering about this question about two years ago when I started attending talks at Carnegie Mellon. At the time, I wasn’t in an academic program and was busy running my second company, but every so often I felt the need to drive over to campus (CMU) and sit in on a talk here and there just to help pull me out of the day to day struggle and think creatively for a little bit. Get out of the rut and out of the box of and enter a bubble which facilitates creativity.

My experience with going to a lot of these talks was mixed. I wanted to go to talks in fields I knew nothing about. Psychology was one. HCI was another (okay, I had some practical experience with product design and development here…). I found that in some of the initial talks, I was completely lost. I really had no clue as to what the heck they were talking about. Bayesian Networks and all that stuff which at the time I knew nothing about (I've since become educated a little more believe it or not). And so I wondered, have I really lost the ability to deal with academia?

I decided to conduct my own little personal experiment. Instead of being intimidated by my lack of understanding of the subject at hand, I decided to continue to go to the talks and see if I could make sense of them by simply trying to break them down one word at a time. Take each little word and break it down to something simpler. And then take the sentence and break it down into something simpler and eventually get to the point of taking the concept and distilling it down to something simpler. And lo and behold, much to my surprise I was amazed to find how many topics which I had no clue about began to make sense... slowly and steadily. The problem with this approach is that it definitely takes longer to comprehend the tpic since there is a significant overheard of translating jargon into something simple and in coming up with analogies to help comprehend the concepts at hand.

I continued this experiement for about six months at CMU. Unfortunately being in Pittsburgh and running a company just wasn't conducive to my need not only for a change in intellectual stimulation nor in just needing a change in atmosphere for personal reasons. (Not to diss Pittsburgh at all, but I just had too many experiences, both good and bad in the place and I just needed a change.) And so I applied to Stanford and joined the Ph.D. program here. Similar to my experience when I first joined CMU as an undergraduate, when I came to Stanford, I found that there are lots of brilliant people here. And everyday, my respect for them increases as I watch different people excel in different fields. But I also found that I had the same problem here at Stanford with academic-talk that I did at CMU. And so I've recently begun to wonder if there is a pattern here.

So my hypothesis, based on personal experience of course is this: Once academics (myself included in that category now), have an innate tendency to take topics they understand and try to complicate them. Somehow, once they understand a topic, it goes through a transformation when they try to explain it to someone else that often makes it un-intelligible. Maybe it becomes too formal. Maybe they are just trying to appear more knowledgeable than the next person. But the fundamental thing that happens is that they may understand it one way, but when it comes to explaianing it, they screw it up.

I believe that this ma be the key between being a good teacher and not-so-good-teacher. A good teacher will remember how he learnt something and what was it that made it click in his head when he saw this concept for the first time and then be able to simplify that even more so that students can understand that same concept just as easily. I understand by analogies. Whenever I am presented a concept I need to come up with a real world example that I can visualize to get a better sense of what the concept is. And it is only when I can construct such an analogy in my head can I really get a grasp of the subject at hand. So when I teach, I tend to use the same approach in teaching. I need to come up with an analogy and hopefully the analogy will be strong enough to convey the concept, but real enough to not introduce any side-effects.

And since I am writing about explaining things, I should eat my own dog food and explain with an example right :). One of the topics I had to explain recently was threading and mutual exclusion. Now this is generally a hard topic for most students and there are tons of cases and different places where Murphy comes in and screws things up. But, what I realized when I was forced to explain it was that, this isn't such a hard concept -- because we encounter it every single day in our lives. A person who has absolutely no background in computer science can understand threading and mutual exclusion. How, you may ask? Well, think about it... Lets say you have a party at your house. And since you don't want to mess up your house, you leave only one bathroom open for guests to use. This bathroom is now the equivalent of a critical section. And using that, you can now explain critical section, you can explain a lock and mutual exclusion. You can explain that bad things happen when there isn't a lock. Extend that metaphor even further and lets say you are now in a theatre. And during the intermission everyone runs tot he bathroom. But the bathroom has only a limited number of stalls. Whoops! We just explained counting semaphores. So the idea without getting into too much detail is to take rather obscure concepts and map them to real-world analogies. (I explained streams in Java by using water pipes and filters as the example).

Analogies not only make it a lot more fun -- because you can make them amusing, but also provide a framework for thinking. A framework, which then becomes etched in the students mid often because it was so silly that it just made sense! That is wha I consider good teaching.

So with that I'll end my most recent rant about my own problems in often understanding academics and what I think would be a better approach to teaching. Comments as always are welcome, from academics and non-academics alike!