Teacher

I really admire people who can teach and articulate what they know. I personally struggle with this.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

Aim to teach with the highest helpful bit-density.

• don’t just regurgitate

Aim to teach the 50% → There’s that LinkedIn post that I need to include here

What should I teach?

Do not aim to teach everything. There are people who know more than you on those things. For example, just because you learned about LLMs doesn’t mean you should just teach about them. Focus on things where the supply isn’t there yet.

Why I am a bad teacher

The reason I suck at teaching is because I get Impatient, I make the person feel like shit for not knowing / grasping the concept fast enough. The teachers are the ones that make you feel encouraged.

• Also, main thing is being articulate
• Stop using filler words: “Um, obviously, like, so..”

Karpathy using hand gestures really helps.

But just because you don’t know how to teach something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t teach someone. As you teach someone impromptu, you realize the Gaps of Knowledge you actually have about a field. You can practice teaching by writing things down. And this goes into the debate of Learning vs. Having the Impression of Learning.

Teaching allows you to think more clearly. It forces you to organize your thoughts synthetically in a way that is the most digestible to others. Terrible teachers like myself exist because

1. You don’t really understand the material. Your thoughts are disorganized and you only have a blurry understanding of the topic. This gets revealed why you try sharing that with the rest of the world
2. You assume a foundation that the audience doesn’t have $\to$ Curse of Knowledge

What Makes Andrej Karpathy a good teacher? The best teacher to date I have met is Andrej Karpathy, who is really able to break down these complex topics into digestible words.

• “I’m going through this section fairly quickly, and I am doing so intentionally. The reason is that…”
  • He has meta-awareness about the information he is conveying
• Using summaries to give you get a high level overview of all the ideas you’ve just introduced to the audience
• He speaks at a fast speed, not too fast but definitely faster than regular (makes it much less boring compared to Andrew Ng), so it seems he has lots of energy and passion when he talks
• Uses a lot of visuals
• Doesn’t use too much technical jargon most of the time, so he is easy to follow
• Actually shows code itself when he is explaining, as he believes that Code is Truth

I think the main thing is actually passion that makes him good, and he seems articulate. I recently realized he seems to talk like how Jordan Peterson talks. And the hand gestures.

Another really great teacher is David Silver.

Who is really stupid?

When you explain something to someone and they don’t understand, who is stupid: The person explaining, or the person trying to understand?

When we think about this individually, we suffer from the Self-Serving Bias: If we don’t understand, we blame it on a bad teacher, and that they don’t really understand the material. But if someone doesn’t understand what we are talking about, we think that they are stupid.

So what is the truth? I think it’s the teacher that is stupid. Because a great teacher will make any student feel intelligent and understand. Like look at 5 Levels of by Wired.

How to Teach

In general, a great teacher understands what kind of audience he is working is. Don’t use uhh, be clear with your thoughts, do not confuse your audience. Walk them through your thoughts.

For Problem Solving

This is related to YouTube, but if I make videos where I teach topics, such as Competitive Programming topics, one thing that I want to really emphasize is “How to think”.

Because that is way more important than the solution, the “what”.

• Focus on the why and the how

Focus on how to think about a particular problem, how to think about a concept, and the thinking process behind coming up with a solution. 3Blue1Brown is excellent at this, he spearheads that idea.

Great explanations provide Intuition for why things are done the way they are.

When it comes to giving explanations for a project on YouTube, how do you decide what to explain? Because it seems that there is just so much content to distill, and you don’t know what to even explain.

For General Concepts

• Use analogies

Thoughts

Andrej Karpathy is the best teacher I’ve had. He says that some of his most rewarding moments was being TA or teaching CS231n.

My problem with teaching is that I also hate repeating myself.

• Andrej Karpathy sees it as a necessary evil, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ZK3ngNvvI&ab_channel=LexClips ~3:03 in

One thought I had is that people who teach often become worse and worse over time, I talk about this idea in Expert, it’s the Curse of Expertise

Having another person evaluate you, I forgot where I got this, because there was this doctor, and he got tremendous feedback from another person evaluating him (maybe from Quora), because you don’t have the Self-Awareness

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