39 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
39 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "The infinite coast of problem solving"
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author: "Thomas Wilson"
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date: 2021-06-13T19:48:00
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slug: "2021-06-13-infinite-coast-of-problem-solving"
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draft: false
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tags:
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- lexicon
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- design
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- product
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---
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I’m currently designing and building the lexicon, ambitiously explained as “the most useful language learning resources in the world”.
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The problem is that there’s a lot involved in that, you know? There’s theoretical questions like “what does most useful mean?” and “how do humans learn languages”?
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Then there’s small problems like “what is the shape of the JSON I send to the client?” and “how do I generate prompts & questions for language learning?”.
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I’ve been thinking about these problems, in some capacity, for legitimately years. So it’s no wonder that I come to them with so much gusto.
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A lot of the questions are nebulous. “Best” is subjective, and learning is a spectrum. Proposing theories and ideas is okay, but making something and finding out is even better.
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The questions are big, and important to me, and so I don’t want an imperfect solution. The tech has to scale, the processes have to be automated, everything has to be _just so_. I’m building tools for problems I haven’t encountered but know I will encounter. Or would encounter, if I just got on with the work.
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Problem solving is fractal. Every step you propose to get from A to B has a whole subset of steps if you look at it closely. If you’re not careful it goes from A -> B, to A1 -> A2, to A1.i -> A1.ii.
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It’s like how [the coastline has theoretically infinite length].
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What I’m saying is that this week I challenged myself: no code, just design. Just product problems and questions. No infinite coastlines, no cartography.
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So I made some designs. They’re down below. This is what happens when I ask the question “what could the future of language education _actually_ look like” and then demand a concrete answer from myself.
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