What Raw Intuition Looks Like, Without Articulative Clothing

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Some people exploit signaling so their communication gives the impression they’re more capable than they are (false positives).

There are also false negatives, which I used to see all the time when teaching math, especially in middle school – some kid would seem like a total knucklehead, completely inarticulate, but it turns out they’re flying through the curriculum at a shockingly fast rate and they know exactly what they’re doing. Almost like some kind of video gamer where they don’t want to talk, they just want to game.

“Me: explain your process to me”

“6th grader: just move the stuff because the thing looks weird and now it doesn’t so you can do the thing and then it’s easy”

Translation:

“move the stuff because the thing looks weird” = rearrange the quadratic equation into the standard form

“now it doesn’t [look weird] so you can do the thing and now it’s easy” = now you can factor the quadratic into linear factors, and it’s easy to identify the root of each linear factor, which collectively form the roots of the quadratic

Just raw intuition without any sort of articulative clothing.

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