Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy

106 点作者 solutionyogi超过 9 年前

25 条评论

freework超过 9 年前

This same effect occurs in computer science with "big-O notation"Every time I'm asked about big-O in a job interview, I'm asked to recite the formal rules of the notation, rather than demonstrate how to use the resulting insight to make the code better. Just because I don't know the formal rules of how to calculate Big-O they assume I can't write any code that scales.Its like a teacher assuming a student can't speak english because he can't recite the adjective order chart from memory.

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acbart超过 9 年前

I attempted to use only intuitive explanations in my programming class once, and a student rebelled and asked for some more definite rules. She wasn't asking for a dictionary, just SOME structure to help her out. The conclusion I reached is that you need a mix - ground students in rules while supplying them with high-level concepts. You shouldn't rely on only one approach, but give them multiple entry points into the idea. Moderation, as in all things.

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kazinator超过 9 年前

"Old little lady" is correct in context."Which little lady are you referring to? The old little lady, or the young "little lady" that is her five-year-old great granddaughter?"Though order is a syntactic feature, the restrictions on adjective order are derived from semantics, which depend on context. They are not ruled out by the grammar, per se.Therefore the rule which says it must be "little old lady" is plain wrong.The fallacy consists of regarding incorrect or incomplete rules as the unvarnished truth which to learn from and imitate.

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winstonewert超过 9 年前

In my experience, getting good at math requires first that you accept that your intuitions suck. Your natural intuition will constantly lead you astray mathematically. People who struggle with algebra are often people who are trusting their intuitions about what is correct. Eventually, you internalize the rules and they become your intuition. But to suggest that we should skip the rules and instead try to build up intuition seems rather wrong-headed to me.

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Broken_Hippo超过 9 年前

I'm a native English speaker, and I never came across such a thing. Often, such adjective mistakes are simply corrected because 'it sounds funny'. I took advanced courses in English and school, and as a weird result, missed out on much of the sentence labeling and other such things. I'm also learning a language. I moved to Norway a couple years ago and am in the second year of classes. Rules, even when they are loose, help a lot as an adult learner because the rules give me something to lean on to make guesses. I'm just now starting to get a feel for what 'sounds' right, but thanks to the rules, I can bypass that for now and use the language skills I have and make do.

brianclements超过 9 年前

I teach music lessons professionally and spend hours every day playing with this exact concept. To me it's really about building off of what a student already 1) knows conceptually (rules) and 2) has experienced (intuition).What I've learned is that you can't teach any type of rule until all it's "prerequisite phenomena" has been experienced. Music education has a bias of more "doing" and experiencing and less "talking" about (or it should at least). So it has a keen way of turning ideas and concepts into action rather quickly. I think many other disciplines in school can learn a bit from how music is taught frankly: there is a very quick turnaround from concept to application/experience and therefore to emotional context of some sort, which really is the end goal to all learning. Why do you care about X?So if a rule simply is an equation of some sort, or a statement of relationships, then the prerequisite phenomena is making sure every variable is defined within it; so that one can focus solely on the relationships within the objects instead of the undefined variables. This covers many different grounds depending on the style of the learner and the material at hand. Sometimes (rarely) words are enough (if you're building familiar rules into new rules and the experiential phenomena is all done in the mind "ah-ha!") and usually, a student needs to hear the sound of a major scale vs a minor scale and try to describe it with words before telling them what actually makes it sound different theoretically. And even then, there are different ways to explain it. If the student picked up major scales really well (prerequisite phenomena), I will use the modal approach to learning minor scales (it's the major scale but starting from a different note), if the student picks up the scale tones and is better with spacial relationships, they usually already talk about the differences between what they just played as a sharp/flat 6th or 7th scale tone. And there you have it, they've just instructed YOU how they think about a concept.Music is a great example of how there is no single correct way to explain the theory. First off, music practice and artistic decisions always came first, the theory came later as people tried to understand and teach it. And it is the bias of educators to find a single correct way to understand it within themselves that leads to them only prescribing one way to do something (memorize this!). Teaching really is listening more than it is speaking.

thaumasiotes超过 9 年前

This is actually sort of called out in the comments on the post, but I think it bears saying again in my own way.It's deeply disingenuous to compare effortless biologically-determined learning to effortful general learning and think you can apply lessons from one to the other. Even in the example the OP picked, there's a reason that the learners drill the adjective order table, and it's because without the drill they will never learn it at all. Learning a language as a small child is a different process than learning the same language as a late teen or adult, and the results are very different. (Even so, I wouldn't bother instructing people in adjective order... if they do never learn it, it's no big loss.)On a different, more technical note, OP doesn't quite understand what's going on in the example either. "Vietnamese spicy food" is perfectly standard English; the ordering there is determined by context. "Vietnamese spicy food" is a subset of spicy food, and will be used whenever it's being contrasted with other spicy food, whereas spicy Vietnamese food is a subset of Vietnamese food, and will be used whenever a contrast is drawn between spicy Vietnamese food and other Vietnamese food. (It's correct, however, that in the zero-context case, "spicy Vietnamese food" is preferred. In my analysis, that's more because people are likely to reify the concept of "Vietnamese food", which makes the phrase structure ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese food" [noun]) rather than ("spicy" [adj] "Vietnamese" [adj] "food" [noun]).)

arafa超过 9 年前

In my third semester of Calculus class, I had a Physics professor. True to his background, he would sometimes take the entire class elaborately explaining the geometric interpretation of complex 3D operations, something I greatly appreciated. The formal notation and theory was always there, but he made sure the intuition was there also (if possible). Best math teacher I've ever had.

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Kenji超过 9 年前

You won't be able to complete a single formal, rigorous proof without clear, formal unambiguous rules. Yes, first principle reasoning is straining, requires hard work and causes headaches, but the understanding will be deeper and complete. The English language is shaped by use and constantly changing. Mathematics is not supposed to change unless we have a mistake in our axioms.

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danharaj超过 9 年前

The first class that touched upon the formal theory of limits for me was called 'Analysis'. The calculus courses I took before that were informal and leaned mostly on intuition and algebra.

clebio超过 9 年前

It bugs me that he doesn't actually give a reason for why these orderings are "right", beyond his having an intuition for them (which might be just pattern learning, as others here mention).It's been said (citation needed) that phrases like "tick tock" and "see saw" are in those orders because it's a high or hard vowel before the low or soft (e.g. "tock tick" sounds weird). Maybe that is why "little old" lady sounds more correct to us? I don't know. But the article goes off to draw a parallel to mathematical intuition, and leaves the original grammar problem unresolved, in my opinion.Incidentally, I usually _really_ like the Better Explained articles.

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jonahx超过 9 年前

Terrific article. And it turns out the complex adjective chart isn't even sufficient to capture the rules. Apparently there are exceptions and it's an area of continuing research:<a href="http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order" rel="nofollow">http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-...</a>

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ajarmst超过 9 年前

Interesting article, and it does describe things that we should strive for---an intuitive sense is a key sign of mastery of a subject. However, the idea that we should learn math the way we learn languages has a flawed premise. Human beings have been equipped by evolution with the capacity to acquire language by exposure. Cognitively normal children aquire language, including the complexities of grammar, through simple exposure to people speaking that language during a particular period in their development. It's unfortunate that this ability doesn't persist through life, or apply to more than one language for most people. But for children, language acquisition is completely effortless.This is not the case for other cognitive skills, such as reading and (to our point) mathematics. My son cannot learn calculus simply by hanging out in my office. While our end goal may be the sort of effortless intuition in mathematics that we experience in parsing complicated sentences, the process of acquiring those two skills is of necessity widely divergent.

TeMPOraL超过 9 年前

Focusing only, or mostly, on formal structure always[0] seemed to me to be just a failure of teacher at introspection. For instance when using your native language, if you stop and look at your own thought process, you'll quickly realize that you don't consciously invoke any grammar rules. In fact, the brain doesn't have enough computing power to explicitly build sentences by applying grammar rules, not if you want to have a conversation. It should be obvious, on introspection, that formal structure can be only a scaffolding for building your cache.[0] - For things you learn to use all the time, or to leverage your cognitive process. The obvious exceptions are things you want to do with mindless precision, where the risk of guessing wrong is unacceptable. Compare public speaking to memorizing a poem, or guesstimating to doing explicit pen and paper arithmetics.

hyperion2010超过 9 年前

ROA: this is the first time I've ever heard of such a thing. I'm not surprised such a thing exists, but as a native speaker who has done a whole lot of writing I find it amusing I've made it for so long without ever encountering the attempts to formalize it.

Terr_超过 9 年前

This reminds me of Lockhart's Lament regarding math education:<a href="http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf</a>

gohrt超过 9 年前

Maybe I was incredibly lucky, but whenever someone rails against how awful the "standard" math education is, and recommends a "better way", I note that the "better way" was how I was taught.I suspect what happens is that students forget some of the good basic ideas (or is that "basic good ideas" ;-) ) they were taught, and teachers fail to re-emphasize them to keep students on track, and so all they remember is the formal/abstract techniques they spent a login time struggling with. Painful experiences stick in our memort more than smooth easy experiences.

Isamu超过 9 年前

Why does the phrase "old lady" or "little old lady" pop into your head when you go to speak about an old lady? Because you have heard the phrase many times before.It's just memory, we recite timeworn phrases because that's what we hear over and over.Non-native speakers use phrases that "sound wrong" only because they are synthesizing from principle or from their own language, and haven't heard the usual phrases over and over.This is where rule-based language analysis runs aground.

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conceit超过 9 年前

> Similarly, getting good at math doesn’t mean marching through a gauntlet of rules on every problemNo, it does to a degree. The rules are inferred from observation and internalized, but not precisely. "little" before "old" is a rule, almost motoric. As a foreign speaker I agree that isn't a logical rule :)edit: I guess, the author is looking for the term heuristic (a general rule that is right often enough, but not precise nor complete).

sireat超过 9 年前

Interestingly enough in the example he gave 303 x 13 I actually didn't look at the last digit to see that 5074 is wrong, I did an instant mental calculation of 300x13=3900 and saw that 5074 can't possibly be right before reading on.So everyone has a different spidey sense.

bluedino超过 9 年前

>> we developed an ear for the language and know how it should sound. And “old little lady” sounds offUntil you get into regional dialects and slang.It only sounds off if you are accustomed to reading correct English. I do a lot of reading, and I think that is what developed my ear for phrases which are 'incorrect'.I can't tell you what a participle or things like that are because I haven't been formally trained, but I can tell you which sentence from a list is the correct one.I hear some people talk and I'll shake my head as I hear them slaughter the English language, but then I realize they probably don't do a lot of reading and didn't get far and school and that's just how their peers talk, as incorrect as it may be.

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ionforce超过 9 年前

Is "Adjective Fallacy" actually a thing or just something invented by this article?Such a poor headline.

lazyant超过 9 年前

I think I was taught the adjective order as in generic to specific.

anigbrowl超过 9 年前

We didn’t become good at English by studying a chart: we developed an ear for the language and know how it should sound.Unless we grew up speaking a different language, or were born to people who didn't have English as their first language. My wife has been in the US since the age of 2 and speaks perfectly but she still has a few minor linguistic tics that a second-generation native speaker wouldn't, and is she shy if she comes across a word she's not sure how to pronounce or whose meaning is unclear.Having taught English as a second language to people from a wide variety of backgrounds, I don't expect anyone to memorize the royal order of adjectives, but it's incredibly useful for them to know that there is an underlying system and to match patterns of adjectives from their reading material against it, or play games with it (like thinking deliberately wrong phrases such as 'old little lady' for comic value), or be able to refer to it if they're nervous about writing something. The same is true for people who miss out on a proper education because of domestic or socioeconomic problems and maybe come to literacy as adults, but never develop the total confidence of someone surrounded by language since birth. Incidentally, those of you who live in California may have noticed the public information campaign encouraging parents to talk and sing to children, especially babies and toddlers. Research indicates that this has a massive influence on brain development and subsequent success or failure in life. See <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21596923-how-babbling-babies-can-boost-their-brains-beginning-was-word" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2159692...</a> for an overview.So yeah, of course the best way to acquire language is to be in a linguistically rich environment, and just soak it up to develop an intuitive understanding that promotes linguistic creativity and wordplay, as opposed to studying it through formal methods and turning it into a philological exercise. But that does not mean that formalism is bad, or that we should conceal the existence of systematic structures from kids in case it will wreck their creativity or something - if for no other reason, than to spare them the waste of reinventing the wheel should they be inclined to adopt a formalist approach on their own initiative. It's very easy to handwave away such rigid-seeming pedagogical tools if you already enjoy the benefits of total fluency, but for those who do not enjoy the same advantages this is the equivalent of pulling up the ladder behind oneself and then critique the confused for poor listening skills.I don't have a comment on the math part - I agree with the author that we ought to be open to using multiple learning techniques so that each student can find the best one, but I think he seriously underestimates the utility of formality. When I was 5 I thought chanting multiplication tables every day at school was a bit silly, but 40 years later I greatly appreciate the fact that I can handle everyday trivial math problems reflexively rather than needing to reach for a calculator, pencil and paper, or a mental script of how to perform the calculation. Repetitive drills and formal methods are not the best way to explain new concepts, but they are incredibly useful exercises to retain them and make the basic knowledge feel instinctive in later years.

elektromekatron超过 9 年前

I went to school here in the UK, getting good marks in English and I have never heard of the Royal Order of Adjectives. It sounds like some official lackey the Queen might call on when she just can't find the right word.I remember our English teacher giving us one single lesson on conjugation, and that was only because we were so confused by all the stuff about conjugating verbs in French class. Other than that I cannot remember us going near any kind of formal grammar.edit - I just thought, it is also not that hard to construct a context in English where 'old little lady' can work.I looked again at the little lady sitting across from me. At first, from her height, I had assumed her to be young. However now, looking closer, I could see she was a very old little lady indeed.

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