The Value, or Lack Thereof, of "Guidance"

Best Practices
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I’m grateful for the positive feedback I’ve received from many of you. The effort that I’ve made thus far doesn’t represent a tremendous amount of labor on my part. Insignificant compared to the efforts many of you have made in complex Tinderbox documents shared with the community.

But I’m also receiving feedback from people who are well qualified to assess whether or not this effort is, in effect, a fool’s errand.

From my perspective, it seemed as though we have often covered the same ground on certain ways of using Tinderbox in multiple meetups, and that it might be worthwhile to capture as many of those as feasible, and consolidate them in a Tinderbox document that might be useful to novice users to help them become more productive or successful in less time. To kind of “flatten the curve,” to use a phrase from a sad, recent time.

In short order, this project has evoked passionate responses from very experienced users, first on the value of the project in the first place (one of whom deletes his posts with regularity, making it impossible to construct a narrative), and later on the “simple” question of note names.

I’m wondering what the next land mine will be that I’ll stumble on.

This kind of debate has gone on a bit longer than I’d expected, and it has prompted me to consider whether they may have a point.

Tinderbox is a complex program, and its features attract new users who are unfamiliar with the application. They bring with them their own burdens of expectations and prior experience, many of which may impede early success with Tinderbox. Success, of necessity, involves shedding those burdens, which only comes with direct experience using the application.

Others may arrive with fewer or no such burdens, unfamiliar as they may be with either software development, or the kinds of applications Tinderbox is often mistaken for. Their challenge is that they often don’t have a clear idea of what they want.

And in the absence of a clear idea of what they want, any guidance is likely to be misleading or at cross-purposes to what their ultimate goal may ultimately reveal itself to be.

I believe this crystalizes the essence of the “negative” feedback I’ve been receiving.

The feeling seems to be that the only way to become proficient in using Tinderbox is by using Tinderbox, not by reading a guide, or watching a video. Even if this means that many would-be users ultimately abandon the effort, and the app, because Tinderbox is “too complicated.”

I, at this moment, don’t know. The negative feedback has come exclusively from the users who are among the most experienced members of the community, and people who have consistently been extraordinarily generous with their time and their experience helping new users in the forum and developing solutions of applicability to the broader community at large.

That is to say that this has not come from a place of being mean-spirited or simply contrarian. These are wise and generous users who are pointing out the pitfalls of trying to offer something like “guidance,” to new users either burdened with preconceptions, or unequipped with a clear idea of what they’d like Tinderbox to do for them.

And I must say that I find this all very discouraging. I don’t resent the negative feedback, as I believe it’s intended to yield a positive result, inasmuch as I avoid spending a lot of time and some effort on a project that can’t achieve what it sets out to achieve.

I don’t see this getting easier or better going forward. At least, not from me. At this point, I have doubts and misgivings about pursuing the project, and I’m reluctant to proceed.

I’m certainly not opposed to the project. It’s just that my enthusiasm for it has been exhausted. I’d welcome anyone else taking up the challenge, and I’d not be among those saying it’s a fool’s errand; but neither am I likely to be a cheerleader. I’d just like to step aside at this point and let whatever happens happen without me.

I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to have a debate as to the merits of the idea, and I won’t participate in any case, so this isn’t an invitation for a debate.

I’m sorry if any of you are disappointed.

Tinderbox is a complex application, and it does reward commitment and persistence.

Perhaps that’s only true path, as in the grail quest,

“Each entered the wood where it was darkest, and there was no path.”

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Paring things back, an early divide in how to read into all the good stuff you’ve assembled, offering a different narrative depending on whether the reader:

  • wants quick results - I just want what they showed
  • will trade upfront learning for more control/understanding when done

Both narratives can traverse most of the content, but the narrative braid leading the reader to the individual content might ned to be different.

The question wants an honest answer from the reader: all too often we proclaim the latter because we feel embarrassed to pick the former. Also the quantum of ‘some’ learning is hard to set as we’re such a diverse bunch in terms of prior expertise, subject domain, comfort with technology and our personal work style.

It reminds me of trying to learn dataviz methods. I want an outcome like that. But, I’ve different data, I’m in a different field, and I don’t want to do lots of ‘coding’ (yet the desired outcome is mostly coding!).

IIRC, the original Hitch-hiker’s Guide’s electronic guide was in the form of an encyclopaedia. so maybe that’s the model to take. IOW, which tool’s for which task, and the sub-tasks within a task. For instance, if you want some rich map or visualisation at the end, does your current info support that? If not, these are the interim tasks to do, the tools needed and how the tasks build off each other, etc., etc.

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I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling discouraged. It’s not that this is a tough audience, it’s that it’s a tough problem. There’s a very special skill involved in mentoring, especially when the mentees are arriving here from backgrounds we know nothing about.

I don’t think what you are/were attempting is a fool’s errand. Even if Tinderbox proficiency ultimately comes from using it, not reading about it, good examples and shared vocabulary help newcomers start using it sooner, one hopes with fewer wrong assumptions.

I also read the pushback less as “don’t do this” than as a reminder of the constraints. Many beginning questions here are of the form “teach me how to use Tinderbox”, as if Tinderbox were a board game. Tinderbox is not that kind of game. The rules and tools are not important to know on day one. Some will never be useful. Tinderbox can’t really be taught as a linear “do X then Y” system, but it can be taught as a set of small, testable patterns: “here’s one way to do this; here’s why; here’s when it breaks; here’s the next step.” That kind of material doesn’t replace experience—it accelerates it.

Rule number one is: “you’ll never know a thing about using Tinderbox without using Tinderbox.”

Learning Tinderbox through a Tinderbox file isn’t always an aid to learning. Sometimes a worked real-world example with very succinct explanations of the steps along the way is clarifying. Unfortunately, at other times it’s opaque, because it already assumes the mental model a beginner might not have built yet.

In any case, thank you for what you’ve already put into it. Stepping back is completely reasonable. That’s why we breathe. If you or someone else picks it up, your work won’t have been wasted.

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@dmrogers I have been mostly lurking and following this topic, but after using Tinderbox for > 10 years, I found some very helpful tips in the document (smart quotes!). I appreciate your effort on this and also think the discussion around the issues has brought up some really thoughtful and fascinating responses to simple questions that are actually very rich and complex.

In teaching I try to explain to students the idea of the simplicity on the other side of complexity. As a beginner, you can be told what seems to be a simple thing, and it can be understood in a simple way, but then you go through the process of learning in more depth and it gets to be extremely complex (this is often where first or second year graduate students are), but then as you approach mastery in something it becomes simple again, but that simplicity is immeasurably richer. I think we have a lot of very experienced people on this forum who are pointing out this tension between the early and late stages of ‘simplicity’.

It’s like the business/consulting story about the machine engineer who was called back out of retirement to fix some complicated machine. He goes up and taps on it with a hammer and says “It’s fixed” and invoices them for $10k. He responds to their disbelief with the breakdown: $2 for the tap and $9,998 for 40 years of experience to know where to tap.

Semi-seriously: Perhaps part of the issue is the difference between “A” Hitchhiker’s Guide and “The” Hitchhiker’s Guide? I note that aTbRef is named with the former despite being indisputably the latter (other than perhaps @eastgate ‘s brain).

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