Ear Worm Phrases and Spindle Video

I’m just about done filming the Temple Chair video series and as I’ve been working on it, I’ve noticed certain phrases keep rattling in my head. One such line is “Just enough information to get in trouble”. My own learning was very book driven but I often found I’d received just enough information to make a mess I couldn’t get out of. This sort of information can result from the author having “The Curse of Knowledge”. It can be difficult to remember what it’s like to not know something once you know it well. Getting deeper into a topic can actually make it more difficult to teach. It’s the opposite of the Dunning Kreuger effect, wherein the less one knows on a topic, the less aware they are of their ignorance and the more confident they are in their knowledge. With “The Curse of Knowledge”, the more one knows about a topic the less they are aware of everyone elses ignorance.

This can lead to “Burying the Lead”, which refers to letting the fine points overwhelm the big picture. In publishing, the order of priority starts with the headline and information progressively gets more detailed as an article proceeds. If you don’t get to the main point until the third paragraph, you’ve “Buried the lead”. It’s easy to let the fine details cloud the picture. Yes, these are important but only in refining the main concepts. It’s hard to avoid after having experience because the finer points naturally become the focus of interest, but untethered to experience, details can be confusing because “The answers don’t mean anything if you never had the question”. Sadly, you can’t just “matrix” information into someones head. Sometimes you actually have to give them “Just enough information to get into trouble” so the solutions you offer or steps you plan to introduce have meaning.

It can be a give and take, which requires a leap of faith for the student. I see all of this play out with spindle making. It seems like a simple task from the end result, and it is. But there are lots of steps and they are there for a reason. I have to work diligently to prevent people from rounding the spindles too early in the process. It’s obvious that they end up round, so every step we take that doesn’t end with round spindles is a bit disconcerting, because the newcomer “Can’t see around corners”. They might have a set idea of the destination, but it’s unnerving if they can’t see it from where they are. I usually try to connect the task at hand to the final results, so it doesn’t seem like I’m “Burying the lead”. As you can see, this can be a bit circular, but luckily, most of the time “It all comes out in the wash”.

I think I turned to books and videos for learning because I could watch or read the entire thing and then go back to the beginning to start with some awareness of the meaning of the steps. Here is a rough cut excerpt from the video. It’s the beginning of the spindle making process, let me know what you think.