is an Agapanthus:



I suppose that requires some explanation. Before I moved to California, I had never seen an Agapanthus. At least, I do not recall having seen any, but probably I'd seen quite a few. Then one day the time came for my wife and I to pick some plants for our yard, and she pointed to some plants on the same street and said those were Agapanthus flowers and I asked if I liked them. I said I did. She told me they didn't flower like that all the time so I'd better like them just with the leaves. I said I still did. We picked some other plant instead, but I was happy to have learned about this new, pretty plant. How unusual. Then a weird thing happened. I started noticing there were Agapanthus plants everywhere. In yards, in parks, on the side of the highway. Everywhere. Now they have some meaning because we had a conversation about them and I know the name. I had just never noticed them before.

One day someone explained to me that the counter-hane was a sabaki move, and one of the most common ones at that. Previously, I'd only been paying attention to crosscuts and attachments in that context. It had ignored the counter-hane because no one had given me the label that that was a sabaki move. Once I cared about it, I began seeing them everywhere.

I have pretty much zero first hand knowledge of Asia, but since you asked for my gut feeling, it was first that a significant amount of people in Asian countries probably achieved high dan without the benefit of a teacher, simply because they grew up in a culture where the game was appreciated. Then on second thought, I began to wonder ... if the game is appreciated, it is probably treated with more respect - i.e., parents would be willing to pay for lessons for their kids just as they are here willing to pay for piano lessons. I ended up sending some messages to Asian high dans on KGS, asking them if they had had lessons. The three who responded all said (paraphrasing) "no, not for a long time." In other words, they want to take credit for making it to high dan on their own, but apparently they indeed had had lessons as kids. In other words, someone who presumably knew what they were talking about had taught them the basics.

Edit: another answered: he has had no teacher; he learns by reading go books.
Edit 2: 2 others answered: One has no teacher, but has spent some time with pros and learned from them, the other has a teacher.

So from a sample of 6 high dans, 1 has a teacher, 3 have had a teacher, and 2 have gotten there without a teacher. Two of these players (one without a teacher and one who has had one) live in the West.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Hi daal, good that you got some sample points.

Hi Ed,

My trip finally winding down, so I will just go through the whole thread post-by-post and make my comments as thought come to mind. I know I am terribly behind on this whole discussion, but I figure it is better to start from the beginning than to try to jump in at the end.

My first thought, about the Zen monk:

The question "How deep is the river" is not a question about understanding but about knowledge - these two are different, so not sure how this relates.

To illustrate - I can "know" many things, for example the speed of light. Do I "understand" it? I doubt it. And this goes for many things.

Back to the monk - I get what he is trying to do when throwing the dude into the river, but it completely misses the point, imho. First of all, as said above, the question was that of knowledge not of understanding. And most importantly, throwing the dude into the water does not convey neither knowledge nor understanding - the most that can be learned or understood from that is that "the river is deeper than I am tall." This means the river can be 30 feet deep, 50 feet deep, 100 feet deep, or whatever. As an answer to a specific question, such answer is very lacking. I would say giving the precise number (30 feet, for example) would be much more illuminating, and possibly lead to much better understanding than the knowledge actually conveyed by the monk.

It honestly seems to me the monk did not know the answer, but did not want to admit it, so he just threw the dude in the river and walked away to cover his own ignorance. Because I don't see how his action can convey any knowledge or understanding above the trivial "the river is deeper than I am tall."

All in all, glancing at some of your later posts, which I will read carefully and comment on, it seems to me that either I misunderstand your purpose or you are unnecessarily mixing these two concepts. To me, they are very distinct. I can clearly tell the difference between "knowing" something and "understanding" something. Most often knowledge is the prerequisite of understanding, but not always. And often you can have knowledge without understanding - this is actually, I would say, a much more common case, examples abound all around us wherever we go.

Right now, I feel that this - the difference between knowledge and understanding - will be one of the points I would like to discuss.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Agreed.
But how useful is state (b) with respect to acquiring knowledge or understanding. The most it can demonstrate that "the water is wet and cold" and "the river is deep". What if the dude with the question was an engineer wondering how much timber he has to get to fix a bridge across the river? You need precise depth for that, getting tossed in the water really does not help.

And what if the dude had an iPhone in his pocket? It would have been ruined now! A Zen monk should think about that before trying to force his particular mindset and worldview on others. Its almost like the monk was saying "I know better what you need/want than you, and so I will give you what I tell you that you want, whether you want it or not." Which is very un-Zen-like, I think.

What if the dude could not swim?

A more Zen-like approach would be, I think, for the monk to act with more humility and inquire what is the reason for asking. If the reason was to find out if the river can be crossed without the bridge - the answer might have had a point, although the point could have been made better in other ways. If the question was of fixing the bridge, the answer was missing the point completely. And there can be a multitude of other reasons for asking, which might possibly require different answers.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Off of the top of my head, I think that a lot of the "levels" you give above have to do with behavior rather than understanding.

For example: "Know about A, but deny it."
The level of understanding does not change if you deny it or not. You understand at a certain level, and then make a decision of sharing this understanding with others or not, or misleading them or not. But this is just behavioral, and the behavior does not really impact the level of understanding you possess.

To illustrate: I understand the difference between ladder and net as techniques in Go. My level of understanding will not change if I decide to lie about it to you. Nor will it change if I then decide to tell the truth about it to somebody else. My understanding is constant, only my behavior changes.

Other "levels" have to do with other skills as well, not just understanding.

For example: "Can help a 10k reach 1 dan."
Any 1d or above has, by definition, the understanding and knowledge necessary to be 1d - so in theory should be able to teach a 10k to become 1d, he just needs to convey everything he knows. However - there are a lot of other issues involved. Communication skills, teaching skills, and so on... Often you have to actually build a curriculum to present the knowledge in specific order to be successful. A lot of additional skills are involved here. But the presence or lack of such skills does not really impact the inner level of knowledge and understanding, they are pretty much independent.

I think that if you want to talk about understanding, you should restrict yourself to that alone, not mix in a whole slew of other concepts which are more-or-less unrelated, like skills or behaviors. I think the only important concept which can be introduced additionally should be "knowledge" and how it differs or relates to "understanding".

Bottom line:
The way this issues are organized in my mind is that they can be divided into four or more separate categories, the first two being knowledge and understanding. The others being skills and behaviors. And there might be more, of course. I see them all as very distinct, although sometimes influencing each other. But any cross-influence is an exception rather than a rule. If we talk about "understanding", we should isolate it first instead of mixing it in with a whole lot of other stuff.

But I will read more, maybe I am missing a point here... I just went through a few posts, and the thread seems long...

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Hi Bantari,

Welcome back.

This is good, because now I have an idea why you and I could not
communicate in the past: you and I were (and still are) using the same words
to mean different things, resulting in much mis-communication.

From Easy-to-understand Style, post 15:From The Roadmap to Shodan, Vol. 2 Review, post 22:

Hi snorri,Examples from my Go experience:

From a WIRED article about Kip Thorne, rendering a blackhole, and the movie Interstellar:Sometimes, they don't even accomplish that --
when people only think they understand what it is like,
but actually they are merely getting a whiff of it.

A Brief History of Primes -- a nice non-technical lecture -- by Manindra Agrawal.

Joseki myths, posts 11, 13 -- kyu question about joseki and mid-game mistakes.


Joseki myths, posts 34 through 37 -- "understanding".

From Joseki myths, post 18:Important piece of information.

A nice quote, from post 133 of this game thread:( emphases added in blue )

As usual, these are different levels of understanding:

• No clue;
• A little clue;
• Hear of the terms, the metaphors, etc.
• Different levels of execution, from kyu to low dan, mid dan, high dan, etc.
• Different levels of teaching it.

A recurring theme: talking (verbally) and doing (actually playing the move) are two very different things. (Post 3).

Hi Ed, what's the difference here between red and blue?

Quotation reference: viewtopic.php?p=176558#p176558

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Hi daal, interesting question.

I seem to remember we chatted on KGS some time ago,
and I shared with you some of my background experiences.
That may or may not have helped with some of these issues.

This is one of my current understandings:

The only way (I know of) is to have our games reviewed.
Find out our problems one by one, move by move. Fix them one by one.

From this thread.
Hi W&GL,

( Disclosure: W&GL and I know each other in real life. )

Here's an unfinished version:
___________________

Thanks for the suggestion.

Short reply 1:Short reply 2:Short reply 3:

Longer reply:

Bookmarks:B2: -------------------------------------------B3: --------------------------------------------B4 --------------------------------------B5: -----------------------------------------------------------------

Here is my personal history of go.

But before that, some relevant background. At the age of 25 I had an accident and hurt my head. Ever since I've been chronically sleep deprived, no matter how much I sleep Im always tired. Maybe because of this my generic memory is bottom 10% of the population, and my working memory fluctuates between 2 and 8. However my spatial memory is top 1% or thereabouts.

When I was about to turn 30 I was introduced to go by a friend. At first I only played against computer program igowin on 9x9 board for about 2 months. My first 19x19 game was on KGS. It took me 15 games to reach solid 9kyu on kgs, another 130 games to reach 6kyu, 175 more to reach 4kyu, 140 more to for 2kyu and 80 for 1kyu. This was over a span of 14 months.

During that first year, I played a fair number of games against stronger players, and had many of my games reviewed by those stronger than me (mostly in KGS Teaching Ladder room on KGS). I never liked solving tsumegos, but I didn't mind training my intuition by doing repetitive simple tsumegos for hours on end. By my estimate I did around 40000 tsumegos during the first year, tho most of them were ridiculously easy ones, such that you can solve in under 3 seconds each, just click on vital spot and tsumego done. I mainly did tsumegos at https://gochild2009.appspot.com/. I also went occasionally to play at the local go clubs, which have fair number of dan level players. At some point I started going over pro games, guessing every move, placing my guessed move on the board, before looking if my guess was correct, however I'm not certain if I did this during the first year or only later.

After I reached 1kyu I unfortunately took a detour, I started playing against bots. As playing against bots didn't cause me to stress out as much as playing against humans. I reached KGS 4 dan level approximately one year later, and some time after that 6 dan level playing against bots giving high handicap. Unfortunately this didn't translate to any significant strength gain when facing humans. I reached EGF 2 dan 3 years after I began playing go. After the first year, I played more live go at local go clubs and participated in an online go school (now defunct nordic go academy). I liked re-playig pro games, often times blind where I only saw the most recent move and kept the state of the board in my head. Whenever I replayed pro games I always tried guessing the next move before looking what it was. When strong 9x9 bots became available I started playing those, as substitution to tsumegos. During all this time I always played slow games, never faster than 30 sec byomi. All told, I feel like I more or less wasted several years, not doing the two things that were important, tsumegos and playing against humans many hours per day.

Around a year ago (it's now been 6 years since my first go game) I started playing regularly (every day an hour or two) against humans and sort of doing tsumegos (maybe 30 minutes per day). I say sort of doing tsumegos because I don't really spend effort solving them, I just memorize the answers. At first I played on WBaduk, losing a fair share of my games as 4 dan, eventually making it to a strong 6 dan level, however I stopped playing at that point. Reason was I first got hooked on fast games on 9x9 at http://wars.fm/go9 which evolved into 19x19 blitz games on KGS. At first I was only KGS 1 dan at blitz! Over the span of 6 months I've progressed to the point where I now have 65% winrate as 3 dan, I hope I can continue to progress if I just keep at it. However I'm conflicted as during the past 3 years I have made virtually no progress, at least according to EGF statistics. Then again, I played a lot less during those 3 years than I did when I began playing go and made actual progress.

It's good to keep in mind that ranking systems aren't all equal. KGS ranking system used to be approximately 1 stone easier when I started out playing than it is now days. Also WBaduk ranks are roughly 3 stones easier than modern KGS ranks.

My method of learning, is usually trying to simplify my mistake to something else than just "I got outread in the fight". Maybe it's; I should have taken care of the weak group, I should have recognized this shape weakness, I should have prepared for this before attacking, I should have spent effort reading this part, etc. I rarely put much effort into sequences or never to be seen again fancy pants solutions to problems. I try to be pragmatic regarding what I should know at my level, I wont fault myself for messing up a complicated life and death but I might fault myself leaving my group too weak. I put a lot of faith into proverbs and rules of thumb, double extension from hoshi is good, if one extension from hoshi approach immediately, if two extensions from hoshi invade corner. etc. I don't really care if they are incorrect some of the time, as long as following them guides me in a way that overall improves my results. During my first year, I often won the games with direction of play, losing the actual fights.