The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her.

Not surprising as she didn't come up with the ideas herself. She stumbled on the underlying principles and did research like anyone else on the terminology scientific experts in learning use to talk about those principles.

> The world-class neuroscientist with whom she teaches a free online class as mentioned at the bottom of the piece clearly agrees with her.

Yet neither of these folks seem to be doing primary research in the particular area they are teaching the course in.

Oakley's peer-reviewed resume on this is quite scarce: http://www.barbaraoakley.com/articlesandreviews.html

Sejnowski is similarly light: http://www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski/publication...

Are we going to wind up with another "10,000 hours" debacle?

Being an expert in something doesn't require being an author of a peer-reviewed journal article on the subject.

Journal articles are written to communicate information to those who couldn't perform the experiment/research themselves, either because they have their own research areas (overlapping or not) or because they simply aren't researchers.

No one person is going to have enough depth and breadth to satisfy your requirements. Not even textbook authors would meet them.

Scientists, as part of their training, learn to quickly dissect papers written by others and assimilate the information to the point where they can often make modifications and create experiments that improve on the original or answer a related question not addressed by the first. This is not dissimilar to the way that programmers can take a program written by another and modify/extend it.

You're weirdly focused on this "argument from ultimate authority" instead of simply evaluating the claims and the data that support them. Googling a few of the terms in the article that you're unfamiliar with would be a more useful way to spend your time.

Though first, if you're going to make an informed criticism of a scientist's publication record, you might do well to have enough experience with searching for publications to know that a world-class scientist doesn't always have all of his publications on his website. That was a highlight reel of decades of research [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Sejnowski%20TJ

I don't think this is the right metric for weighing these claims. As a mathematician, I do not do primary research in calculus or linear algebra...

...but teaching those classes pays the bills.

But you do not claim to be an expert on teaching or to have "The BEST Way To Learn Linear Algebra".

... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it. I'd hope you'd give those credentials at least as much weight as some HN self-proclaimed expert.

> ... the author wrote a book on the topic, and teaches a fairly famous course on it.

Sadly, that doesn't automatically mean anything from a correctness perspective.

Educational methodology, in particular, tends to be absolutely rife with fads more than fact and immediately sets off my alerts.

This is doubly problematic when someone touts how popular their course is instead of how effective it is.

Context: You disparage someone as simply touting their personal anecdote, and ask if anyone around here is a "real" expert.

If someone had replied "why yes, actually I just wrote a book on the topic, and I teach a huge course on it," would you have accepted that person as being "versed" in the topic?

Can we at least agree that the author is actually more qualified than you seem to give credit for in your original post?

See also authors of dieting fads. Popularity doesn't make you right [nor wrong].

There is a whole field in cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory, devoted to this topic. One element of learning theory that may be of interest to HN readers is their notion of a "schema" (not an RDBMS schema). Schemas are the networked data structures in the brain (based ultimately on the underlying physical brain structure--neurons, regions, etc.) There is some interesting work in how schemas are acquired, primarily through imitation and repetition (which is what you would expect when training a neural network).