Learners produce the expected verbal answer without the model that generates it, and the answer passes because assessment tests the words.
Yudkowsky's example is a pupil who answers that a dropped object falls because of gravity, having attached a word to an event without any expectation about what would happen differently. The diagnostic is anticipation: a person with a model can say what they would expect to see, and a person with a password can only say it again more slowly.
In practice
- A candidate who defines the term correctly and cannot say what would happen if it were false has the password.
- An exam answerable by recombining the lecture's vocabulary will be answered that way by most of the cohort.
- Standing
- Consistent with research on inert knowledge and on transfer failure, both of which document understanding that does not survive a change of surface form.
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for