I love reading about advertising in the early 20th century. It’s one of my favorite subjects, and it’s way too often neglected by the Internet at large.

Part of it is just a fascination with the ambition of those early admen. It was truly fitting for that age of great works. While bridges and skyscrapers were being built at breakneck speed (sometime literally), the admen were similarly constructing cultural edifices out of whole cloth, deciding almost singlehandedly what constituted a proper lunch, marriage proposal, or even morning ritual.

So much of what’s “normal” for us today was decided by executives on Madison Avenue 70 or 80 years ago that looking at that history is like getting a frontrow seat at the creation of the modern world.

Another part of my fascination, however, is more practical. As I’ve studied these admen, I’ve found that their struggles and techniques for overcoming them have a resonance with my attempts to sell on the Internet today (i.e. my flashcard app for tutors and test-takers). 

Early 20th century American capitalism was a no-holds-barred affair. Regulations were weak and a lot of the legal protections we take for granted today were nonexistent. Anyone could make any claim about their product, everyone was competing for everyone’s attention, and consumers weren’t particularly loyal to one brand or another. If you wanted someone to buy your soap, cereal, or toothpaste, you had to go out there and sell them on it.

Kind of similar to the Internet today, no? My flashcard app is, likewise, one of many. My app could easily get copied, slandered, or slated, and there’s not a lot I can do besides compete even more fiercely. I desperately want customers for it, but I know I will have to work incredibly hard for them.

The admen that survived and thrived in this environment were tough, resourceful, and occasionally unethical. More than anything, though, they were systematic, relentlessly experimenting to find effective marketing and copywriting techniques.

Ironically, just as their advertising campaigns passed into culture, so too have their innovative advertising techniques become part of the advertising landscape. It’s easy to not realize how innovative these techniques were until you look at the before and after, like how a plain description of pork and beans became a prime example of need-focused marketing.

Like most of the readers of this essay, though, I never actually learned this stuff. I had to learn all my marketing the hard way, by failing to sell things. Finding out the actual stories and laws of “scientific advertising” (itself a clever marketing phrase from that era) has made a huge difference in my ability to market myself and my products.

This is doubly so because my advertising looks a lot more like these old magazine ads than like modern television or magazine advertising. I employ hero images, headlines, and long copy to convince people to buy my products. I do not have the funds or resources to run a branding campaign, so these direct response campaigns are my main focus.

I’d like to share with you all the lessons that I learned from these early “Mad Men”. Hopefully, it’ll prove as useful to your marketing as it was to me.

Before I start, this piece relies heavily on the work of Albert Lasker and his crew at Lord & Thomas: Claude Hopkins, John E. Kennedy, and the like. This is not only because these men were behind some of the greatest advertising successes of their age (Sunkist, Kotex, Puffed Wheat, the election of Warren G. Harding), but also convenience: they wrote a lot about what they did. In fact, Claude Hopkins literally wrote a book called Scientific Advertising, which I relied on for this piece along with Cruikshank’s and Schultz’s biography of Albert Lasker The Man Who Sold America.

Lesson 1: Measure campaigns (and measure sales especially).

The most important part of direct response copywriting is measuring the direct responses. Ideally, you measure all the way from first contact to point of sale.

For the early admen, this was tough. When they were just putting ads in magazines, they had literally no idea which ads were working and which ones weren’t. That’s why they made really heavy use of coupons. 

For instance, in their campaign to turn Palmolive into the international juggernaut that it still is, they gave out coupons for 10 cent cakes of Palmolive. From there, they could measure the cost of the ad vs. the revenue. For instance, in Cleveland, their coupons cost $2000, their ads cost $1000, but sales increased from a base rate of $3000 per year to $20,000 per year after the campaign. Given that their ad campaign only ran in Cleveland and they had no other ads running at that time, they could tell that their ad campaign returned $14,000 on top of what they would have earned without the campaign (for details about this incredibly clever ad campaign, see footnote [1]).

Measuring is way easier in the Internet era, of course. With Google AdWords, segmentation tools, and Google Analytics it’s easy to see the result of a campaign. It’s shocking, then, that more Internet companies don’t measure their advertising, or worse, claim not to care. As Claude Hopkins would put it, “The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.”

For my app, I care most about the funnel: from first click on my website, to trying out the app, to purchasing. Ironically, articles like this one aren’t actually great from a marketing standpoint (although good investments in SEO), as the people who will read this article are almost certainly not the same people who would purchase a flashcard app. Hopkins would accuse me of being more interested in artistry than sales, which he would be correct about. Oh, well.

Lesson 2: Samples and contests work, but only if people have to work for them

The admen at Lord and Thomas loved their free samples, coupons, and contests. However, they also quickly learned that you need to make people work for them.

For example, when they were first advertising puffed rice and puffed wheat (with the immortal tagline “Food shot from guns”), they made the mistake of distributing samples “promiscuously, like waifs”, which were quickly discarded by the consumers. Similarly, they mistakenly attempted to offer puffed wheat for free to anybody who bought puffed rice. As Lasker later put it, “it is just as hard to sell at a half price as at a full price to people who are not converted.” 

Instead, the effective method was to make people work for it. If they wanted a free sample, they had to write a letter. If they wanted to guess the weight of the world’s biggest cake and win a prize, they had to buy a tin of Cotosuet, the lard substitute the cake was made with.

It’s a similar story today. Many websites do giveaways, especially venture-backed ones. It’s tempting as a way to juice sales or responses. But, it’s important to make your consumer work for the giveaway. If they don’t believe in the product enough to work for the giveaway, it’s a waste of time to give it to them.

This is something I’ve noticed as well. Whenever I just give away something (like a book, a video, or advice), I get poor quality responses and a lot of hassle. In other words, people treat the giveaway as worthless. But, even if I just require people to agree to sign up for my newsletter, people end up treating the giveaway with more care.

Lesson 3: Your headline needs to capture the most exciting part of your product.

While before we were talking about general marketing advice, now we can talk about copywriting specifically (like for your landing page).

It’s very common for people marketing on the Internet to feel like their headline needs to either reflect exactly what their product is, or their aspirations. That’s how you get generic headlines like “Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook. ” or “A new way to manage your work” (from Monday.com).

Part of the problem, of course, is that space on the Internet is unlimited, and products on the Internet don’t face the intense pressure from competition that the products these admen were advertising. If you’re advertising a bar of soap, your headline has to be really attention-grabbing, because honestly soaps are pretty similar. If you’re advertising Facebook, not only do you get a ridiculous amount of free advertising and brand awareness, you’re also advertising a uniquely sticky product that seems to sell itself pretty darn well.

The admen didn’t have that luxury. They spent countless hours debating on the perfect headline, including punctuation and capitalization. Their headlines were attention grabbers: they made you want to read the ad and, crucially, buy the product (or send off for the sample).

So, they ended up with classic headlines like “A cow in your pantry” for evaporated milk, the aforementioned “food shot from guns” for puffed wheat and rice (it has to do with the manufacturing process), “Let this Machine do your Washing Free” [sic] for a hand-cranked washing machine, “Better than jewels — that schoolgirl complexion” for Palmolive “beauty soap”, and “Women like the convenience of Kotex” for the hitherto impossible to advertise for sanitary pads.

None of these were exact descriptions of was being sold, but they were exciting! Some of them were definitely oversold, like describing a hand-cranked washing machine like it was automatic, but they grabbed the reader’s attention and sold the product. The Palmolive headline is especially interesting: it doesn’t even sell the product, but the benefits of the product.

Similarly, if you want to sell products online, your headline needs to be something that captures the most exciting part of your product. I think Slack has an interesting take on this: “Slack replaces email inside your company.” For companies that have been drowning in email, it’s an appealing proposition.

Note that this headline does not actually describe what Slack does in any meaningful sense. This headline would also work for a personal whiteboard company (if they were really ambitious about the possibilities). But it addresses a specific problem and makes the reader want to find out more.

For my own app, I’ve decided on “Say goodbye to unproductive studying”. While it’s not quite as good as Lord & Thomas’s, it captures the benefits of my app pretty well, while still remaining intriguing.

Lesson 4: the core of copywriting is self-interest

This is something Claude Hopkins hammered home again and again. Copywriting (and marketing) should not be about winning awards or making art. At the end of the day, your copywriting is about communicating to the consumer why it benefits them to buy your product.

Too often copywriters think they have to win awards with their copywriting or entertain the reader. That’s nice, but that’s not what you’re aiming for. Your copywriting doesn’t need to be hilarious or heartwarming, it just needs to tell the reader why the product is to their benefit.

There’s another corollary to this, too: as long as you’re telling the reader as to why a product is to their benefit, it doesn’t matter how much you write. Again, going back to Claude Hopkins, “Some say, ‘Be but very brief. People will read but little.’ Would you tell that to a salesman?”

If you look at the early ads, like for Palmolive, it’s amazing how much text there is. This amount of text actually cost the advertisers more money, but they wrote as much as they needed to sell the product.

Nowadays, a lot of effective advertising has been replaced by video, which is even closer to salesmanship than longform text. Slack, for instance, puts a 2 and a half minute video on their homepage, along with around 100 words of text. If you look at someone like Tai Lopez, who is undoubtedly successful as a self-marketer (no comment on anything else), his videos selling his courses run over an hour in length.

There are still some practitioners of the art of the longform text sales page on the Internet, though. Brennan Dunn at Double Your Freelancing Rate does exactly that, as do a lot of the skeezy get-rich-quick guys who advertise on Facebook. I can’t say if their products perform as they promise, but their marketing obviously works, or else they wouldn’t keep running ads.

In your own marketing, don’t be afraid to write more and talk more. As long as your marketing keeps speaking to your customers’ self-interest (i.e. why your product will benefit them), they will keep reading. Or, as John E. Kennedy put it, “Copywriting is salesmanship in print.” As long as you’re still selling, keep talking.

My own landing page runs several hundred words in length. I’ve continually lengthened it over the months that it’s been up, and had good success with it. I’ve refined it based on the in-person communication I’ve had with people about my app, and what’s worked successfully in selling it. What works to sell in person also works to sell online.

Lesson 5: Marketing a product is about making the features seem extraordinary

There’s a classic Mad Men scene where Don Draper first figures out how to market Lucky Strike cigarettes: it’s toasted. The tobacco manufacturers are confused, because “everybody else’s tobacco is toasted”. Don Draper corrects him, “Everyone else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike is toasted.”

This is an ad campaign that actually ran, masterminded by none other than Albert Lasker and his Lord & Thomas gang. The timeline in Mad Men is a bit messed up: that ad campaign was ran well before the cancer scare (it started in 1917), and wasn’t actually the most successful of the Lucky Strike campaigns (we’ll talk about that later).

But the core of the scene is correct. Making features seem extraordinary even when they were commonplace was a key technique of Lord & Thomas. For example, that’s exactly what Claude Hopkins did to sell Schlitz Beer. He created an advertising campaign called “poor beer vs. pure beer”, and claimed Schlitz’s “pure beer” was good for you because it was made with pure water, filtered air, and 4-times washed bottles. This was true of all beers, but as Hopkins put it, “Again and again I have told common facts, common to all makers in the line–too common to be told. But they have given the article first allied with them an exclusive and lasting prestige.” As a result, Schiltz went from 5th in sales to 2nd in sales in St. Louis, where the test campaign was run.

This technique is even more effective, however, when there is actually a cool new feature (and if you’re not willing to lie and say that a certain sort of beer is healthier for you). So, for instance, Lord & Thomas had a really hard time marketing Pepsodent, because it was pretty much identical to all other toothpastes. However, they had a lucky break when Pepsodent purchased the exclusive right to add sodium lauryl sulfate to their toothpaste, which is the ingredient that makes toothpaste foam.

So, how did Lord & Thomas capitalize on this lucky break? By calling out this new feature in the most ostentatious way possible. They couldn’t possibly call the new ingredient “Sodium Lauryl Sulfate”, so instead Lasker put out a challenge to Lord & Thomas employees: he wanted a 5 letter name with two consonants and three vowels. His employees came up with “irium”, which sounded suitably futuristic.

Then Lord & Thomas went buckwild. They rebranded Pepsodent as “Pepsodent with irium”. Having already been bankrolling Amos & Andy, the most popular show on radio, they flooded the airwaves with ads for new “Pepsodent with irium”. Pepsodent jumped to the top of toothpaste sales. And, to the delight of Albert Lasker, irium became so famous that the American Dental Association had to hire a receptionist specifically to talk to all the people who were calling in and asking about it.

In your own marketing, call out every single feature in your product and make it sound extraordinary. Describe it in loving detail and make up a name for it if you have to.

And remember: your customer is going to come to your product with a different view of what’s interesting than you are. My own product is a flashcard web app aimed at tutors and test-takers. Because it’s a web app, you can access it through your desktop or mobile browser. Duh, right?

Well, no. Pretty much every tutor I’ve talked to has been surprised and impressed to hear that. What is ordinary to me (and likely to you) is extraordinary to your customers. Treat it that way.

Lesson 6: The difference between a bug and a feature can be a matter of positioning

Sometimes bugs are just bugs. If you have an app that randomly shuts down at inopportune moments, that’s just something to be fixed.

However, sometimes bugs can be features for some users, as this immortal xkcd comic reminds us. In your marketing, you can make use of this.

This is what Lord & Thomas did when selling van Camp evaporated milk. They first got housewives to try it by advertising it as “a cow in your pantry”. However, they couldn’t get housewives to stick with it, because it tasted scalded (which, to be fair, it was). In other words, they didn’t have product-market fit, and advertising more was just going to burn through potential customers.

So they positioned it differently. They called it “sterilized milk”, and told housewives “you’ll know it’s genuine by its almond flavor”. The bug, bad taste, was transformed into a mark of cleanliness. In an era before strong food controls, that was a good marketing technique.

In your own marketing, you can do similar things. If you run a chat app, for instance, one of the main problems is that people feel such pressure to respond instantly that it totally distracts them from getting their work done. So, in your marketing, why not include a testimonial that suggests email is just too darn slow to have a proper conversation?

In other words, if your weaknesses are impossible to hide, might as well turn them into a strength.

Lesson 7: Fit your marketing in with existing habits

One of the first things Albert Lasker realized while helping to invent the modern marketing industry was that changing people’s habits with marketing was almost never profitable. The trouble was that you’d have to spend a lot of effort changing people’s habits, and then spend even more effort getting them to buy your product.

The better way was to identify a habit people already had, and exploit and popularize it with your marketing. People don’t want to just buy your product, they want to use it. If you tell them that they can use it to help them do what they already want to do, they’re a lot more likely to buy it.

Lord & Thomas exploited this constantly when they were tasked to sell fruit. They would promote recipes with the fruit, ways to use the fruit, and even, in the case of Sunkist oranges, manufactured juicers that were easier to use than the ones on the market to get people to make more orange juice.

However, their biggest success was with Lucky Strike cigarettes. They were successful with the “It’s toasted” campaign, but they still weren’t top of the market. The top of the market came when Lasker heard that doctors were prescribing cigarettes as appetite suppressants. So, he came up with the campaign, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” 

This was a classic case of exploiting existing habits. Lasker didn’t need to convince anyone that cigarettes worked as an appetite suppressant. He just needed to convince people to use a Lucky as a suppressant instead of another brand. This was so successful that sales increased by 8.3 billion units from 1928 to 1929, then reached 10 billion units in 1930.

In fact, this advertising campaign ended up being banned by the FTC because of complaints from candy manufacturers, so it was changed to just “Reach for a Lucky Instead”. At that point, the catchphrase was so ingrained that it still worked.

The best products, likewise, are positioned to fit in with existing habits. Slack couldn’t work as an email killer if people hadn’t already been using Gchat. Excel couldn’t work as well as it did if people hadn’t already been familiar with spreadsheets, and especially with Lotus 1-2-3. Every wildly successful product has been built on helping people do what they’re already doing, but easier.

In your own marketing, find what people are already doing and convince them that your product can help them do it easier and better. Don’t try to make them do something that they’re not already inclined to do.

In my own marketing, I’ve relied heavily on the existing popularity of spaced repetition flashcards like Anki and Quizlet. I have to convince users that my app is better than those, but not that the app is worthwhile at all.

Conclusion

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Marketing and selling have existed for hundreds of years, while modern marketing has existed for dozens.

The products being sold change, but the selling remain the same. Convince your customer that your product will benefit them, and they will listen to you and buy from you.

Footnotes

[1] The Palmolive campaign was actually incredibly clever. They needed to get Palmolive distributed in drug stores as a “beauty soap”, so it wouldn’t be competing against normal soap in general stores. In order to do so, they employed a carrot and a stick. 

The carrot was that the copy of the ad claimed the drug stores were distributing essentially free samples of Palmolive (they paid 10 cents for them and the consumer was using a 10 cent coupon for them). However, in reality, the drug stores paid wholesale prices for the sample, and were reimbursed at retail prices by the manufacturer. The drug stores got the publicity of pretending to do a giveaway, while actually profiting.

The stick was that, before the coupons were sent out to consumers, they were sent out to all the drug stores in the area, along with a message that the coupons would surely be redeemed somewhere. The not so hidden message: if you don’t stock Palmolive yourself, be prepared to watch your customers form a line out the door of your competitiors.

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We are better at chemistry now than at any other point in history. In 50 years, we will almost certainly be better at chemistry than we are now.

This statement above is one of the central dogmas of not only chemistry, but of science. In fact, it’s so central that it probably just seems factual. Of course we’re better now, right? We have the benefit of history!

It’s easy to forget or not realize how controversial this statement would have been even 400 years ago, though. Scholars then were raised in a culture that worshipped the achievements of their intellectual ancestors. Claiming that you knew more than Aristotle about science was equivalent to claiming you knew more than Paul about Christianity. I mean this literally. One of the reasons Galileo was famously imprisoned wasn’t simply for disagreeing with the church, but disagreeing with the words of the “Philosopher”, Aristotle. Aristotle, if you’re unfamiliar, lived approximately 2000 years before Galileo.

I am glad that we no longer live in that era. That was a worse time for science and a worse time for humanity. On a moral level, I abhor the idea that intellectual opinions can be censured by imprisonment or death. On an intellectual level, I think an obsession with the achievements of the past necessarily inhibits recognizing advancements in the present, and leads to stagnation.

But the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Specifically, I think the “obviousness” of the inevitability of scientific progress, even though it’s well-founded, tends to cloak that the progress of the associated scientific culture is by no means inevitable. For instance, there have been some recent great essays arguing that our research culture has regressed, at least judging by the number of people involved versus our rate of scientific advancements.

What I’d like to argue in this essay is that, similarly, the obviousness of progress in chemistry has masked the regression of the associated culture of teaching chemistry, especially general chemistry.

It’s regressed in the sense that students today come out of general chemistry with a mistaken view of what chemistry is, and lacking in practical chemistry skills. In the past, students have come out of general chemistry with a better idea of the principles of chemistry, and with greater practical skills.

A big reason as to why today’s students are mistaken in their view of chemistry can be seen in the texts we use. In modern chemistry textbooks, very few portions are justified by empirical evidence. They are justified by principles and deduction, and occasionally illustrated by real-world examples. But, it is incredibly rare to see citations from the original laboratory work that proved the theories.

Meanwhile, the practical side of chemistry (as well as the emphasis of the importance of it) gets let down by the hands-on portion of chemistry, laboratory work. Laboratory work is meant to be training in empiricism. However, this empiricism is only in theory. The laboratory work of introductory chemistry is closer to a cookbook than an experiment. Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.

The textbook and laboratory work combined leave a general chemistry student today with two takeaway impressions:

1. Chemistry is a monumental edifice of theory and deduction, disconnected to empirical evidence.

2. When empirical evidence does conflict with chemical theory, the evidence must change.

These takeaway impressions are regressive. These would be the explicit lessons of Aristotelian chemistry, which distrusted experimentation except as illustration. When the ancient Greeks discussed chemistry in terms of the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth, they would illustrate the similarity of fire and air by discussing candles. However, it was literally anathema to the Greeks to disprove the theory of the elements by experiment.

So, if chemistry teaching has regressed, then we need to return it to its former glory by progressing it again, right?

Before our current shoddy state, chemistry teaching was much better at impressing upon students the empirical basis of chemistry. Even more importantly, they impressed upon students the importance of doing chemistry, rather than simply learning it and keeping your lecture notes in a notebook on a shelf. That is the standard of teaching I’d like to go back to, which I’ll explore more later on in this essay.

Before I get there, though, I want to explore how we’ve gotten to where we are, starting from the beginning of chemistry teaching. It would behoove us to be mindful of our history, especially as we’ve already started to repeat it.

But before even that, I wanted to get a few things out of the way.

First of all, my qualifications: I took chemistry in high school and college, both general and geochemistry (I was a geosciences major). I found general chemistry very boring, geochemistry less so. Since college, I’ve worked as a philosophy teacher and own a test-prep business. While I’m not the most qualified to discuss chemistry, I am very qualified to discuss education, and would like to frame this essay as such.

Second, I wanted to define chemistry as the science of chemicals, and the teaching of chemistry as teaching what to do with chemicals. The early years of chemistry had a lot of overlap with philosophy, and more recently chemistry has had a lot of overlap with physics. I’d rather not discuss those right now, so my historical tour is limited to chemicals only.

Finally, it can be a bit tough to get information on what the live teaching of chemistry was like (there weren’t reporters), so I have to rely a lot on textbooks and surviving notes.

With that in mind, I’d like to go back to the first chemistry textbook, and the first hints of tension between students learning chemistry as a theory vs. students learning chemistry as an empirical science. It was when the teaching of chemistry was still in progress…

***

The first chemistry textbook was, well, a weird one. 500 years ago, chemistry wasn’t a subject. Really, there weren’t many distinct subjects at all, as most things science-like were subsumed under broad category “natural philosophy”. 

This wasn’t just a nomenclature thing. Because so many subjects were under one umbrella, the techniques and even boundaries of chemistry were shared with a bunch of other subjects. So, we are forced to rely on the definition of chemistry mentioned previously, and define the first chemistry textbook as “the first book that systematically discussed and taught how to use chemicals”.

Using that definition, we find ourselves in the mid 1500s in Bavaria with Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica.

For those of you who are familiar with Latin, you might already see the problem. The title of the book translates to “On the Nature of Metals”, and it was mostly about the operation of mines. This included political instruction, like “Don’t start mines in authoritarian states”, and practical engineering details, like how to make sure your mineshafts don’t collapse.

Crucially for chemistry, though, it also included how to get your ores out of your minerals. Whenever a mineral is mined, it doesn’t come in a pure form. It almost always comes in the form of a weird rock.

So, how do you get usable minerals out of a weird rock? With chemistry! Or, as Agricola would put it, the manufacture and use of “juices”, like alum (a salt), “vitriol” (sulfuric acid), and sulfur. 

Agricola, in his instructional work on mining, therefore also taught chemistry. He didn’t teach chemistry in any traditional way. He was really just a reporter. He reported what the miners did (and included diagrams), without explanation or theory. He didn’t even use units. He would just say things like “leave vitriolous stones out in summer and winter” until they “get soft”.

But it is precisely this approach to teaching chemistry that made Agricola a seminal figure in the teaching of chemistry. Before Agricola, chemistry (or, to be precise, the parts of natural philosophy that dealt with chemicals) was entirely theoretical. Evidence had zero impact on theory, and theory was deductive and based on intuition and first principles.

That’s why Aristotle’s chemistry was based on the four elements of air, fire, water, and earth. It made sense to him, and then he could create all sorts of fun diagrams. Then students were taught to memorize them, and replicate them using deduction. By the time we got to chemical “equations” like dry + hot = fire, we’ve created an entire theory which doesn’t help us understand the actual reactions at all.

Agricola just ignored all of it, despite the fact that it was considered the foremost science of his time and something he almost certainly learned. There is nothing in Aristotle’s chemistry that could explain why the miners’ processes to create sulfuric acid worked. Any attempt to use Aristotle’s theory to do so would just be misleading.

So, if we think about what chemistry students would take away from this work, we can say their takeaway would be something like “In order to make use of chemicals, you have to follow a process that is known to work.”

It’s not a great foundation to science, but it’s a start. It’s a place to build from, and, more importantly, puts the use of chemicals at the forefront of chemistry. But it’s a long ways away from good chemistry teaching.

On a side note, I read De re metallica in an English translation, translated by none other than Herbert Hoover (former President of the US and mining engineer) and his wife. Hoover was an absolutely fascinating and incredibly impressive person, and it is really a pity that he screwed up handling the Great Depression so bad as President.

***

The next big innovation in chemistry teaching came from an unlikely source: yet more theorists. This time, not the Aristotelians, but the alchemists. Yes, those alchemists, of eternal life and transmutation into gold renown.

Alchemy had been around for a while, but, by the 1500s, it was the rage among intellectuals. Even Newton was obsessed with it. Now, the theoretical foundations of alchemy were total nonsense, much like the theoretical foundations of Aristotelian science. For example, Paracelsus, one of the founding fathers of Renaissance alchemy, believed that all diseases came from sulfur, salt, and mercury, which he “proved” by burning wood. It’s hard to imagine being more wrong, no?

But the alchemists, despite their foundations being flawed, did have a distinct advantage over the Aristotelians in both their chemistry and chemistry teaching. The alchemists were meticulous experimentalists, precise and excellent at record-keeping. That meticulousness and desire to repeat experiments is exactly why they were responsible for the next big innovation in chemistry teaching. They just needed to be bold enough to throw out theory entirely.

That is precisely what Jean Beguin, a French alchemist, did. In 1610, he published a chemistry textbook that represented the best of the alchemists, called the Tyrocinium Chymicum, or “tournament of chemicals”. It was a guide to manufacturing pharmaceuticals (there was a lot of overlap between medicine and alchemy, as the Paracelsus example shows), and it was a big step forwards in that it was the first chemistry textbook to actually use units (hurray!).

Well, Beguin didn’t exactly publish his textbook. He actually shared it privately with his students. Then it was pirated, became incredibly popular, and Beguin improved and republished it under the idea that, if it was going to be popular, it might as well be good. This does raise the alternative topic of the connection between piracy and improved scientific education, but that can be tabled for now.

Tyrocinium Chymicum represented the best of the alchemists because it is bold. It takes the experimentation of the alchemists and throws out the rest.

At this time, this was not an easy thing to do. Beguin emphasizes in his preface that he has nothing but respect for alchemy, and for Galen, Hippocrates, and the whole Greek tradition of science. He also emphasizes that, because it’s obvious he respects the whole tradition, he requests that other alchemists stop getting so upset with him. The subtext, of course, is that he would really appreciate especially if they wouldn’t somehow get the church involved, as he didn’t wish to be Galileo-d.

After emphasizing his respect for alchemy and the Greek tradition in his preface, Beguin proceeds to not discuss it for the rest of the book. The entire rest of the book is just incredibly detailed cataloguing of how to produce various pharmaceuticals. And, unlike Agricola, Beguin’s alchemical background let him be very, very detailed. In Tyrocinium, there are never any descriptions like “put rocks in a ditch and wait”. There are weights, instruments, and a lot of precise cataloguing of inputs and outputs.

The fact that Beguin was willing to throw out theory meant that this was actually a very effective way to teach how to use chemicals. For example, Beguin had no idea why soaking oak and filtering it produced a liquid that could dissolve pearls. That would require him knowing what tannic acid was, and then understanding how it related to pearls (calcium carbonate). If he tried to understand it using alchemical theory, he’d get confused.

But, he didn’t understand it, and he didn’t really care why he didn’t. He just described it. Exhaustively. In minute detail. Making sure not to forget literally any step even if he had no idea if it was important. 

He does, unfortunately, prescribe literally everything he creates for some ailment or another. So, for instance, he prescribes putting ammonium hydrosulfide directly into open wounds (pg 28), which, if you’re unfamiliar, is the active ingredient in stink bombs. He was a better chemist than physician.

Tyrocinium Chymicum is not a fun read, even when you compare it to other alchemy books. But it’s an incredibly important text in chemistry. It is a book by someone who experimented excessively with chemicals, laboriously detailed everything he found, and then instructed others so they could do the same, even under fear of censure/imprisonment/death. It also contains the glimpse of chemical equations in his excessive cataloguing, the first big step in useful chemical theory.

So, if we think back to the idea of takeaways by chemistry students, we might get something from Tyrocinium like, “Chemistry is about following steps meticulously, using the proper instruments, and exhaustively recording inputs and outputs”. Funnily enough, this isn’t so different from our chemistry labs today.

So, we’re at the 1600s, and we’ve already reached the state of laboratory work today in general chemistry. If that’s how far we’ve regressed, then it is worthwhile to see what we’ve given up.

***

Human beings are natural categorizers, and we’re good at it. It’s easy to mistake that with being good at science. Aristotle certainly did, categorizing elements as “hot” or “vaporous”, fooling himself and much of the Western world (up to the mid 1600s!) into not noticing that the categories said more about man’s perception than the elements themselves.

By the mid 1700s, categorization had come roaring back into chemistry teaching. This time, at least, it was backed up by the rigorous experimentation exemplified by Beguin. Unfortunately, it still came with the baggage of theory, although it fortunately no longer got in the way of experimentation quite so much. For instance, it was much more unlikely that you’d get thrown in jail for your experimental findings disagreeing with theory.

The year was 1766, and our hero Joseph Black, a brilliant scholar and professor in the midst of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment, if you’re unfamiliar, was one of those strange moments in time when all of the world’s most influential thinkers were, for some reason, in one place. In this case, it was Edinburgh.

While we don’t have any textbooks from that time, we do have copies of lecture notes that people took in Black’s classes. Black was very popular as a lecturer, and people would actually attend just for fun. A big part of this was his innovative use of flashy experiments to illustrate his points. 

This is more important than it seems. Black’s lectures, by focusing around experiments, made it clear to the students that chemistry, in the end, was about describing reality. The lectures helped make sense of what the demonstrations showed. Students imbibed the importance of empirical evidence.

Another big innovation of Black’s time (if not Black himself) was, as previously mentioned, useful categorization. Agricola and Beguin threw out the categorization of Aristotle and Paracelsus (despite Beguin’s protests to the contrary) because they simply did not correspond to reality. It’s one thing to say burning wood shows the unification of sulfur, mercury, and salt, but if you’re actually an experimentalist, you know that’s dumb. However, once they threw it out, they didn’t have anything to replace it with.

Black and his brethren, along with further developing the rudimentary chemical equations originated by Beguin, developed a new type of categorization: affinity tables. They knew certain elements ended up bonded with other elements. They didn’t really know why, or have a good way of predicting future bonds besides noticing obvious similarities between elements.

So, that’s what they did. They grouped elements by similarities, and created tables of which elements bonded with which other elements. As a teaching tool, this was handy, in a sort of similar way to memorizing the periodic table of elements.

As mentioned, though, this came with the burden of theory. Students learned that bonding was due to an invisible force called “affinity” (hence, affinity table). One can only assume that students who learned this and scholars who studied affinity theoretically massively wasted their time. Oh, well.

So, here’s what the students of Black would take away from his classes:

1) Chemistry is an interesting, useful subject founded upon experimentation.

2) Theory is a useful tool for a chemist when it’s grounded in experimental results.

This is getting closer to what a chemistry student should believe, and better than the impressions a student would get from general chemistry today. However, what we’re still missing is a sense of all of the uses of theory (although Black himself wasn’t aware of them), as well as the connection of theory not just to usefulness but to reality.

***

After the 1700s, chemistry was set on a clear trajectory. An openness to scientific inquiry and state sponsorship meant that the inevitability of scientific progress was basically set at this point. Meanwhile, this steady march of improved understanding led to an appreciation for scientific knowledge in general, and a great atmosphere for scientific learning.

Here’s where I say something controversial.

The atmosphere was so great, in fact, that the teaching of general chemistry actually reached its peak in the mid 1800s. The mid 1800s marks our point of regression.

Gasp!

Let me explain.

The mid 1800s were a unique point in chemistry. The usefulness of chemistry had exploded. Chemical industries were in full swing. The universities incorporated chemical labs. In Europe, the state sponsored research and development, while in America, the state sponsored intellectual piracy of European research and development.

Chemical theory, meanwhile, had actually become really useful! In Germany, Augustus Kekulé discovered and popularized the use of diagrams for organic chemistry. Simultaneously, the careful experimentation of laboratory scientists meant that categorizing chemicals could actually be done in a systematic way (like by weight of each element in a given chemical). Eventually, by the mid-late 1800s (1869, to be precise), the ultimate chemical categorization tool arrived: the periodic table.

Now, what’s interesting is that a lot of what we consider “fundamental” to chemistry was still not on the table (pun intended). Gilbert Lewis introduced the idea of electron pairs only in 1916. In fact, the electron wasn’t even discovered until 1897, and the nucleus in 1909. We’re still 50 years out from all of that.

So what did that mean for chemistry students? Well, it meant that their chemistry instruction was incredibly practical. Theory wasn’t developed enough to be learned solely on its own, so it was taught to supplement the laboratory work. Germany especially was a paragon of practical chemical learning with its massive research laboratories. The “Giessen method” of teaching was developed during this time by Justus von Liebig, one of the foremost chemists of his day. It involved massive amounts of laboratory work, hands-on training in what chemists actually do.

Crucially, this wasn’t just cookbook laboratory work, like we do today. These were legitimate experiments, closely tied to the active research von Liebig was carrying out at the time. The assignments would give instructions as to the goal, but only vague instructions on how to carry it out. 

The final exam for the end of a student’s chemistry education was the so-called 100 bottle challenge, where a student had to analyze 100 bottles of unknown compounds for their constituents. The reward once you’re done? Well, join von Liebig’s lab as an assistant, of course!

As you can tell, every piece of a student’s chemistry education under the Giessen method was to prepare you to go out in the world and do chemistry. Students were in the lab from the beginning, learning theory and performing experiments that actually helped them do chemistry.

That’s why I say this is the best time for chemistry teaching. Here’s what a chemistry student’s takeaways would be:

1) Practical methods on how to do chemistry as taught by someone who was at the forefront of research chemistry.

2) Specific theories, as well as how to apply them, why they’re useful, and the empirical evidence supporting them

In this era and place, general chemistry students were taught to the greatest extent possible to be chemists. That, to my mind, is the greatest possible way to teach chemistry: not as something to learn, but as something to do.

***

If the Giessen method was indeed the peak of chemistry teaching, then it’s all downhill from there (as peaks tend to operate). That’s unfortunate, because next up on our historical tour of chemistry teaching is Linus Pauling.

I really shouldn’t throw Linus Pauling under the bus. The man was incredibly brilliant, and an absolute font of ideas, some Nobel Prize winning and only a few that can be described as stupid (e.g. using Vitamin C to cure AIDS). And his approach to teaching chemistry, especially general chemistry, was pretty clever.

Pauling, somewhat similarly to Joseph Black, saw introductory chemistry as serving two functions: introducing chemistry and making people interested in it. So, that’s how he set up his teaching and his textbook.

When it came to introducing chemistry, Pauling took the approach of building up chemistry logically, like the textbooks of today, by starting with atoms and working his way up to chemical bonding. However, unlike the textbooks of today, he still included the empirical evidence that supported the fundamental assertions.

For instance, when introducing the periodic table, Pauling puts it in, explains it, and then briefly talks about the experimental evidence that confirmed it. He doesn’t simply cite facts referenced in the book (like similarities of alkali metals, as a modern chemistry textbook would do), but references the actual experiments done and includes their results.

It’s when dealing with what makes people interested in chemistry, though, that Pauling’s love for science really shines through and makes an impact on his students. He obviously loves collecting interesting and illustrative reactions and properties. It’s clear that he isn’t just familiar with chemistry as an academic subject, either, as he weaves in the use of chemicals in engineering as well.

Where does his teaching fall short, though? Well, exactly where Justus von Liebig’s work shined: as an example of how to do chemistry. The practice problems in the book are abysmal, rote, and seem to mostly exist to fill space. They are problems that in no way are natural ones to come up, or to trigger deeper thought from the students.

So, then, what would the takeaways be from Linus Pauling’s course as a student?

1) Chemistry is logical, interesting, and based on empirical evidence

2) The empirical evidence that chemistry is based on is beyond the ability of introductory chem students to repeat

In 100 years, this was the shift. Chemistry, as something that one did, was relegated to more advanced courses. You would no longer be able to do chemistry by taking an intro course alone.

The regress, then, would come in disregarding the empirical evidence entirely, and transforming chemistry entirely into something that one learned, rather than did.

***

This brings us to the present day, the year of our lord, 2020.

As mentioned, I took high school chemistry and 2 semesters of college chemistry. I don’t remember what textbook I used for my course, but it was much like this free online textbook, Chemistry 2e, for both my high school and college classes.

With this textbook, we’ve moved completely away from chemistry as something to do to chemistry as something to learn. The book is illustrated with plenty of examples, sure, but not of actual experiments that any real scientist did to prove or explore concepts. These are examples that literally only exist within the bounds of a chemistry textbook, the sort that use color changes with easy chemical formulae.

It’s sterile chemistry. It’s the equivalent of teaching kids scales before they learn to play a song, or insisting that kids learn grammar before teaching them how to write. It’s chemistry as rote and rules, with no joy to exploration.

What’s frustrating about this is that it isn’t wrong, and that’s what its proponents hide behind. This is a way to teach students chemistry so that they learn the right things. They learn an introduction to everything in order, and learn the right facts to make sense of it all.

But, at the end of it, there’s nothing to take away. There’s certainly nothing that a chemistry student can do with this knowledge. It’s as useless as the dates he learned in history class or the declensions he learned in Latin. It’s another thing that will simply molder away in a notebook until it’s thrown out.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. While researching for this essay, I stumbled across the CHEM project, which was a project in the 1960s to modernize the teaching of high school chemistry. While it’s not perfect, its emphasis on teaching chemistry that is grounded in the sort of experiments that high schoolers can do is an improvement.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell, it never got much traction. A follow up survey in the 70s found only 20% of high schools using the curriculum, and I’m not sure if any do now.

So, the takeaways, then, for a modern college chemistry student is this:

1) Chemistry is logical. 

2) The empirical evidence for chemistry is unimportant. 

3) The applications of chemistry are for changing the colors of solutions, and for describing things that are already kind of obvious.

4) Chemistry experiments are about repeating a process until you get to a specified endpoint

Students walk out of modern general chemistry classes finding chemistry neither interesting nor understanding its use. These classes are a process repeated over and over again, in college and high school classrooms around the world, with no clear goal or even metrics. They are closer to rituals than anything else.

As I’ve hopefully shown, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the past 100 years or so, theory wasn’t developed enough to dominate any class, never mind general chemistry. As a result, classes could be far more practical, not only engaging the student but teaching them chemistry as something useful. 

If nothing else, I hope we can think about going back to that time. Chemistry teaching should be held to as high of standards as chemistry itself, and not left simply to wither.

Flashcards are an incredibly useful learning tool. In fact, they can be used to learn pretty much anything. That’s why it’s a pity that so few people use flashcards to their full potential.

Flashcards can be used to learn pretty much anything, because, in short, remembering is essential to learning. Once something is taught to you, you need to be able to remember it to use it.

Remembrance gets stronger with repetition. The more you remember something, the more vivid it is in your memory and the easier it is to remember. For instance, the more often you’re forced to recall a certain password, the more likely it is that you will remember it in the future.

Flashcards directly force you to recall chunks of information. In doing so, they make it easier for you to recall that information in the future.

Flashcards, therefore, have an obvious use when memorizing discrete content, like facts or vocabulary. Mnemonics can aid in memorization, but nothing tests and strengthens memorization quite so well as literally forcing yourself to recall. In fact, if you force yourself to recall the mnemonics as well, it increases their effectiveness.

As a graduate exam tutor (and flashcard app developer), however, I’ve discovered that flashcards can also be an excellent way to help yourself with processes and problems. The basic idea is the same: in order to perform a process or solve a problem, you have to remember how to do it. Flashcards can help you do so.

However, the complication with learning a process is that you don’t want to simply memorize the problem or process. After all, the point of learning a process isn’t simply to be able to repeat it on command. Instead, you want to be able to apply it when appropriate, even when the problem comes in a different form.

In other words, you don’t want to use the flashcard to just recall the problem. You want to use the flashcard to recall the thought process inherent to the problem, so you can use it to help solve future problems. 

The best way to do so is to create a 3 sided flashcard. There’s the problem, the answer, then the explanation. The answer to the problem isn’t enough. The answer only confirms if your attempt to solve the problem is correct, before you check the explanation for the process itself.

This is essentially how I tutor my tutoring clients. I put every question they have trouble with into my flashcard app, 21st Night. We work through the problem together, and then, once we’re finished, I have them write their own explanation in the app. For homework, they review the cards.

Now, when my tutoring clients write an explanation for a problem, they often make the mistake of just literally writing the step-by-step to solve the problem. However, in order to really use the flashcard to aid your pattern recognition, the explanation needs to anticipate future problems. To do so, it’s really important that the explanation incorporates not only how to solve the problem, but how you know that this is the way to solve the problem.

So, for instance, if it’s an algebra problem, the explanation that you test yourself on shouldn’t just be the step-by-step process to solve the problem. It should discuss how you know how to set up the problem, and how you will recognize similar problems with similar setups in the future.

Then, when reviewing, it’s important to test your recall of not only of the problem and the answer, and not even of only just the process, but also of your recognition of the type of problem. No matter the subject, there are only a limited number of types of problems. Similarly, there are only a limited number of approaches to solve the problems. As long as you can recall the approaches and recall how to recognize when to use them, you will be able to solve the problems in the subject.

In my own tutoring practice, this approach of putting everything into flashcards and practicing recall has proven very effective. While before my students would consistently forget the complex details of what I taught, now my students remember what I teach and how to solve the problems that used to vex them.

In summary, flashcards can be used to learn basically any subject that can go in a textbook. If the subject is content-heavy, the flashcards will help you memorize the content. If it’s process or problem-heavy, the flashcards will help with your pattern recognition, as long as you structure the explanation correctly

If you’re looking for flashcards, I’d of course recommend my own, which come with detailed studying analytics, three sides, and built-in sharing with friends and tutors. If you’re looking for free flashcards, though, I’d recommend Anki, although you’ll have to get comfortable with creating hint fields in order to get the 3 sided functionality.

When you’re tutoring, it’s important to keep track of what exactly you’ve taught your students, when you taught them, and their progress.

If you don’t keep track of this, then each session you’ll come in not knowing what to cover next. Your students will be unhappy with your lack of preparation, and you’ll be frantically trying to come up with lesson plans on the fly.

One option that some tutors come up with is to create a syllabus. Then they just work through the same lesson plans with each student, checking things off as they go.

While this works fine from a record-keeping perspective, you lose out on a lot of the benefit of tutoring. Tutoring, when it functions well, should be personalized. A one-size-fits-all syllabus is the opposite of personalized.

So, if you’re not just doing a syllabus, what can you do?

One thing to do is just to keep a spreadsheet with the questions (or topics) you’ve covered and the date that you did them. Highlight the date red, yellow, or green depending on how the student did on that topic or question on that particular date (bad, ok, or great). Don’t forget to circle back to old difficult questions!

Here’s what mine from back in the day looked like. 8/23 was the date it was covered, and the arrow in that box is a note I took. The gmatclub link goes to the question. I should have circled back to the question, but there wasn’t enough time with that student.

Now I do something different. I’ve recently created a tutoring app called 21st Night that logs all of this for you, so you can just focus on the tutoring. It’s free for tutors, if you want to check it out. Just contact me.

Here what that looks like:

Making people learn is tough. I’ve taught classrooms ranging from 1 person to around 3000 (through an online course), and the gap between what I teach and what students learn has always been present.

This is true for all teachers, of course, but I think I’ve felt it more than most. As someone who’s self-employed and charges by the hour, when people stop learning, they often ask for a refund. That refund comes from my pocket. Their learning gap becomes my rent gap.

This means I’ve developed a number of strategies to keep students engaged and learning, and my pockets full. Of these, probably the most important has been my adaptation of mastery learning.

Mastery learning, popularized by Benjamin Bloom, is, at its core, both simple and a powerful alternative to the traditional classroom structure.

A traditional classroom structures relies on lecture first, then homework, then a test at the end. If a student doesn’t get the material, they’re expected to go to office hours, but it’s far more common for them to do poorly on the test. At that point, the student and teacher both tacitly agree that the student will likely never learn the material.

In a simplified mastery learning model, material is taught, then homework and tests are used as checks to see how well the material is learned. If the student doesn’t reach a specified standard, they spend more time on the material until they can reach the standard on another check (i.e. homework or practice test).

To put it in another way, in a traditional classroom model, every student spends the same amount of time on each subject, but their achievement varies. In a simplified mastery learning model, every student’s achievement reaches the same standard, but the amount of time they spend on a subject varies.

I’m a big fan of the simplified mastery learning model because it results in greater student achievement (literally, by definition). I also find it doesn’t impact how much material an individual student is able to get through, as most of the material I teach stacks on itself anyways. Students who didn’t understand the material at the beginning were never going to understand the material at the end, even if they did encounter it.

The big trouble, though, is that it’s inconvenient. The traditional classroom model is so popular because it fits so well with the pressures of a course with limited time and a syllabus to get through. A traditional mastery learning model seems like it could take an infinite amount of time, and it’s possible that you’ll never get to what you need.

In response to this, I adapted the mastery learning model, so that I could still get through the material I needed in the time that I had. Here’s what I did:

1. I started off all my students with a diagnostic test. No matter what your subject, some of your students will come with some background in it. It’s important to know how much, so that you can tailor your lectures accordingly and spend time wisely. It also gives students a heads up with regards to the material that they’ll need to know.
2. My lectures were short and to the point, taking up only half of class time. While I recognized that I needed to make sure my students were exposed to the proper frameworks and problem-solving strategies, I left the details of those frameworks up to their own learning. Details tend to be lost over the course of a lecture anyways, so it wasn’t particularly useful for me to try to drill them into the students’ heads.
3. The second half of class time was always devoted to assisted self-study. I gave my students a lot of high quality material to learn from (questions, answers, answer explanations, and practice tests) and showed them how to learn from it. In the second half of class, they’d work quietly through the material related to the lecture. If they had any trouble, I’d help them on their question.
4. I consistently checked in on their homework and their tests. Homework was given every class, while tests were given as needed. Both homework and tests were consistently encouraged, and I checked in to see how students were doing on both. Any problems specific to a student were addressed during self-study (e.g. not doing enough homework), while problems specific to the class were addressed during lecture.
5. I left myself a lot of leeway on the syllabus. Not every lesson stuck the first time. I wanted to revisit those. Occasionally, a lesson stuck really well, and I wanted to explore that topic deeper. Just as mastery learning encouraged the students to revisit topics again and again, I wanted to encourage myself to revisit topics as needed.
6. I required my students to reach a minimum level of knowledge, but didn’t insist on the same level of knowledge for all of them. If I had gone full Benjamin Bloom, I would have insisted all my students reach the same level of knowledge. This might have been possible on easier subjects, but it would have been time-prohibitive on the difficult subjects I taught. Instead, I was ok with certain students diving deeper than others, as long as everyone reached the same level.

This adapted mastery learning model worked way better for me than a traditional classroom model. In the traditional classroom model, I was always shocked at how little my students seemed to learn. I’d occasionally reach the end of a lecture, take a question from a student, and realize that they hadn’t even understood the first slide. The rest of the lecture must have been gibberish to them.

The mastery learning model worked much better. My students actually learned and internalized what I taught. If they had trouble on anything, I could adjust my teaching and help them adjust their learning. When I started the next lecture, I felt confident that I was “preaching to the choir”.

Throughout my experiments in mastery learning, the most important tool I used was 21st Night, an app I created. That’s what allowed me to assign my students questions, check their understanding of the questions, and encourage them to reach proficiency on those questions.

If you’re interested in trying out 21st Night for free with your classroom, contact me. I’m looking to get 21st Night into the hands of other teachers, and I’d love to hear from you.

Charles Sanders Peirce is one of my favorite unknown philosophers. Although problematic (i.e. virulently racist) and a bit difficult to read, he was brilliant, and wrote on a wide range of topics in an insightful way.

One of my favorite ideas of his (and likely one of his most accessible) was his idea of truth. I think about it quite a lot, especially when I read pointless Internet arguments.

Peirce’s idea of truth came from pragmatism, which he was the founder of, and pragmaticism, which he created after he got mad that people were misinterpreting pragmatism. His exact line of reasoning in creating pragmaticism was to make a clunkier word that would be less likely to attract misguided adherents. In this, he seemed to have been successful, as I’m not aware of any other pragmaticists.

In pragmatism (or pragmaticism), truth is defined thusly:

“Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

This is about as easy as Peirce gets to read.

In other words, he defined what we think of something as what we think that thing can do. Or, as he explained later, we can also think of it as, “Given that this is true, what should I do about it?”

So, if we describe a diamond as hard, we mean it can scratch pretty much anything else. If we call someone mean, we wouldn’t want to go to them for comfort on a tough day.

If someone else describes a diamond as soft, but still acknowledge it can scratch pretty much anything else, then you’re agreeing with that person. In the same way, if they say, “Oh no, that guy’s actually pretty nice,” but still wouldn’t go to them for comfort on a tough day, they’re also agreeing with you.

Well, what does this have to do with Internet arguments? Internet arguments usually fail from the getgo, by this standard. If you call a certain policy racist, then you are arguing that you ought to treat that policy in the same way as another policy you’d call racist (like redlining). You also argue that it has identical effects to other racist policies.

But that’s not normally the case, is it? Words like racist, problematic, or socialist are thrown around with regards to their definition by any standard, but especially not by a pragmatic standard.

Take, for example, an excerpt from this Quality Contribution from r/themotte on Reddit. In it, two Redditors are arguing about whether we should still be celebrating strong female leads in Hollywood, decades after Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s breakout success.

From there, it rapidly progresses to whether strong female leads are even necessary, and ends up in an argument about whether the patriarchy exists:

Arguer 1: “If we imagine the patriarchy has ruled human culture for 4,000 years and oppressed women the entire time, then does it really seem that surprising that 20 years of stereotype smashing aren’t [sic] enough to fully heal things perfectly?“

Arguer 2: “In numerous important ways, women are objectively better off than men in every developed country for which I can find statistics. For many young women today, resentment of ‘the patriarchy’ is [sic] resentment of suffering they have never and will never experience.”

They both are trying to argue about the same thing, namely whether the patriarchy does or does not exist. Unfortunately, they aren’t actually arguing about the same thing, because they don’t actually have the same definition of the patriarchy.

Arguer 1, by a pragmatic definition of the patriarchy, argues the most relevant effects of the patriarchy to the argument are the existence of negative stereotypes of women in popular culture. Given that these stereotypes exist, the patriarchy exists, and we ought to actively create stereotypes that will promote a better image of women.

Arguer 2, by another pragmatic definition, says the most relevant effects of the patriarchy are the “statistics” of women (I assume he means income, life expectancy, education, etc.). Given that those are positive, the patriarchy does not exist, and we ought not to teach women about the patriarchy as something that still exists.

In other words, by the standards of Peirce, Arguer 1 and Arguer 2 aren’t even close to arguing about the same thing. Arguer 1’s patriarchy is a patriarchy of stereotypes. Arguer 2’s patriarchy is a patriarchy of statistics. They’re not the same patriarchy!

R/TheMotte is a subreddit devoted to debate. This argument was singled out as a quality debate on that subreddit. And yet it’s not even an argument. They simply aren’t talking about the same thing.

They even realize this later on in the argument, several posts down, as Arguer 2 brings up the Google definition of patriarchy as

a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property”.

Arguer 2 claims he agrees with this, but Arguer 1 does not. Of course, this isn’t actually accurate, as Arguer 2 doesn’t really agree with this either. His patriarchy affects statistics, not moral authority.

In a pragmatic (or pragmaticist) world, an argument would begin by defining terms by their effect, and by what we ought to do if that effect exists. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in, so our Internet arguments will continue to run around in circles.

Kendrick Lamar once rapped, “It’s levels to it, you and I know,” while surrounded by many bald black men.

I was thinking about that recently after an interesting conversation I had with a friend and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training partner. A 200 pound former Penn State wrestler and a Harvard Chemistry PhD to be, he is an absolute force to be reckoned with on the mats.

(Penn State, if you’re not aware, is considered the best wrestling program in the country, winning the D1 Championship 4 straight years in a row).

After yet another round of being beaten up (nicely) by this friend, we started talking about his experience as a Penn State wrestler. He said something interesting, “When I first came to Penn State, I had no idea how to wrestle, just like pretty much everyone who comes on. It took me some time to learn.”

It was a weird thing for him to say. Penn State does not accept just anyone onto the wrestling team. They regularly attract the number 1 college wrestling picks in the country, and my friend was, himself, an outstanding high school wrestler in a really competitive league.

And yet, he had learned so much at Penn State that he considered himself an absolute novice at the beginning. How was that possible?

Well, like any skill, there are levels to wrestling. When your coach is a legendary Olympian, the level of high school wrestling can seem like no wrestling at all. It feels like you can’t ramp up to the next level, you need to step up.

So, at Penn State, my friend took that step up in wrestling. He became such a better wrestler (and very competitive on the national level) that he felt like it was the first time he really wrestled. He became a next level wrestler.

This made me interested as to how the coach, Cael Sanderson, makes guys take that step up. What’s the key to creating next level wrestlers?

I did some research and talked to my friend, and here’s what I found. First, gather a bunch of really talented guys a room. Then, closely bond them together through games and a mutual attitude of humility. Make them do hours upon hours of drilling and wrestling-specific exercise (Cael is really big on having all exercise relate back to wrestling), although give them time to cool off and relax as well.

Last, use your encylopedic knowledge of wrestling as you work with each of them one-on-one, training them in exactly how they should wrestle.

It seemed straightforward enough. There was one really interesting part though: how they drill. Wrestling drills are, traditionally, just doing what the coach tells you to do, over and over again. And that’s an important part of learning basic wrestling skills.

But, what Cael realized is that once you have a basic but comprehensive wrestling vocabulary, you can change the way you drill. Wrestling is not a team sport, it’s an individual sport. You don’t have to do the same thing as your teammates, you just have to do what works.

If you have the vocabulary, it’s fine to only drill your favorite techniques, as long as they work and cover the relevant situation. So, instead of only drilling their coach’s favorite techniques, a lot of their drills are individualistic. Each wrestler drills their own favorite techniques over, and over, and over again against a partner.

They drill their techniques with no resistance, some resistance, and total resistance. They get so many reps in that it becomes second nature. Eventually, having drilled these techniques so many times, they are instantly prepared for literally any counter strategy someone will throw at you and have an answer.

And that seems to be the secret of creating the best D1 program in the country: clever drilling, close team bonding, an amazing coach, and incredibly talented recruits.

Now, considering that most readers of this are not planning on going into college wrestling, what are the general lessons of learning from this?

1. Close, one-on-one interaction and collaboration with other talented people is incredibly helpful for improving skills (witness the way people describe Bell Labs)
2. A closely-bonded team that emphasizes humility is motivational
3. Drill repeatedly what you want to improve in a variety of situations (easy, medium, and hard situations)
4. An individual can focus on only learning their favorite strategies, as long as those strategies are comprehensive

The last lesson, and one that is sort of meta, is that learning strategies, like any strategy, works best with “export discipline”. You need to constantly test your strategy against outside programs.

In college wrestling, this was already built in when Cael Sanderson came along. By nature of the sport, you’re constantly testing your athletes against other athletes in regimented, one-on-one competitions.

Furthermore, it’s an easy place to implement new strategies if old ones aren’t working: an individual coach can come in, make sweeping changes, and start seeing pretty immediate results by the results of the competition. It’s also a very manageable size to test a strategy, as wrestling programs are small enough that a coach like Cael can work with each athlete individually to improve their learning.

I can only wish that it was possible to create the same export discipline in colleges, graduate programs, or the like. If they were forced to constantly test themselves publicly against other programs, then perhaps we’d see the same sort of innovative strategy implementation in them as well.

I work with a lot of LSAT clients who have struggled for a long time on the LSAT. In fact, that’s my main type of client: I’m rarely someone’s first port of call on their LSAT journey.

Often, their scores have increased a bit over a long period of time (like a 145 to a 159 over 6 months), but they’ve hit a hump they just can’t seem to get beyond. So they say, “Help me, Trevor Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”

(They don’t actually say that.)

And I do help them! I pretty consistently get my students scoring 170+ by the end of a couple months working together.

How?

I fix their approach to learning the LSAT.

You see, people misunderstand how to learn on the LSAT. They see a great resource like 7Sage, and say, “Ah-hah! Let me just watch those videos, memorize them, and I will become an LSAT master.”

Or, if they’re a bit more clever, they say, “I will work my way through the entirety of the LSAT Trainer. I will do every problem in every chapter, and I will become an LSAT master.”

Former way doesn’t work at all. Latter way sort of works. The best way to learn on the LSAT, though, is to follow a feedback loop: try out a new problem, fail, learn a new strategy, do old problem, try new similar problem. See diagram below for a visual representation.

Watching and memorizing 7Sage videos skips almost every part of this process: You’re not identifying similar problems or trying new problems. You are sort of learning new strategies, but not in response to the problems.

No wonder it doesn’t work!

And doing every problem in the LSAT Trainer isn’t much better. You are trying new problems and learning new strategies, but you’re never going back and identifying your original issues or trying out the strategies on old problems. There’s no feedback, in other words.

So, what is the better and faster way to learn on the LSAT?

1. Try a problem. If you get it wrong, go to step 2.
2. When you get the problem wrong, learn the correct way to do it and write it down yourself. This should be a specific strategy with a motivation: I needed to set up this diagram because it was this type of game, which I could tell from these cues.
3. Memorize the correct process, and redo the problem on a blank sheet of paper (no notes).
4. Find a similar problem, and try out this new strategy. If the strategy doesn’t work, go to step 2, and see why (i.e. why the problem was not actually similar enough).
5. Return to the problem in a day to make sure you still remember it (and return to periodically afterwards with spaced repetition).

This is the process I follow with all of my students. I even created an app to make it easier, especially step 5. Steps 2 and 4 are what you need good resources for, like a tutor or a book.

It is often a rough adjustment to their learning process. Writing out a full explanation with motivation feels like a waste of time when they want to just move onto the next question. Returning back seems dumb: won’t you just remember the answer?

But this is exactly how you learn quickly! By including motivation, you not only learn the tools to solve problems, but when to use them! And by returning back, you solidify your recall of the strategy, making you solve problems faster and more smoothly.

If you start implementing this process, you will find that your LSAT learning rate skyrockets. Trust me.

Attention Redditors, my students, blog readers, and everyone else: just because you finished a practice test does not mean you’re done with it! 

You are done with a practice test when you can not only do, but explain, every single question on that practice test. You can explain, at the drop of a hat, why the right answers are right and the wrong answers are wrong.

This should be true even if I wake you in the dead of night and ask you. While you are still blinking the sleep out of your eyes, you should be able to tell me the exact process to get the right answer and avoid all traps.

If you are not at that point with every single question on the practice test, you are not done with that practice test.

The same goes for questions, chapters, books, and flashcards. If you need help getting to that point on any question, try using an error log.

Capsice?

About a year and a half ago, I had a GRE tutoring client who had a reasonably important political job. She was in her mid 30s, sharp (and sometimes cutting), and had appeared in the news quite a few times.

She was also absolutely terrible at math. I mean really, really terrible. She didn’t know how to do anything past 6th grade math, and she was pretty terrified of that.

This was a problem, as the GRE goes way past that. Even to get a mediocre score, like she wanted, she would need to learn a lot more math. And I’d have to be the one to teach her.

So, picture me, in my office, sitting side-by-side with an accomplished woman who I just met. She’s smart, but she’s bad at math. She knows she’s bad at math. She hates math, and has hated it since high school. It’s my job to teach her. How do I do that?

Teaching an adult who never learned math is different than teaching a kid. When teaching kids, the hardest parts are that everything is unfamiliar to them, and that they often lack a lot of the common sense to make seemingly obvious connections. These are compounded by the kids’ lack of motivation, so teaching is a lot of motivation and cajoling.

When I teach adults like this woman, however, they are generally familiar with the material, they have common sense and life experience, and they are very motivated to learn by the prospect of not getting the degree that they want. So, the question is then: why are they bad at math?

The first issue is always anxiety. When that woman said she hated math, what she really felt was a deep and profound sense of anxiety over it. She is smart and motivated, and accomplished many of her professional goals.

Now she’s forced to confront something she can’t do that 14 year olds do without breaking a sweat. Imagine how that feels. Bad, right? It feels like someone rubbing your nose in failure.

As a tutor, therefore, my student’s anxiety is always the first thing I have to deal with. This is not easy for me. I would mostly describe myself as a nerd, with the bluntness that entails. Gentle motivation has been a skill I have had to learn with a lot of hard work.

As a result, I’ve developed stock phrases, like: “each problem you get wrong now is a problem you get right on the test” or “studying for a test is just like practicing for a marathon; it’s about putting the miles on the pavement.” I even just tell them, “The GRE sucks, but it only has to be a big part of your life for a short time.”

Beyond my students’ anxiety, though, there still lies the central question of why, exactly, they never learned math. They are almost always familiar with the material. They likely took the SAT or ACT and were tested on the material. They might have even taken a prep course to refresh themselves.

This is sufficient for many people to develop a passing understanding of math. But it’s not sufficient for these people. What are they missing?

Well, over the course of working with quite a few of these sorts of students, I’ve learned what it usually comes down to: they are really, really bad at recognizing similar math problems via induction.No matter what subtopic in math we are in, they have a ton of trouble adapting solutions from one problem to the next.

When students (or anyone) does a math problem, the first step is to recognize its similarity to problems they’ve done before. Then they recall the general sort of solution before solving the problem.

After all, none of us are inventing solutions out of whole cloth, unless we’re 9 year old Carl Friedrich Gauss. We’re all just doing variations on what we already know.

(Self plug: this essay is on the website of an app, 21st Night, that is literally designed to make it easier to recognize similarities and recall solutions to problems. Ahem.)

But, these students think they have to be Carl Friedrich Gauss every time. And if they can’t invent the solution, then they give up. They see their fellow students doing problems with ease, and assume there is simply a “math gene” that they’re lacking.

And, if they lack the math gene, why bother trying to learn math? It’ll never work.

This was what it was like with my student. She had somehow “learned” at an early age that math is either about inventing, or following a set of arcane steps, like a magic ritual. Lacking the capability for invention, she had only followed arcane steps for her entire math career.

It’s exhausting and difficult to memorize without a framework. Imagine trying to memorize the spelling of every word without ever recognizing the connection between phonetics and orthographics (how it sounds and how it’s spelled). Spelling would be, well, an arcane mystery (pun fully intended). Every word would take so much out of you, and you’d avoid spelling whenever possible.

That was her and math. She had memorized her way through high school math and the SAT. She had a miserable time of it, and avoided math because it was exhausting and reminded her of failure. Now she was working a full-time job and needed to take the GRE, and she simply didn’t have the brain space for it.

Whew! Not fun, right? So what can I do?

Well, after clearing her anxiety (or trying to over a long and drawn-out process), I needed to teach her that math was about recognizing patterns. She needed to see that problems were in fact similar to each other, and that the solutions to problems were consistent with one another (i.e. we weren’t inventing new rules every single math problem).

Put that way, it sounds easy. In actuality, this is a painstaking process for all involved. I needed her to unlearn that math was all about memorization, learn that math is about understanding and similarities, and then actually learn the strategies and techniques she needed to do.

With her, as with most of my students, this is generally best done empirically. I can tell my students this, and they will nod and agree. And then they will continue with the same assumptions they’ve had for 20-something years.

So, instead, I tell them that we are going to need to do and analyze a lot of problems together. It will be many hours, and I need their patience. That’s all I say.

To actually teach them the right way to think about these problems, I ask them two questions after each question we do together, whether they get the question right or wrong:

1. How did we know to apply that method to that problem? What prompted it? [This teaches them to recognize similarity to other problems that use that method]
2. Why did you choose this approach? In other words, what did we want in the end? [This forces them to recognize the purpose of the steps, and understand the logical consistency.]

Answers to these questions go in the explanation in the error log (the app I mentioned), as well as a step-by-step explanation of how they solved the question. Then the app makes sure they recall everything by a spaced repetition system.

I do that over a period of hours. Then I have them do that at home for even more hours. Between me and their homework, I usually have them spend 100+ hours doing and analyzing GRE math problems with those questions and my app.

And 100+ hours, hundreds of math problems, and thousands of words exchanged later, these unteachable adults are finally mediocre at math.