like for example i’ve noticed in my life that beginners luck is a real phenomenon and pops up constantly. i’ve just now thought of applying the dialectical method (or my own terminally online, meme-addled, haven’t-read-enough-theory imitation of it) to be idea of beginners luck and skill mastery/learning in general
let’s say beginners luck (playing well without understanding why your plays work) exists as a phenomenon due to the dialectical nature of the process by which humans acquire skills and its consequent non-linearity and unpredictability. mastering a game is the process of iteratively refining one’s mental model of how best to play it, coming up with new strategies and tactics, testing them by playing the game, and keeping or rejecting reject strategies and tactics according to whether they succeed or fail.
this is pure thesis - antithesis - synthesis, right? like when you’re totally new to a game you just try what seems natural (thesis). then you reach intermediate level by correcting for mistakes you made as a beginner (antithesis). then you jump to advanced mastery by recognizing which of your first round of corrections helped you and which were overcorrections, and for those overcorrections you revert back to (or at least toward) the way you were doing it when you first started (synthesis).
a good example is in chess. if the best move is one which breaks a common rule of thumb, a beginner might play it not knowing it breaks a rule; an intermediate player won’t play it because they know it breaks the rule of thumb; and an expert will play it because they know this is an appropriate situation in which to break the rule of thumb.
are any of you aware of a book or paper about this dialectical understanding of learning? or am i just rambling nonsensically here?
Dialectics as a concept has existed for thousands of years. So in a way there’s no single “right” way to define it and plenty of ways to claim it’s relevant for learning. Socratic questioning is a dialectical method. What you describe could reasonably be called dialectics.
Marx built off of Hegel’s dialectics, which are notably not well-described by “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”. Hegel’s dialectics are more complex than most, and I don’t feel confident enough in my understanding to try to reduce it lol.
For me personally, dialectics is about the interconnection and dynamicity of everything. A static view of gray just sees its current color, a dialectic view sees the interplay and tension between black and white, their trajectory and transformation into another color.