He doesnt understand how to answer email.

My friend, let's let him hide behind the name Bob, is in his seventies.
Occasionally I send him  email but he doesn't answer back.
Every time I ring him he reminds me that he doesn't know how to answer
email.

This should make you think.
The traditional reaction of many younger is to conclude that he must be senile.
Now he's not stupid, and it's not going to get any better the longer it lasts.
So what's going on?
I dont have the answers, but we could explore some:

• He's getting "computer fright" (is that the right term) and this is getting ingrained. People who get this are also afraid of making a mistake, so they dont explore.
• He realises that once he wants to understand how to reply to email he's going to be learning lots more and he thinks the investment is not worth it.
• He's set in his ways.
• Somebody needs to show him.

Some people get out of it by writing a recipe: press this button and that and follow the recipe rigidly. Clearly this is not understanding.

One point I want to make is that adapting to a piece of technology can appear to require a huge investment, the little bit you learn is only the visible tip of an iceberg of knowledge.
New information always perturbs our system.

What I have just written is a rough draft. What do you think?

Software patterns can be hard to understand at first

Let's take the fashionable concept of Software Design Patterns.
If you read the foundation book by a group known as the Gang of Four, you can be tearing your hair out wondering what on earth they are saying. On the other hand, if you are prepared to put up with the jokes and you know Java then the book Heads First Design Patterns makes the learning much easier because they present the subject from the perspective of a simple task you are given to solve.
The problem with many descriptions of design patterns as they are expressed in the "abstract" is that
they are using English words which are images, but it's very hard to work out how to interpret them.
And yet I get the impression that their authors think that they are being perfectly clear.

So you need a good strategy to understand the concept. A key element is patience, just keep on reading.
I had started but not finished the head-first design patterns book and then went on to read the Wikipedia
articles on individual patterns. It turned out, it seemed that the best strategy for me was to look at the code samples in Java, surmise what was trying to be accomplished and then go back to the "abstract definition".

And then it seems that it's so much easier than what it seemed to be.

Comfortable/Unconfortable concepts

Let's suppose we try to define a concept in mathematics like this:
A set of integers is Moustierian if it contains the integers 6823807439 and 523098064.
I just made this up using random numbers of course, but I would be hiding this from my listener.

In a way it is a trivial but the person that is given this concept will not feel that this is a comfortable concept because he/she will be wondering where on earth did I get those numbers from?
And where did I get that strange name?
So there will be a number of hanging questions, which are like weights attached.

Did I mislabel this blog?

I have let this blog alone for quite a while, but I often think about the subject.
It seems to me that the title of the blog could have been better adapted to the contents that I have put in and will probably put in, namely it's about understanding technical subjects like computing, mathematics, physics and chemistry rather than understanding say the  Chinese philosophy of the 13th century or understanding French philosophers after World War 2. There are common features of course to all subject but I'm not competent enough to discuss these much.
But while I'm on the subject let me mention the shock I had when I came to France, picked up a book by Gilles Deleuze and tried to understand what he was saying. Being used to discussion from English analytical philosophers I was very put off by the French philosopher's style. Lots of anglophones would agree, coming from a world where they had read someone like say Nozick.

If I wanted to read such a French philosopher I would need a strategy, adapted to someone from my culture.
I would have to have been told how the French typically organise their discourse, which is often different to what anglos are used to. And there are the individual words of course, but that is not sufficient.

Epi-understanding

Introspection tells me that when I try to understand a concept I often have parasitic images that come along that need to be recognised and that can make it more or less easy to understand the concept. In any case they can get in the way, but images can also help.

Let me give an example: the mathematical notion of function is often explained as a set of ordered couples.

If you are told this then you might begin visualising backets and commas that live in some kind of space, and this is somewhat unfortunate. Someone else might imagine a mathematical function as a kind of little engine that takes inputs and produces outputs with a little bit of noise like all engines do. Both views are somewhat incompatible superficially. I do recall a logician called Borthwick who told me back in 1978 that he could never imagine a function as being a set of ordered couples.

One of the problems with the notion of sets is that it's relatively easy to picture a finite set, but hugely difficult to imagine giant sets (infinite or not). These unwanted pictures can lead us down the wrong road and sometimes we arent fully aware of the influence they have on us. 

I suspect that this unwanted interference occurs more when you are beginning on a field.

I'm not sure the term epi-understanding is the best I could do with, so please suggest something else.

A related and similar term seems to be "connotation". 

Different kinds of understanding

The word understanding is used in several ways. Here are some, please tell me if you have others.

You can understand a whole subject.
You can understand an utterance (in its context).someone just made.
You can understand a sentence in a book.
You can understand someone's behaviour.

I guess I should edit this occasionally.

misunderstandings due to prejudice

I'm not sure that prejudice is quite the right term here. What I mean is an idea that you have before
you are told about something and that you think applies to that something without justification.
It then creates havoc, especially if you are not aware that this "assumption" is being made unwanted.

You might be making this mistake because you mistakenly think the person trying to explain something to you is really trying to explain something else.

This kind of mistake occurs quite frequently in older people with so much experience, they think they have seen it all and dont listen carefully to what is being said.