You don't need the whole iceberg

Whatever you want to learn is the tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline is everything it rests on, and anyone who explains it has to decide how much of that to bring up.

A tutorial decides once, for all of it

Tutorials tend to settle that decision in one of two ways. Some stay broad. They cover the whole subject at an even pace, which helps you get your bearings, but the specific point you came for gets a sentence before the tutorial moves on to the next topic.

Others go all the way down. They start at the bottom and define each term before using it, so nothing is left unexplained. If you wanted one simple thing, it arrives after a long run of jargon, each term introduced because the next one depends on it.

Often you want a mix. You want depth on the part you care about and a broad pass over the rest, enough to see how it connects without studying each piece. There may be a part you already know and would rather skip. A tutorial comes at one depth, and it applies that depth to every part.

The author picks the depth before you arrive

The single depth comes with the format. A tutorial is written once and read by many people, so its author has to choose a starting point and a depth before any of those readers show up. The reasonable choice is an imagined typical reader with some background and a general interest in the subject, and a good tutorial serves that reader well.

Your need has a different shape. It's uneven, and it comes from the question you brought and what you already know, neither of which the author can see. Two people can open the same page and need opposite things from one section: explanation that helps a newcomer can get in the way of someone who already has the background.¹ So a fixed depth is wrong somewhere for almost every reader, thin where you needed depth and heavy where you didn't.

Skimming looks like a way around the heavy parts, but it assumes you can tell what to skip. On an unfamiliar subject you usually can't. A term that looks like decoration may be the one the rest of the explanation depends on, and you find that out only once you understand it. Skimming also works in one direction: it can remove material, but it can't add depth where the tutorial ran thin.

Each of these problems comes down to timing: the depth is fixed before the author knows who's reading. The person who can set it well is the one asking, at the moment they ask.

Set the depth when you ask

Sophia is an app that builds private courses around what you want to learn, and how deep the course goes is part of what you ask for.

You can ask for an overview of a subject, or for a course that goes in depth from first principles. Either one holds its depth from start to finish, which suits a need that runs evenly across the subject.

If your need is uneven, and you want to go further into some parts than others, you can ask Sophia to build a custom course around it. The course can go deep on the part you care about, stay broad on the rest, and leave out what you already know.

Asking for that takes two things: your question and a sense of what you already know. You have both before you start, even on a subject whose jargon you can't yet sort, and they're the two things the tutorial's author couldn't see.

You get the tip of the iceberg, and the part of the ice under your question. The rest can stay underwater.

Sophia is coming to the App Store, iOS first. Join the waitlist for an email at launch.

Footnotes

1. Slava Kalyuga, Paul Ayres, Paul Chandler and John Sweller, "The Expertise Reversal Effect", Educational Psychologist 38(1), 2003. A review of instructional experiments, such as trainees studying electrical circuit diagrams with and without built-in explanations. The effect concerns guidance within specific materials, measured by test performance and reported mental effort, not tutorials in general. ↩