That's where humans suck. The classic "you're not doing it right" then proceeds to quickly show how to do it without verbalizing any info on learning process, pitfalls, failure modes, etc, as if just showing it was enough for themselves to learn. Most people do[n't do] that, not even a sign of reflection.
My worst case was with a guy who asked me to write an arbitrage betting bot. When I asked how to calculate coeffs, he pointed at two values and said "look, there <x>, there <y> thinks for a minute then it's <z>!". When I asked how exactly did he calculate it, he simply repeated with different numbers.
People often don't know how to verbalize them in the first place. Some of these topics are very complex, but our intuition gets us halfway there.
Once upon a time I was good at a video game. Everyone realized that positioning is extremely important in this game.
I have good positioning in that game and was asked many times to make a guide about positioning. I never did, because I don't really know how. There is too much information they you need to convey to cover all the various situations.
I think you would first have to come up with a framework on positioning to be able to really teach this to someone else. Some kind of base truths/patterns that you can then use to convey the meaning. I believe the same thing applies to a lot of these processes that aren't verbalized.
Often for this kind of problem writing a closed form solution is simply intractable. However, it's often still possible to express the cost function of at least a big portion of what goes into a human-optimal solution. From here you can sample your space, do gradient descent or whatever to find some acceptable solution that has a more human-intuitive property.
It's not necessarily that it's intractable - just that a thing can be very hard to describe, under some circumstances.
Imagine someone learning English has written "The experiment reached it's conclusion" and you have to correct their grammar. Almost any english speaker can correct "it's" to "its" but unless they (and the person they're correcting) know a bunch of terms like 'noun' and 'pronoun' and 'possessive' they'll have a very hard time explaining why.
They may not even know why and it may be okay -- they speak it somehow, right? In this case, the language is both a set or rules and a systematization of a pre-existing phenomenon. There's enough ephemeral, hard to explain concepts, but most humans just aren't used to explain it even to themselves.
For example, I've never learned English, anywhere. I know it from .txt and .ng documents and a couple of dictionaries I had back in the DOS days. I'm an uneducated text-native, basically. But here's what I'd say to that newbie:
- Usually we use "...'s" for attribution like in "human's cat = cat of a human". But "it" and other special words like "that", "there", etc are an exception. We write "it's" as short for "it is", sometimes "it has". But we write "its", "theirs" for attribution, like in "its paw" = "paw of it" ~~ "cat's paw" = "paw of a cat". There's more to this, but you can ignore it for now.
I wouldn't say this is where humans suck. On the contrary, this how we find human language is such a fantastic tool to serialize and deserialize human mental processes.
Language is so good, that an artificial language tool, without any understanding of these mental processes, can appear semi-intelligent to us.
A few people unable to do this serialization doesn't mean much on the larger scale. Just that their ideas and mental processes will be forgotten.
My worst case was with a guy who asked me to write an arbitrage betting bot. When I asked how to calculate coeffs, he pointed at two values and said "look, there <x>, there <y> thinks for a minute then it's <z>!". When I asked how exactly did he calculate it, he simply repeated with different numbers.