One major risk involved in learning is to your self-esteem: feeling ridiculous when you make a mistake, feeling frustrated when you can’t get an exercise right for hours of trying, and so on.
As you note, in physical aptitudes there is a non-trivial risk of injury.
There is the risk, too, of wasting a lot of time on something you’ll turn out not to be good at.
Perhaps these things seem “safe” to you, but that’s what makes you a learner, in contrast with large numbers of people who can’t be bothered to learn anything new once they’re out of school and in a job. They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
One major risk involved in learning is to your self-esteem: feeling ridiculous when you make a mistake, feeling frustrated when you can’t get an exercise right for hours of trying, and so on.
I would say that the problem then is with the individual, not with learning. Those feelings reset on false beliefs that no-one is born with. Those who acquire them learn them from unfortunate experiences. Others chance to have more fortunate experiences and learn different attitudes. And some manage in adulthood to expose their false beliefs to the light of day, clearly perceive their falsity, and stop believing them.
They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
I doubt people are consciously making this decision, but rather they aren’t calculating the potential rewards as opposed to potential risks well. A risk that is in the far future is often taken less seriously than a small risk now.
People who buy insurance are demonstrating ability to trade off small risks now against bigger risks in the future, but often the same people invest less in keeping their professional skills current than they do in insurance.
Personal experience tells me that I had (and still have) a bunch of Ugh fields related to learning, which suggest that there are actual negative consequences of engaging in the activity (per the theory of Ugh fields).
My hunch is that the perceived risks of learning accounts in a significant part for why people don’t invest in learning, compared to the low perceived reward of learning. I could well be wrong. How could we go about testing this hypothesis?
One major risk involved in learning is to your self-esteem: feeling ridiculous when you make a mistake, feeling frustrated when you can’t get an exercise right for hours of trying, and so on.
As you note, in physical aptitudes there is a non-trivial risk of injury.
There is the risk, too, of wasting a lot of time on something you’ll turn out not to be good at.
Perhaps these things seem “safe” to you, but that’s what makes you a learner, in contrast with large numbers of people who can’t be bothered to learn anything new once they’re out of school and in a job. They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
I would say that the problem then is with the individual, not with learning. Those feelings reset on false beliefs that no-one is born with. Those who acquire them learn them from unfortunate experiences. Others chance to have more fortunate experiences and learn different attitudes. And some manage in adulthood to expose their false beliefs to the light of day, clearly perceive their falsity, and stop believing them.
Thus it is said, “The things that we learn prevent us from learning.”
I doubt people are consciously making this decision, but rather they aren’t calculating the potential rewards as opposed to potential risks well. A risk that is in the far future is often taken less seriously than a small risk now.
People who buy insurance are demonstrating ability to trade off small risks now against bigger risks in the future, but often the same people invest less in keeping their professional skills current than they do in insurance.
Personal experience tells me that I had (and still have) a bunch of Ugh fields related to learning, which suggest that there are actual negative consequences of engaging in the activity (per the theory of Ugh fields).
My hunch is that the perceived risks of learning accounts in a significant part for why people don’t invest in learning, compared to the low perceived reward of learning. I could well be wrong. How could we go about testing this hypothesis?
I’m not sure. It may require a more precise statement to make it testable.