Now, after seeing my learning style, the typical reaction was that I should stop doing that, because my dancing style will be ugly and “robotic”, and my partners will feel uncomfotable.
Now, that’s about the only possible way to learn to play anything non-trivial on instruments such as the guitar; therefore, these people
believe that all guitar music is ugly and robotic, or
have no idea of how people learn to play, or
are confused and/or talking through their asses (e.g. some part of them deep down is saying ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’)
(not necessarily with probabilities within an order of magnitude of each other).
I completely agree with you (which is why I persisted in my learning style). From my experience it seems to me many people are confused like this.
Possible explanation: We learn some things by copying or early in childhood, and we learn some other things explicitly. I guess this makes many people think that skills are divided to “explicitly teachable” and “explicitly unteachable”, using some heuristics, such as: “if it is usually learned at school, it is teachable”, “if I tried to learn it and failed, it is unteachable”, “it is teachable only if I perfectly understand how it works”, etc.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills. Similarly to attribution fallacy, if we see someone good at doing X, it is easier to assume that it is a part of their nature, not a learned skill. (And those people may support us in this opinion, for example because it discourages the competition.) Seems to me this is pretty frequent in art. Also, sometimes the idea of “unteachable skill” is a good excuse for not learning and doing something.
Even those people who learned e.g. playing guitar may not propagate the idea automatically to other aspects of their lives.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills.
Sometimes people don’t see how they themselves learned something. When you ask them, they confabulate empty phrases like “it’s a knack”, or “eventually you just get it”, or the like. They generally suck at explaining. So, ignore them and move on.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills.
I was assuming that those people had themselves learned to dance at some point, so unless it was a very long time ago and/or they suck at introspection they knew how they did it. If you were talking about people who didn’t themselves know how to dance, then replace ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’ with ‘I’m jealous those people can dance and I can’t, but I can’t be bothered to learn it myself, so in order to put them down I’ll tell them that their grapes are sour’.
Maybe there are two learning styles—copying and explicit—each of them having their set of advantages and disadvantages. (Perhaps an analogy to System 1 and System 2.)
Learning by copying is faster and it does not require cooperation from the person you copy. On the other hand, copying is imperfect, and you cannot copy what you don’t see. Learning explicitly is slower and requires a good explanation; which requires a good introspection from the person who explains.
So maybe this is an instance of “the last will be first”. -- People who are good at learning by copying, use learning by copying as their favorite learning style. People who are bad at learning by copying can compensate by focusing on explicit learning.
Under these assumptions, the “copying” people have a fast start, because many activities are simple and can be learned by copying. Then when it comes to more complex activities, they usually continue copying, get some mediocre results, and stop there. And even there, they probably get those mediocre results faster than an “explicit” person. -- They really believe that learning by copying is superior, because this is what worked for them. Learning explicitly is just a strange ritual done at school; and I suspect that even there they try to copy the teachers.
On the other hand, “explicit” people learn slowly and are completely dependent on good learning materials. Sometimes the good materials are available, and allow them to reach mastery in complex things. The whole school system is designed for this. Sometimes the materials are unavailable or misleading (e.g. because the topic is mindkilling), and they are lost. These are the “book smart” people. -- They believe in explicit learning, because this is what worked for them.
These are just extreme descriptions, I guess most people use learning by copying in some areas and explicit learning in other areas. They may have an explanation about which style is better in which situation. There are things that give advantage to one of those styles in a given area: how big inferential distances are there, how visible is the information, how good are available teaching materials. But better teaching materials can be made even in areas where learning by copying has the natural advantage. -- It’s just than in a given area, when most people are satisfied with what they learn by copying, developing techniques for explicit learning may seem unnecessary and “wrong”. This can be more complicated if saying that the copying does not work for you means advertising your low status, so the defense of explicit techniques itself becomes a low-status thing to do, and insisting that those techniques are completely unnecessary becomes a signal of good copying skills and high status.
Now, that’s about the only possible way to learn to play anything non-trivial on instruments such as the guitar; therefore, these people
believe that all guitar music is ugly and robotic, or
have no idea of how people learn to play, or
are confused and/or talking through their asses (e.g. some part of them deep down is saying ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’)
(not necessarily with probabilities within an order of magnitude of each other).
I completely agree with you (which is why I persisted in my learning style). From my experience it seems to me many people are confused like this.
Possible explanation: We learn some things by copying or early in childhood, and we learn some other things explicitly. I guess this makes many people think that skills are divided to “explicitly teachable” and “explicitly unteachable”, using some heuristics, such as: “if it is usually learned at school, it is teachable”, “if I tried to learn it and failed, it is unteachable”, “it is teachable only if I perfectly understand how it works”, etc.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills. Similarly to attribution fallacy, if we see someone good at doing X, it is easier to assume that it is a part of their nature, not a learned skill. (And those people may support us in this opinion, for example because it discourages the competition.) Seems to me this is pretty frequent in art. Also, sometimes the idea of “unteachable skill” is a good excuse for not learning and doing something.
Even those people who learned e.g. playing guitar may not propagate the idea automatically to other aspects of their lives.
Sometimes people don’t see how they themselves learned something. When you ask them, they confabulate empty phrases like “it’s a knack”, or “eventually you just get it”, or the like. They generally suck at explaining. So, ignore them and move on.
I was assuming that those people had themselves learned to dance at some point, so unless it was a very long time ago and/or they suck at introspection they knew how they did it. If you were talking about people who didn’t themselves know how to dance, then replace ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’ with ‘I’m jealous those people can dance and I can’t, but I can’t be bothered to learn it myself, so in order to put them down I’ll tell them that their grapes are sour’.
Maybe there are two learning styles—copying and explicit—each of them having their set of advantages and disadvantages. (Perhaps an analogy to System 1 and System 2.)
Learning by copying is faster and it does not require cooperation from the person you copy. On the other hand, copying is imperfect, and you cannot copy what you don’t see. Learning explicitly is slower and requires a good explanation; which requires a good introspection from the person who explains.
So maybe this is an instance of “the last will be first”. -- People who are good at learning by copying, use learning by copying as their favorite learning style. People who are bad at learning by copying can compensate by focusing on explicit learning.
Under these assumptions, the “copying” people have a fast start, because many activities are simple and can be learned by copying. Then when it comes to more complex activities, they usually continue copying, get some mediocre results, and stop there. And even there, they probably get those mediocre results faster than an “explicit” person. -- They really believe that learning by copying is superior, because this is what worked for them. Learning explicitly is just a strange ritual done at school; and I suspect that even there they try to copy the teachers.
On the other hand, “explicit” people learn slowly and are completely dependent on good learning materials. Sometimes the good materials are available, and allow them to reach mastery in complex things. The whole school system is designed for this. Sometimes the materials are unavailable or misleading (e.g. because the topic is mindkilling), and they are lost. These are the “book smart” people. -- They believe in explicit learning, because this is what worked for them.
These are just extreme descriptions, I guess most people use learning by copying in some areas and explicit learning in other areas. They may have an explanation about which style is better in which situation. There are things that give advantage to one of those styles in a given area: how big inferential distances are there, how visible is the information, how good are available teaching materials. But better teaching materials can be made even in areas where learning by copying has the natural advantage. -- It’s just than in a given area, when most people are satisfied with what they learn by copying, developing techniques for explicit learning may seem unnecessary and “wrong”. This can be more complicated if saying that the copying does not work for you means advertising your low status, so the defense of explicit techniques itself becomes a low-status thing to do, and insisting that those techniques are completely unnecessary becomes a signal of good copying skills and high status.