Two years ago I started writing a post about how to learn from others (I never finished it). The premise was similar to this idea, that just hearing some lesson or advice isn’t enough to learn it. Instead, to integrate such lessons you should ask what experience the person who conveyed the lesson learned it from, and try to replicate it yourself. And if you’re the person giving advice, don’t just give the advice, but give a way to learn it.
For example a good piece of advice in hand to hand combat is to keep your head back (many people lean forward with it). But just hearing that wouldn’t help a fighter much. Here’s how you can learn it, and how I, in fact, learned it: do a hands-only spar. it makes the position of your head much more significant, and if you pay attention you’ll see that when your head is back it gets hit much less, and it’s easier for you to get a hit on your opponent without risking getting hit yourself as much.
I think our brains are wired to learn from experience. It’s not that we can’t learn from words, but it’s narrow and insufficient. it’s like we never fully trust words, or fully propagate them, or something like that. But experience is a richer format which is more significantly imprinted in our brains.
Also this is the reason stories are useful, including fiction. As Eliezer said: “nonfiction conveys knowledge. Fiction conveys experience”. And there might be things you can only learn from extreme experience, and not substitute experience, but that stories can still give you a glimpse into.
Two years ago I started writing a post about how to learn from others (I never finished it). The premise was similar to this idea, that just hearing some lesson or advice isn’t enough to learn it. Instead, to integrate such lessons you should ask what experience the person who conveyed the lesson learned it from, and try to replicate it yourself. And if you’re the person giving advice, don’t just give the advice, but give a way to learn it.
For example a good piece of advice in hand to hand combat is to keep your head back (many people lean forward with it). But just hearing that wouldn’t help a fighter much. Here’s how you can learn it, and how I, in fact, learned it: do a hands-only spar. it makes the position of your head much more significant, and if you pay attention you’ll see that when your head is back it gets hit much less, and it’s easier for you to get a hit on your opponent without risking getting hit yourself as much.
I think our brains are wired to learn from experience. It’s not that we can’t learn from words, but it’s narrow and insufficient. it’s like we never fully trust words, or fully propagate them, or something like that. But experience is a richer format which is more significantly imprinted in our brains.
Also this is the reason stories are useful, including fiction. As Eliezer said: “nonfiction conveys knowledge. Fiction conveys experience”. And there might be things you can only learn from extreme experience, and not substitute experience, but that stories can still give you a glimpse into.