The value of experience is as much what it takes out of your head as what it puts in. That's why it's hard to use books or lectures as a substitute for it. I wish someone had told me this when I was 20 and indignant that every job required "experience."
As Henri Poincare so perceptively noted, "Les faits ne parlent pas." One must construe experience. And because this task is so fraught with risk, one wants at one's fingertips a large body of successful and unsuccessful examples -- case studies of shrewdness and folly.
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Those who have participated intimately in highly consequential attempts to construe experience are living repositories of a particularly vivid sort of practical understanding of the pitfalls that lie in wait for the unwary. They've seen shrewdness and folly with the naked eye.
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Hence the continuing fascination and relevance of Thucydides and Tacitus, and of the culture they sired of scrupulous striving to eschew self-deception in the analysis of high-stakes past attempts to construe experience. This culture and its living repositories matter vastly.
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