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."
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Replying to @paulg
Lewis Mumford offered this opinion: "Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler, as in the chamber of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial."
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @paulg
"It is the artist, however, the knower, the sayer, who realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them the richer."
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @paulg
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps @paulg
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps @paulg
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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The more access one has to it, and to those living masters who embody and promulgate it, the better. The less access one has to it, the more prone one is to grievous error.
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