I had a manager that once told me” Alidad I don’t understand why you need to know the theory of things before you do it. I’m an action man”.I told him, everyone have a theory of action, you just don’t explicitly know it and are allowing your autopilot to decide for you.
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The flip side is that work-as-imagined is always different (sometimes a little, sometimes very) from work-as-done, and true expertise (which in fairness “action man” managers tend to lack) comes from mastery of the latter—whether or not those experts can explain it!
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And often they can’t! They’ll fall back on the textbook descriptions when asked. It’s only by studying their work in situ that folks start to work out what the real principles are
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This is the tip of the iceberg of several whole fascinating fields of study:
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Actually, I have a different blog post about the phenomenon being discussed here: commoncog.com/blog/the-right
In a complex system, you can’t reason using the rules of the layer below. You have to reason using the rules of the emergent behaviour/layer above it.
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It’s the same reason I don’t find neuroscience super useful when evaluating learning theories, for instance — whereas cognitive science or psych is more useful since it’s a higher level of abstraction.
is right — you do not need to understand physics when sailing.
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The difference is in what “understanding” truly means.
I didn’t know p=mv but I did know that I needed mass and swiftness to chop firewood with my machete.
I’ll leave it at that.
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Then you should give advice at the level of “mass and swiftness”, not p=mv. You should also give advice as to the placement of firewood, the sharpness of the machete and how to test sharpness (or even a theory of sharpness), and what to watch out for when swinging.
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Yeah I think we’ve drifted far away from the point I was making.
It’s all good.
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😉
As further proof that reasoning at the right layer of abstraction matters: you should probably be aware that there is a LARGE body of replicated research showing that intuitive models of physics (built from real world action) tend to not match up with actual physics.
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You should ask yourself: how can these people be so effective at psychomotor action, but yet hold naive models of physics in their heads?
The answer: for most real world activities, you only need a crude understanding. The bottleneck for skill lies elsewhere.
It’s not just psychomotor action.
I get the perspective that if one doesn’t know the “laws” they don’t know subject.
I offer that’s a gross simplification. And I’ll leave it at that.
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Thanks for the engagement. I’ve reached my limit on this one.
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