> It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone.
Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player.
However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing.
But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.
Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player.
However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing.
But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.