I never see any NFL games, and only an occasional highlight clip, yet I can easily talk knowledgeably at just about any level about what is going on. I have little idea what the players look like - it's just the world of words. I play three leagues of fantasy football and listen to podcasts about drafting them for two weeks this time of year. And I know enough to jump in all season.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb wrote about the "green lumber fallacy," and a person who made a fortune trading in green lumber without ever realising that this meant freshly cut, not dyed or painted green. EB White wrote in the 1950s about a Manhattan executive who traded in sheep and ovine* products without ever having seen one in the flesh. White was relating this to the trouble he was having with a particular sheep that week.
Yet that problem flows in both directions. You can be a local historian who knows a great deal about its regiment who went to the Civil War but be badly misinformed about the conflict in general. Hell, you could have been in the war and know a lot about it at a ground level without knowing the big picture. You can coach peewee football and know things about the game I don't but be a fool in discussing professional football.
I mentioned this to my brother who does not follow statistics or news stories much at all. He likes watching women's pro soccer and women's college basketball, but doesn't read much about them.
Hey, that connects to the article I just read about learning by reading vs learning by listening. I throw that in as an extra here.
2 comments:
FWIW, in a number of the math courses I took (not all), I found I could understand the material better from the lecture than from the reading. (Nothing beat working out the details yourself, though.) I'm not sure how that fits into his model.
Interesting! It reminds me that in work-related trainings there were people who learned best from discussion - a type of verbal interaction not distinguished from listening in the article. Others very much needed hands-on. In math, a lecturer would often do both voice and reading, putting up diagrams or equations as he went along. Writing or drawing as one goes mimics writing it yourself and I think is superior to giving the equation or diagram whole and/or in advance.
When we would switch to new software on the computer, both reading and listening were frustrating. The instructor would want to give the history of how and why the new system was developed and what they were trying to accomplish in the design, which was useless info. The manual to be read was concerned with making sure they had documented every possibility. Only once did they let me teach it to the newcomers my own way, as a makeup for the six people who had missed the first training. It went beautifully, and feelings were hurt. I sat them each at a station and said "this is how you sign in...if this is for an admission, go to the dropdown on the left...let's just do that first...the top three choices are what you are going to use 95% of the time..."
Adult Sunday School, Bible study, or small groups at church are often discussion. That may be trial and error knowledge of how to do this the best way. Yet I am increasingly unsatisfied with that.
Yeah, the article doesn't really cover the waterfront, does it?
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