jsgoddess started an IMHO thread asking about specific areas where an experience-based opinion trumps one formed by study alone. She wondered if it’s sometimes true that first-hand knowledge is more authentic and informed than a scholarly view.
It’s hard for me to imagine any area where that wouldn’t be true. How could someone who’s merely read about something know vastly more about it than someone who’s actually done it, seen it, lived through it?
jsgoddess mentioned history, an interesting choice with the 9/11 anniversary this week. My kids will never really understand what that was like.
A couple of people mentioned sex, that there’s no way to really understand it without experiencing it yourself.
Anything people DO, whether it’s a sport or an art, you have to DO it to really know about it. What’s it like to live somewhere else, in another environment, how could a person really understand that without doing it?
Some things are like “you don’t have to be kicked in the balls to know it hurts”.
The question being asked is extremely variable. There are things that I can read and perform equal to or better than a professional who has done the task a 100 times over, even without myself having the book knowledge or experience the professional has had, and it’s like deja vu, as if I’ve done it before. Then there are things where experience rules all. For the most part though, I believe experience is the better route for most things in understanding.
But you have to wonder about intuition though, it’s very real and sometimes acting or performing based on intution was like you knew it all along without any experience, including feelings of emotion that go with the experience before you ever experienced it. The brain is like a canvas in which parts of previous experiences unrelated to new experiences can be drawn together with previous emotions to create a combined experience with an expected emotion. With only minor changes it what you really feel after you have experienced what ever it was you experienced for the first time. I guess what I’m saying is that some things I have never experienced are no surprise to me when I do experience them. It’s quite odd. Then there are other things, like “oh, so this is what its about! I never would have predicted!”. It depends.
There are some really simple things you can do just by studying, especially now that the internet permits such detailed study of other places. Driving somewhere you’ve never been (at least in the US) is now a piece of cake. I know people who feel otherwise – who say that the map doesn’t give them a good “mental image” of where they’ll be driving – but I also know people who agree with me. It’s possible that the broad experience of driving in lots of places makes driving somewhere new easier and I just haven’t noticed it. I certainly wouldn’t give an eighteen-year-old the keys to my car and a map from here to Dayton and say “you can make it in eight hours if you try.”
Well, experiencing the true nature of quantum instability, or the density of dwarf stars is probably only of limited value in understanding the more arcane aspects of cosmological physics. I suppose it might be some use, but I can not for the life of me figure how it could be applied thereafter.
A physician who has Ebola would have a limited time during which to use the greater understanding of medicine, as well. I am not sure his greater depth of knowledge would convince me that a doctor with a communicable terminal disease is my best choice of personal physician.
Study is beneficial in a lot of ways that experience cannot even begin to touch. Getting lost at sea won’t help you understand Celestial Navigation. Starving to death is unhelpful in the understanding of nutrition.
here I feel I should explain further my thoughts :
emotions and knowledge are completely different things and what you’re basically asking is if we can understand emotions solely by reading a book, of course not
the “knowledge” you obtain when having sex or living a trauma (such as the 9/11) is related only to the emotions you feel, or more specifically : how you react in those situations
living them probably won’t help you understand what happened and why you felt the way you did - and that’s what real knowledge would provide
Papy, you’re right. I get it. Strictly factual knowledge doesn’t have a lot of meaning or utility for me, but that’s my personal bias and lifestyle. Thanks. I was having trouble seeing beyond my own perspective.
I could argue that, absent emotional knowledge, strictly empirical knowledge is pretty incomplete. But we’ve probably been down that path a few times before.
Yeah, Triskademus, I won’t argue that experience is always the preferred way of learning.
ParentalAdvisory, I’d be interested to read about some examples of things you can do as well as a pro, without study or experience.
scr4 - the (experienced) male gynecologist’s knowledge would have clearly have breadth and depth that a first-time mother (of any age) couldn’t begin to approach. But there are still things he’ll never truly know. Medicine is an interesting tangent, since there’s so much we can all learn about it these days thanks to the Internet (and it’s a good thing we can do our own research, given the extraordinary pressures on physicians’ time).
Jurph, that sounds like a whole new interesting topic. Personally I’ve had both good and bad experiences with maps, such that driving in a new town by intuition only has been sufficient at times. Good city layout sure beats a bad Mapquest !
Medicine is a good example of a field where “experience” can be a dangerous thing to fall back on.
This includes drugs and procedures that physicians “know” are effective - till they are tested in rigorous trials and found to be ineffective and/or hazardous.
And in the magical world of “alternative medicine”, devotees commonly dismiss knowledge in favor of experience, i.e. anecdote. You can explain to them (for instance) that no, using bloodroot salve is a bad idea for removing your own skin nodules and tumors, since it causes caustic burns and can’t be depended on to remove the entire tumor. What they’ll want to know is, did you try it personally, and if not, why should they believe you instead of an anonymous message board poster who says they used it themselves and it’s great? See, that poster has “experience” and all you’ve got is knowledge about its use, the biology of skin neoplasms and the damage this treatment has caused.
As to the OP, there are many technical jobs where the technician will do things in a certain way because that is “how it has always been done” without knowing exactly why. Someone with purely academic knowledge can sometimes (only sometimes though, experience trumps at other times) see a much better way of doing things because they understand the reason the job is being done and have enough knowledge to see a better way of doing it.
The best a results are usually from someone with both knowledge and experience, though the lack of experience itself can be helpful as you are not automatically thinking of the standard solution and are more likely to think of something entirely innovative.
Why would that be scary? Words are merely symbols. I’d like a cite for an example of facts alone being sufficient for understanding (of something significant).
Holdonaminute – there’s a WHOLE wide world between “facts alone don’t constitute understanding” and “no respect or interest in factual knowledge.” Sheesh.
It seems to me your definition of “understand” is “know what it’s like to experience it”. At least, I don’t see any other reason you’d reject the examples already provided.
It’s possible for a creative artist—a poet or a painter or a composer—to know less about their own composition—what it “means” or how it achieves its effects—than would an astute critic or interpreter who looks at their composition analytically.
How about the issue of racism (since there’s a good thread going on that right now) No matter what we read about it, or think we believe about it, we can’t KNOW what it’s like unless we personally experience it.
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