Comment by skybrian
15 hours ago
It seems overly pessimistic about education. Book learning isn't everything, but a physics textbook could be seen as the compression of centuries of experience.
15 hours ago
It seems overly pessimistic about education. Book learning isn't everything, but a physics textbook could be seen as the compression of centuries of experience.
Book learning to me seems like a compression of knowledge that had to be acquired through many years of experimentation and observation. But knowledge is not an experience itself.
Take juggling for example - something that was on HN homepage last week. You can learn everything you need to know about juggling though a post or a book or an educational video. But can you juggle after all that book learning? Not at all - to be able to juggle one has to spend time practicing and no amount of reading can help meaningfully compress that process.
Muscle memory required for juggling is not a 1:1 correlation to experience, but I feel like it's close enough to it.
Juggling is a nice example. Maybe one could phrase it as, you can learn how to learn to juggle from a book.