We Don’t Learn By Knowing — A Terrible Blog Post #13

Chris Dwan
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

I am beginning to wonder about myself. Is this relentless curiosity about everything and seeking to understand it healthy? I mean just this morning as I was going through my morning routine, I was thinking about what my next blog post would be in the background. Between last night and this morning, no less than four compelling new ideas passed by my consciousness. I feel a little bit like a bee flitting from flower to flower sniffing the sweet nectar.

Wim Hof is coming to Vancouver. If you don’t know about who he is, Dear Reader, then I will forgive you for abandoning my post and going to find out. He’s a super interesting guy and I’ve benefited greatly from learning some of the things that he teaches about. Make sure you come back though. Having only one reader is a precarious position to be in. Which reminds me, you haven’t commented on my terrible posts. How are they going to get better if you don’t comment?

Are you back from your deep dive into Wim? Great. You’re wondering why I mentioned him at all. It’s because I asked a friend if he wanted to go with me to see Wim. His reply was that there wasn’t any need to go see him because we already have a good grasp of the basics of his teachings. It’s true. From a practical standpoint we can read about the techniques and watch videos and try things for ourselves and learn a lot. Something is missing though. Something doesn’t seem quite like the full picture with this idea that we won’t get anything from going to see him.

I think it comes down to a deeper principle. I guess that’s why I feel like I’m a bee bounding between blossoms. I am always trying to extend my understanding to deeper principles that are valuable across domains. Everywhere I look there’s phenomena that can be used as a starting off point to dive down to deeper principles, and the world is just too full of opportunities to try to understand everything…

The deeper principle that I see is that we think we’re creatures that learn by knowing, but it’s not true at all. It’s a complete lie. If it were true, then I would be able to pick up a textbook about how to play piano, read it from end to end and give a world class performance. It’s obviously false, but somehow we have some tendencies to behave like it’s true. “Oh I know about that already” Ok, you know about it, but did you learn it? What does ‘knowing’ even mean?

This is a big can of worms and I don’t think I have an appetite to eat a whole can of worms today. Perhaps I can pick one or two to swallow before I run out of time to write this terrible blog post.

Big fat juicy worm number one: stories. What’s up with stories? If you do some searching around the internet about the power of stories, you’ll find a bunch of experts who make an entire career about teaching the value of stories and how to tell stories. What’s up with a story, and how does it relate to the fact that we don’t learn by knowing?

As much as I want to make sure this blog post stays terrible, I will offer a caveat here, I’m just going to start throwing out ideas, possible reasons for these things. Got it? Ok let’s go! If we don’t learn by knowing, what do we learn from? Experience! What is a story except a pre-packaged experience. Pop it in the microwave, and voila a whole meal. Our brains are optimized to unpack these stories, visualize them and we get much of the value of someone else’s experiences. We can re-live that person’s story in our head as if it were our own story and actually pick up new skills. It’s almost like the matrix where Neo got some new badass skills downloaded into his brainal cortext thingy.

I admit that I didn’t fully chew that worm and swallow it, I’ll leave the rest of that to you. Let’s move on to the next juicy worm. If we don’t learn by knowing something, and we learn by doing and experiencing, then what role does knowing play in all of that? Perhaps a big part of knowing is really just that bits of knowledge are signposts for experience. Once you know about the new rock climbing gym down the street, you’ll probably forget about it unless you use it as a signpost to go experience it by driving by or checking it out, or just writing something down in a planner “go check out new climbing gym.” See the pattern? Knowledge led to action, action to experience, experience to learning.

Times up so let’s go back to Wim Hof. There’s another worm here that I didn’t munch on, and that’s presence. Being in the presence of a person is a particularly powerful kind of experience. Video can fool us into thinking that we’re getting that experience, but it’s still a shadow of the real thing. I think that despite the fact that I know a number of things about Wim’s methods and have tried them, I will probably have a powerful experience if I go to see him in person. There’s probably a whole dimension of learning that I’ll miss out on if I pass up the opportunity to go see him in person. We don’t learn by knowing, we learn by experiencing.

Now go finish your worms, Dear Reader.

“selective focus photo of brown and white bird on brown grass” by AussieActive on Unsplash

Doing all the Software Development Things for 20 years

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