There always exist a tetchy tension between book-knowledge and experience-knowledge, and in many ways, this tension has gotten increasingly worse over the years.
The experience-knowledge proponents assert the claim that no book-knowledge will ever be sufficient, and that the only worthy knowledge is that of experience-knowledge. And because of that, proponents of this ideology who are also employers are more likely to want to hire people who have been in the field for years over someone who has freshly graduated from some institute of higher learning.
For those who are non-employers, it means that they cast shade on anything that they (or people that they know) personally did not experience. This is part of the reason why misinformation and disinformation are becoming endemic problems in the modern hyper-connected era---what constitutes as ``people that they know'' have been largely increased through the virtual communities, with people ascribing a closer relationship among strangers than they would normally do so in meat space only because they seem to be emotionally close over a very narrow range of domains.
I think this extreme is not right.
The other extreme is no better; academics and experts throwing shade at individual experiences, concluding that those experiences are nonsensical because they are not ``subjected to a rigorous scrutiny through well-defined methods''. That level of hubris contributes to the overall disconnect between the experts and the layperson. The implicit claim here is that the only valid/truthful knowledge is that of book-knowledge, and that experience-knowledge that is not codified into book-knowledge is not knowledge at all.
That extreme is not right either.
I like to see things from a different perspective. Experience-knowledge is the source of all types of human knowledge---it has existed before the invention of the written language and is a cornerstone of human civilisation. But experience-knowledge is not scalable, since it requires a ``direct transmission'' from one experience-knowledge holder to a neophyte. This method of transmission is thus highly limited by geographical and cultural boundaries.
Book-knowledge is the accumulation and summarisation of various types of experience-knowledge into a pithy form. It contains all that is necessary to bootstrap a neophyte into the right frame of mind that is learnt from experience-knowledge, but is not sufficient in that there are sufficient nuances that would benefit from an experience-knowledge holder. This aspect holds even for really abstract knowledge domains that deal purely with ideas, like mathematics or even philosophy---merely reading the book-knowledge is insufficient to develop a level of understanding that can be termed as intuitive, or embedded deeply enough that the reader of the book-knowledge has incorporated the book-knowledge into his/her experience-knowledge.
So I agree in part to the experience-knowledge proponents that book-knowledge is insufficient, but I disagree completely that the only worthy knowledge is that of experience-knowledge.
Another angle to look at this is to consider what type of knowledge is encoded in both book-knowledge and experience-knowledge.
Most times, for the sake of brevity, book-knowledge stores only positive examples, a technical term that simply states that ``only positive assertions are recorded''. Thus, on a book about cats (for example), we will see attributes that are present in cats recorded in this book, with the omission of attributes that are absent in cats---this is because the set of attributes that are related to that of a cat is supposedly finite compared to that of the set of attributes that are unrelated to that of a cat.
However, experience-knowledge does not have such a restriction. In many cases, I would say that experience-knowledge has the strong potential of storing more negative examples than positive ones. Continuing upon the ``book of cats'' analogy, the experience-knowledge will contain some attributes that are present in cats, but will also contain many attributes that are absent in cats.
To expand upon the employer analogy I brought up earlier, it means that, paradoxically, it is more important to determine the types of negative examples that the candidate possesses in his/her experience-knowledge instead of just the positive examples to determine his/her suitability. Of course, there is a bit more to that---it is necessary to determine the types of negative examples that the candidate's experience-knowledge contains, but it is also important to see what the candidate has learnt from that. Negative examples are useless unless one learns something of importance from it---a person who has experienced nothing but failures is as suspicious as one who has experienced nothing but successes. When one experiences all failures/successes, it is likely that he/she does not actually have a good diversification of experience-knowledge, which means that he/she is not as strong a candidate since he/she probably has little chance to learn the type of nuances that book-knowledge fail to capture. In other words, a person with experience-knowledge of either all failures or all successes is no different from one who has only book-knowledge.
So yes, while [good representation in] experience-knowledge makes one a superior specimen of a person, book-knowledge is a great way to bypass the scaling problem of learning by providing a good enough summary of good rules of thumb to bootstrap the reader. To claim that one type of knowledge is dominant over the other kind is the type of extreme rule of thumb that is nice because of the lack of a cognitive load, but is feckless.
That's all I have for today. Till the next update.
1 comment:
Well-said. Indeed, negative examples are much more likely found in experiential knowledge.
As to which is more important, that will depend strongly on the context. In pursuits that are mostly about execution, i.e. trading, music performing or acting, experience is of course more important. But in other contexts like math, where superior knowledge of classical theorems will triumph raw but unsophisticated problem-solving experience, book knowledge is still more important.
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