#experience-and-learning — Public Fediverse posts

The corrections

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t.

~ Pete Seeger

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Learn something

No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.

~ David Eddings

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Watch, quietly

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.

~ T.H. White

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In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

~ Eric Hoffer

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https://constantine.name/2023/10/19/learners/

#Quotes #EricHoffer #ExperienceAndLearning #7ForSunday

Tough acts!

How I assemble 7 for Sunday varies. This week, I had the three quotes selected, and three of the other pieces chosen and written… and I was left staring at this spot between a quote from Asimov and a quote from Kelly; Tough acts to follow or precede. I racked my brains over this. I felt I should be able to find a joke a la Asimov, which also illuminated a shortcoming of my own… this is the best I could come up with:

Four years ago, when I left for college, I thought my father was the dumbest ape to ever walk the planet. Upon my return I couldn’t believe how much he’d learned!

Why slow learning? We live in an age of information overload, ever-accelerating technologies, and split-second learning. Citizens, learners, and workers today are required to continuously reskill, upskill, and newskill to keep up with this new pace. 

~ Tom Hodgkinson et al from, Slow learning | ITCILO

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Granted, the joke is weak. As a consolation prize, I’ve included that wonderful project for your consideration.

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The illiterate of the 21st centruy will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

~ Alvin Toffler

#alvin-toffler #quotes #experience-and-learning #7-for-sunday

https://constantine.name/2023/07/29/illiteracy/

Irrelevant in all circumstances

I waffled on my title. I started a draft with the current title, which is simply item #7 plucked from Housel’s post. Later, I misread it as “Irreverant…” and, even after noticing my speling error, still thought myself clever; “Haha, yes, I am irreverant in all circumstances.” Which my mind then toggled back to “irrelevant” and, “Yes, I am probably also irrelevant in all circumstances.” Ouch.

The firehose makes it easy to mirror the poor Oxford boy: since information is free and ubiquitous but adding context has a mental price, the path of least resistance is to know facts without a clue where they go or whether they’re useful.

~ Morgan Housel, from Different Kinds of Information

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And no, it’s not at all a diss on [a]social media. It’s a terrific little post listing different kinds of information. I’d love to be a source of a large amount of #2 and #4. But if I’m being honest, I’m more a source of #5. …and #7, I definitely generate a lot of that. Maybe even some of #8—but only in the, “oh my gawd, no! Spit that out!” sort of way.

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Think more

Read less, study less, but think more. Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which you really need and which you really want to know.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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Think more

Read less, study less, but think more. Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which you really need and which you really want to know.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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Failure

Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.

~ Francis Ford Coppola

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Knowledge

The title “scholar” suggests that a person has gone to school, and that he studied, but it does not mean that he has acquired any truly important knowledge.

~ George Lichtenberg

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Scorn and censure

He that cometh to seek after knowledge with a mind to scorn and censure shall be sure to find matter for his humor, but none for his instruction.

~ Francis Bacon

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Learning

I’ve always treated the world as my classroom, soaking up lessons and stories to fuel my path forward. I hope you do the same. The worst thing you can ever do is think that you know enough. Never stop learning. Ever.

~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

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Problems

Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; Indeed they create our courage and wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

~ Scott Peck

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Side quests

I [generally] hate the Internet. I wanted to start this post with a reference to a little children’s TV skit I saw many (many) moons ago, on Sesame Street or maybe it was the Muppets… about a guy named Henry with a bucket with a hole who tried to fix it based on another character’s—named Liza—ministrations, but which eventually lead him to need the hole-y, original bucket to haul water to complete the bucket-repair process. If you’re not yet grabbing your head, try reading: “There a hole in my bucket. Dear Liza. Dear Liza.” Fortunately, Wikipedia, and a pile of YouTube clips I managed to not watch, have me covered. Long live the Internet!

“Holey-bucket-fixing” is a long chain of tasks which turn out to be circularly dependent. Obviously, I don’t realize it’s holey-bucket-fixing at the start of the side quest. I start off on some simple problem. To do A, I need B. To do B, I need C. To do C, I need… A? Where’s the Tylenol?!

But sometimes, I start off on some simple problem and it goes very well. As in . . .

Your merry band enters the dimly lit inn, glad to find shelter from the stormy night. The rogue among you sticks to the shadows to the left, the dwarf angles right, (in both senses of the word,) towards the bar, and the elf-archer, with the balance of the band in tow, strides for a long table against the doorless, far wall. The dwarf orders the first round of whatever-it-is-they-serve-around-these-parts, and the bartender strikes up a conversation. “Haven’t seen you folks around before. You look like you might be up for an adventure.” If you want to go on an adventure, turn to page 42. If you just want this idiot to shut up so you can drink your whatever-it-is-they-serve-around-these-parts in peace, continue reading.

And so, with a hole in my bucket, or a simple question in mind, or—challenge-loving dwarf-at-the-bar that I play so well—just too curious for my own good… I almost always turn to page 42.

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Lifelong learning

Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.

~ Shane Parrish

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Lifelong learning

Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.

~ Shane Parrish

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That quote from, https://fs.blog/2015/11/lifelong-learning/ , is one of the too-rare times when, upon reading something, I want to leap to my feet knocking my chair over behind me while shouting, “Hear! Hear!”

It’s true that there is some learning which I prefer to observe, rather than directly experience. In such cases “conceptual” learning, rather than experiential learning, is just fine by me. (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtF0UlznC8 )

In general however, ain’t nothing finer than reading something, making a new connection, writing a blog post about that… or spending weeks figuring out how to bend some javascript-DOM-AJAX thing to do what I want… digging in the innards of an automobile to make a new stereo-unit work… digesting some tome from the anti-library… running a year-plus experiment just to see what happens… just generally being all like, “I’m wondering . . .” And then find out where that curiosity leads.

What’ve you been up to in the learning department lately?

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