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by gnaritas 3804 days ago
Nuance. Words are not sufficient to convey all things; some things take practice, not knowledge. You cannot learn to play a guitar merely by reading everything there is to know about playing music on a guitar and humans are far more complex than guitars.
1 comments

But the guitar (or driving, or typing, or ...) practice isn't nuance so much as moving things from (slow) conscious thought to (fast) unconscious processing.

The practice isn't about acquiring information, so much as it's about moving that information to a different internal subsystem.

It is about acquiring information, in the right place, the muscles that can actually handle all the nuance that's too much to think about and do correctly in real-time; people and culture are the same, no amount of reading will make you behave like a native, only time can do that and thus to the point of the thread, you can't learn it until you encounter it and practice a while. Intellectually thinking you know something isn't the same as actually knowing something that takes more than brains. What you know before practicing is wrong; practice is the actual learning and letting go of all the wrong stuff you knew.

At the root of this, you think all knowledge can be encoded in words and shared, and that's the problem, it isn't true. Many things cannot be shared via words, only experienced.