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by lsinger 2339 days ago
It’s a relatively known piece of “wisdom” from storytelling:

“The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.” [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jacqueline_woodson_882873]

You can repeat a generalization over and over again. It sounds right — but it doesn’t stick. You can’t translate it into your own practice. You learn the words, but not the intuition.

Telling concrete stories helps us learn the intuition, too.

1 comments

This really reminds me of the concept of elaborative encoding whereas we learn by connecting facts with preexisting knowledge [0]. Abstract things do not stick because we have less touch points to connect them with. The Baker Baker paradox for instance describes the fact that we are much more likely to remember that a person is a baker than the more abstract fact that his name is Baker [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaborative_encoding

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/20100...