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by deltasquare4 1059 days ago
I'd say knowledge is not the only thing you need. It's one thing to know, and entirely another thing to be able to recall and apply that knowledge when it matters.

The application of knowledge gets trickier because there is almost always no "right answer". Everything is a decision, a choice. There may even be conflicting but contextually correct ways to process the same decision - i.e. Early bird gets the worm vs second mouse gets the cheese.

2 comments

Yes, absolutely. That's what I wanted to imply with training.

One thing is knowledge. Other thing is to get that knowledge transferred into, f.e. movement for use of a machine.

Like a real example, the Chinese. They're developing such a phenomenal ability to visually memorize things since their childhood on. As students, whole books are memorized. But ask them to utilize that knowledge, they just can't. They haven't learned how to utilize knowledge practically, in contrast to the western worlds approach to school. But we here have a bad visual memorization.

So you take a Chinese Teen, who finished the college purely the Chinese way and put him in one of western world's universities. You'll get an absolute killer.

Gaining knowledge the western way, memorize in Chinese visual way.

The decision you talking about needs to be done in every situation of a daily life. The quality of decision depends on the knowledge. The knowledge by itself needs to be broad. You need to be able to access each part of the broad knowledge individually and bring everything in relation. That's only can be done with training. And the use case defines the knowledge needed

"Do I buy a desktop PC or a very expensive laptop?" vs. "Should I buy Rheinmetall stock for profit or real estate" vs. "The law passed last week is damaging my core business. Pivot? Where to?"

In HN context, a more suitable example is "fail fast" vs "persevere". Both are sound advices in the right context.