Previous experience isn't manual edge cases, it's training data. Humans have incredible scale (100 trillion synapses): we're incredibly good at generalizing, e.g., how to pick up objects we've never seen before or understanding new social situations.
If you want to learn how to play chess, understanding the basic principles of the game is far more effective than trying to memorize every time you make an opening mistake. You surely need some amount of rote knowledge, but learning how to appraise new chess positions scales much, much better than trying to learn an astronomically small fraction of chess positions by heart.
If you want to learn how to play chess, understanding the basic principles of the game is far more effective than trying to memorize every time you make an opening mistake. You surely need some amount of rote knowledge, but learning how to appraise new chess positions scales much, much better than trying to learn an astronomically small fraction of chess positions by heart.