Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Your first explanation, “People don’t actually learn muchthat can be abstracted from their life details,” actually looks pretty good,especially when we add that people may have great difficulty expressing inwords what little they *have* learned. People’s experiences certainly modify their behavioral tendencies, but manyof these modifications will be appropriate only to their particularcircumstances and thus will have no *general* value.  And—my added point--producing an abstract descriptionof one’s own “learning” (= behavioral modification) may be beyond the capacityof almost everyone.

Expand full comment
Silas Barta's avatar

The main things that people learn from life, rather than from being told are reading, aren't stored in verbal form.  As a result, people generally don't think that they can be represented with words.  ...Robin, Katja, I'd be happy to discuss this in more detail by email or phone, as I think it's a really important and interesting question.  *head-tilt?* 

Expand full comment
52 more comments...

No posts