We learn many things over the space of our lives. With language, we can share such things with many others distant in space and time. With such a fantastic capacity, you might think we humans would hardly ever have to learn anything important directly for ourselves. But while we do learn many things from textbooks and mentors, we are surprisingly bad at teaching the most important life lessons. Like, for example, what its like to be married a long time, how to stay married, and when that is worth the trouble.
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.
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?*
You have made a very good point here, but I don't think it is cynical, in the bad way, to have the kindness and compassion to implicitly point out, as did whoever came up with reason number one, that people, sadly, don't learn or get taught except by the hard way (I guess I am more "cynical" than that because the hard way doesn't seem to me, in my fourth adult decade, to be such a good teacher either).Number one is consistent with - .. Advice, in terms of broad effects, is useless. Your biology, and the investment, or lack thereof, made in you by others for reasons beyond your control, are your destiny.... People don't learn much, and hence don't teach much - why? ...I guess because they can't ... why can't they? because he or she was insufficiently valued, either by the modernist and stochastic vectors of DNA, or by the sad-sack cast of characters that surrounded him or her from day one.as brideshead began, how doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people
Michel de Montaigne wrote an awesome autobiography in which he reveled in his ordinariness and was yet full of insight and perspective. Yes, his essays are a rare sort of book, but valuable exactly for this reason.
Quite right. There is no shortage of advice-attempts. However, unless we are facing a moment of vulnerability, we react to such attempts with rolling eyes. Why? Because we have our own agendas and aren't looking to have them superseded by someone else's. Even if we think the advice is good, we judge ourselves to be at a point in life where there's no room to implement it, or we tell ourselves that we're doing it already, or just about to, as soon as our schedule frees up a bit. In general, let's ask: How often is a person's life trajectory deflected by *advice*? Not many times.
Robin, you have a habit of missing the non cynical explanation.
11. One of the lessons you learn in life is that you can't learn life lessons from other people.
So many times I've learned some awesome thing and then recognized that people were trying to teach it to me, but it didn't transfer. It seems people can only learn the hard way. Maybe a defense mechanism against fake life-lessons? I don't know.
Why can't you learn to ride a bike from reading a book? Some faculties are unspeakable or unlearnable because the faculties' closely associated learning mechanisms are not wired up to the speaking / learning centers, possibly for safety against accidents (if you could verbalize muscle movements, and tried executing a move that someone else learned and taught to you, but something about the translation or the body shape was different, you might injure yourself).
It might also be unverbalizable simply because it's huge; the nuances of facial expressions seems like the sort of thing that cannot be spoken simply because it would be tediously long.
This would roughly be my guess - I could write about what I know and what I have learned, but almost no-one will read it, and those who read it won't see how to apply it, so why bother?
One problem is that "life lessons" contradict each other. Some advice says "Take action as early and as often as possible, because opportunities are fleeting". Other advice says that rushing to judgment and action will backfire. "A stitch in time saves nine" and "Haste make waste" are two proverbs with exactly opposite meanings, as are "A penny saved is a penny earned" and "You can't take it with you".
We learn a tremendous amount from our ancestors, passed on via culture. It is common to all surviving cultures and so we lose sight of it.
I'd say the things we don't learn we don't learn because they aren't yet known, at least we haven't distilled these things as objective truths.
It's important to stress that all individuals are different, and relationships are made of individuals and so all relationships are different too. If you read just a little bit about marriage advice you discover that everyone thinks they have learned different things from their experiences, with the overlap in lessons being things that you already knew, as part of what is passed on by culture. I think this is generally the case.
People do attempt to pass on what they have learned, when they think they have learned something universal, and people do pay attention, when they think there is something universal to be learned. But people have limited attention and it's very rare for anyone to learn anything new that is universal and so they are naturally, wisely hesitant and skeptical when it comes to trying to learn from individual accounts of elders.
I would say that people constantly give advice, usually in verbal form via stories, suggestions, warnings and so forth. Ignoring this is acting like a fish unaware of the water it swims in.
The problems are that people differ dramatically in goals, aptitude, situational context and so forth. As such the advice is often contradictory, and often either inappropriate or potentially so. There is of course also the problem of conflicting goals, and our need to worry that we are being manipulated by the advice giver for their own benefit, or at least for a goal which we do not share.
11) The people who have insights worth having, tend to realize that the greatest insights are better learned than taught. More importantly, experience convinces them that a hands-off approach leads to better results in the long-run (call it the "invisible hand" of wisdom), while an active attempt to meddle in the wisdom-acquisition process tends to be counterproductive.
If you're old, and if you have wisdom that's *actually* valuable, you usually have a very high degree of faith in the ability of that wisdom to propagate itself without your interference. If you're busy writing memoirs and trying to manipulate unsuitable youngsters into adopting your own personal definition of wisdom, you're signalling that you're not very confident that your "wisdom" can stand on its own.
Here's a boring hypothesis. Writing a great book of advice based on long experience is hard. Writing a great anything is hard, but if someone has a notable success, other people are likely to try to follow in that category.
Notable successes in new or neglected fields of writing are impossible to predict. If you'd asked whether there was likely to be anything as big as Harry Potter in the young adult genre the year before it got popular, I think the answer would have been no.
I suggest that a lot of what's going on with what's written and what isn't is chaotic.
Tentatively, I think you'd get more wisdom out of people (at least the clearer-headed people) if you asked them in a leisurely way about what they'd done and how their point of view changed over time, rather than asking them for advice.
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.
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?*
Make that conversation public somehow! I'm a bit spooked by how closely this resembles what I've been obsessing about over the past year.
You have made a very good point here, but I don't think it is cynical, in the bad way, to have the kindness and compassion to implicitly point out, as did whoever came up with reason number one, that people, sadly, don't learn or get taught except by the hard way (I guess I am more "cynical" than that because the hard way doesn't seem to me, in my fourth adult decade, to be such a good teacher either).Number one is consistent with - .. Advice, in terms of broad effects, is useless. Your biology, and the investment, or lack thereof, made in you by others for reasons beyond your control, are your destiny.... People don't learn much, and hence don't teach much - why? ...I guess because they can't ... why can't they? because he or she was insufficiently valued, either by the modernist and stochastic vectors of DNA, or by the sad-sack cast of characters that surrounded him or her from day one.as brideshead began, how doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people
Michel de Montaigne wrote an awesome autobiography in which he reveled in his ordinariness and was yet full of insight and perspective. Yes, his essays are a rare sort of book, but valuable exactly for this reason.
Quite right. There is no shortage of advice-attempts. However, unless we are facing a moment of vulnerability, we react to such attempts with rolling eyes. Why? Because we have our own agendas and aren't looking to have them superseded by someone else's. Even if we think the advice is good, we judge ourselves to be at a point in life where there's no room to implement it, or we tell ourselves that we're doing it already, or just about to, as soon as our schedule frees up a bit. In general, let's ask: How often is a person's life trajectory deflected by *advice*? Not many times.
Robin, you have a habit of missing the non cynical explanation.
11. One of the lessons you learn in life is that you can't learn life lessons from other people.
So many times I've learned some awesome thing and then recognized that people were trying to teach it to me, but it didn't transfer. It seems people can only learn the hard way. Maybe a defense mechanism against fake life-lessons? I don't know.
Not a comment on your content mattt6666 but you made me think of Baz Luhrmann:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...
Why can't you learn to ride a bike from reading a book? Some faculties are unspeakable or unlearnable because the faculties' closely associated learning mechanisms are not wired up to the speaking / learning centers, possibly for safety against accidents (if you could verbalize muscle movements, and tried executing a move that someone else learned and taught to you, but something about the translation or the body shape was different, you might injure yourself).
It might also be unverbalizable simply because it's huge; the nuances of facial expressions seems like the sort of thing that cannot be spoken simply because it would be tediously long.
This would roughly be my guess - I could write about what I know and what I have learned, but almost no-one will read it, and those who read it won't see how to apply it, so why bother?
One problem is that "life lessons" contradict each other. Some advice says "Take action as early and as often as possible, because opportunities are fleeting". Other advice says that rushing to judgment and action will backfire. "A stitch in time saves nine" and "Haste make waste" are two proverbs with exactly opposite meanings, as are "A penny saved is a penny earned" and "You can't take it with you".
We learn a tremendous amount from our ancestors, passed on via culture. It is common to all surviving cultures and so we lose sight of it.
I'd say the things we don't learn we don't learn because they aren't yet known, at least we haven't distilled these things as objective truths.
It's important to stress that all individuals are different, and relationships are made of individuals and so all relationships are different too. If you read just a little bit about marriage advice you discover that everyone thinks they have learned different things from their experiences, with the overlap in lessons being things that you already knew, as part of what is passed on by culture. I think this is generally the case.
People do attempt to pass on what they have learned, when they think they have learned something universal, and people do pay attention, when they think there is something universal to be learned. But people have limited attention and it's very rare for anyone to learn anything new that is universal and so they are naturally, wisely hesitant and skeptical when it comes to trying to learn from individual accounts of elders.
I would say that people constantly give advice, usually in verbal form via stories, suggestions, warnings and so forth. Ignoring this is acting like a fish unaware of the water it swims in.
The problems are that people differ dramatically in goals, aptitude, situational context and so forth. As such the advice is often contradictory, and often either inappropriate or potentially so. There is of course also the problem of conflicting goals, and our need to worry that we are being manipulated by the advice giver for their own benefit, or at least for a goal which we do not share.
11) The people who have insights worth having, tend to realize that the greatest insights are better learned than taught. More importantly, experience convinces them that a hands-off approach leads to better results in the long-run (call it the "invisible hand" of wisdom), while an active attempt to meddle in the wisdom-acquisition process tends to be counterproductive.
If you're old, and if you have wisdom that's *actually* valuable, you usually have a very high degree of faith in the ability of that wisdom to propagate itself without your interference. If you're busy writing memoirs and trying to manipulate unsuitable youngsters into adopting your own personal definition of wisdom, you're signalling that you're not very confident that your "wisdom" can stand on its own.
Here's a boring hypothesis. Writing a great book of advice based on long experience is hard. Writing a great anything is hard, but if someone has a notable success, other people are likely to try to follow in that category.
Notable successes in new or neglected fields of writing are impossible to predict. If you'd asked whether there was likely to be anything as big as Harry Potter in the young adult genre the year before it got popular, I think the answer would have been no.
I suggest that a lot of what's going on with what's written and what isn't is chaotic.
Tentatively, I think you'd get more wisdom out of people (at least the clearer-headed people) if you asked them in a leisurely way about what they'd done and how their point of view changed over time, rather than asking them for advice.
Google has over 300,000 hits for "what I’ve learned about life.”