= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Sawin comments on Rationality Quotes: January 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (268)
The synthesis here is roughly: Practical experience in a sort of Giant Lookup Table fashion but has bugs and fails in certain situations. Theory may have limits, but its main flaw is that it includes many useless things. To help those with practical experience, you need an awareness of theory and an awareness of the bugs in practical experience.
Anecdotal evidence: Most of driving, I learned through practice and instruction. I learned to brake smoothly only after my dad told me the underlying physics.
Thinking it over, it's also a matter of extrapolation. From practice, you can effectively fit a curve to the behavior, but you don't learn what happens outside the domain where that curve fits - and so, when you stall the wing or lose grip on the rear tires, your reactions will be exactly wrong, because you're playing by rules that don't apply any more. And yes, you can learn to fit the point of switchover and learn to fit the behavior in the new regime, in time ... but if you crash, first, it will be very expensive.
Agreed, both are advantages of theory.