= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
conchis comments on Saturation, Distillation, Improvisation: A Story About Procedural Knowledge And Cookies - 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 (29)
I think the clearer examples (of procedural knowledge) tend to be things like physical skills that we can learn to reliably perform, but without necessarily being able to articulate how it is that we perform them. In that sense it wouldn't be accurate to say it's simply a subset of propositional knowledge; it's more that the two may intersect to some extent, and the boundaries of each can move as we learn to articulate what it is that we're doing, or to think about what we're doing in propositional terms. (EDIT: or, as Alicorn suggests, forget the propositional reasons why we did things a particular way in the first place.)
The classic example of riding a bicycle comes to mind. No amount of propositional knowledge will allow you to use a bike successfully on the first go. Theory about gyroscopic effects of wheels and so forth all comes to nothing until you hop on and try (and fail, repeatedly) to ride the damn thing.
Conversely, most people never realise the propositional knowledge that in order to steer the bike left, you must turn the handle bars right (at least initially and at high speeds). But they do it unconsciously nonetheless.