This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of posts about why you should try things, and with strategies against common reasons for not doing so.

Overview:

You’ve probably read about how to properly turn information into beliefs, and how to squeeze every last bit from your data. There's been less attention on the importance of going and getting data.

This article is about how personal experience is an incredibly useful form of data, and in particular how in many activities going out and trying something is more marginally useful than doing more exploratory research into it. In particular, I'll examine how personal experience is useful because it makes information more tangible and easier to learn, is good practice, and exposes common circumstances that you didn't build your models to handle.

For precise and well-defined fields and problems, clear thinking and reasoning will get you really far. Mathematics departments don’t use that much equipment, and they’ve been going on pretty well for hundreds of years.

Rationality is about how to turn data into maps. But this still requires data. I think that in a wide variety of not particularly theoretical subjects (like sports, social interactions, negotiation, cooking, etc.) rationality needs to be augmented by personal experience. Instrumental Rationality turns models into high-utility actions, but before you can do that you need a model.