Nearholmer wrote: 26 Aug 2025, 12:44pm
Not that long ago the vast majority of human learning was via practice, not theorising
I really, really don’t think so.
Tuition in one form or another, so transferring knowledge from one brain to another, is probably a defining or differentiating characteristic of us upright apes. Many, many creatures teach their offspring to some extent, but nothing like to the extent that we teach.
A major mode of learning for we primates is copying. The vast majority of this copying has been via doing not talking or reading - until quite recently, when we copy methos transmitted via talking, reading and viewing vids. These media lose or don't include a vast amount of relevant information needed for successful and true copying.
Nearholmer wrote:
Much of the “initial knowledge capital” was certainly gained by trial and error, but it wasn’t down to each successive individual to discover everything over again, and a rich oral tradition is as much a library as is a pile of books, maybe even more so, because it gets foisted upon the individual. TBH Im not certain whether the “soma” in question is the individual, of the entire collection of individuals, but if it’s the former then the collected wisdom in the heads of the tribe members is “extra-somatic”.
Until the advent of a set of educational establishments available to all, there was very little in the way of the sort of education we had at school. Such education was confined to a tiny number of the population, in monasteries and, later, places like Oxbridge. Most learning was via trades, guilds and similar. It was learning by doing with very little in the way of written descriptions of the procedures and methods.
Talking was obviously involved, but only as a sort of goad to keep the doings on track.
Nearholmer wrote:
As for theorising, humans seem to have been at that game from very early-on too, postulating by extension from proven knowledge and essaying, making the odd inductive leap etc.
You are right that technologies have long emerged in advance of any deep theoretical understanding of them, but it would also be true to say that the two have often progressed sort-of hand-in-hand, and although theory preceding practise by a long distance has become much, much more common in recent centuries it wasn’t completely absent before that.
Theorising has long been a part of human culture. The whole of a religion, for example, is theorising in the extreme! But theorising about more practical matters was always part of a much larger container of doings of particular kinds. And theorising was (rightly) regarded as worthy of a lot of suspicion because older methods tended to be tried and true whilst theopries often turned out to be mad theories lacking in any attention to their full consequences and costs.
One aspect of the rise and dominance of theorising over learning-by-doing is the establishment of whole institutions that have a power in society yet actually produce little of worth and often a lot that's damaging. Religions are like that but so are pseudo-sciences such as economics, psychiatry and political think tanks. None of them value learning-by-doing and are far too keen to blame poor implementation of their pet theories as reasons for failure/damage rather than the theory itself.
Nearholmer wrote:
As for the overall “ignorance was bliss” drift of what you say, I don’t buy it. People managed to exist in large numbers in miserable and degraded condition before the “knowledge revolution” (invented term) as much as they have since, they just existed in smaller numbers because of lack of the knowledge needed to sustain greater numbers.
To be sure, our ability to obliterate ourselves either in a bang or a series of whimpers, is greater than it’s ever been, but so is our ability to sustain ourselves. Everything to play for in the second half, as they say in football commentaries.
It's true that the greatest producers of misery for humans is other humans. "Hell is other people". However, the modern habit of producing and blindly following theoretical propositions blind to their full consequences has vastly increased the potential for humans to do damage and create mayhem. Consider the human cost in applied death due to various ideologies of the C20th alone. Don't fit the theory of what a human or national subject should be? Death for you!
We're currently witnessing the largest theory-driven damage we humans have managed so far - existential risks of many kinds abound. If you think there's going to be some fine "second-half" when all the technologists and business orcs come to their senses and invent wonderful new tech and economics to solve all the problems made by not-so-wonderful tech and economics well ...... dream on, as the waters rise, the food disappears and the various mobs, official and unofficial go raging about. With luck we'll die quickly in a forest fire or under a nuclear bomb.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
