Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Something to ponder

I wonder, how can you tell when you're learning? I mean, if you're learning algebra, you have the answers at the back of the book. If you learn to cook something, you're successful when the product is edible. But on larger stuff? Things with less immediate results? That's the rub. It's hard to tell what you know from what you're just guessing.

2 comments:

susan said...

Good point. It seems to me the vast majority of people in today’s industrial world have never learned how to think. Thinking is a skill, or more precisely a complex set of skills, and not some kind of innate ability that pops into being the moment we need it. We all have the capacity to think, but it's one that has to be developed by education and regular practice.

Ben said...

Thinking is fun, in that it can lead you to different places. For the same reason, though, thinking can be very uncomfortable. So maybe most people prefer not to do it. And there's something called metacognition, being aware of your own thought processes, that the majority never learns.

But if it sounds like I'm speaking from an elevated perspective, that's the opposite of what I'm trying to do.