Knowledge is not experience

[gothwalk]

There's something I see going around of late, and it bothers me. It's some kind of a tendency to claim that reading about something means you know about it. There are very few places that's true - theoretical physics and RPG rules are two of them. Politics, crafts, fighting, relationships, art, poverty, hunger, drunkeness, overcoming fears... all of these, positive and negative, are things I've seen people claim to know about lately when they patently do not. You cannot know politics - I don't - without getting involved, campaigning for something, moving and shaking. You can't know anything about fighting until you've hit and been hit. You can't know much about relationships until you've been in one, and worked on it. You can't know poverty until you've had to count every penny in the house to get enough to buy oats to make porridge, because it's the most food you can get for the least money.

And if you make those claims, you have to be prepared to have those people who do know about them look at you in a different light. Claims of "I can deal fine with...", when you never have, or "I am happy with...", when that's not your situation, are particularly irritating to anyone who has.

Until you have experience, your knowledge is not much.

Comments

[elorie.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

[juanfandango.livejournal.com]

Until you have experience, your knowledge is not much.

IBTD. You can have all the experience in the world, but if you aren't intelligent enough and educated enough, to benefit from it, if you don't have the ability to analyse (and self-analyse), it does you very little good. And similarly, don't knock theoretical knowledge (provided it's sound theoretical knowledge, and not cod-knowledge dredged from the first half-dozen Googled pages).

You say that you can't know fighting unless you've been hit. (I paraphrase and also do some selective snipping, for brevity only). If you're in a fight and you're hit, you've failed. Now, you're only going to acquire knowledge from that if you analyse why you've failed. Whether you can use that knowledge to prevent a future failure depends on your skill, but you'll never prevent a future failure unless you can do that analysis in the first place. So the next logical step is to do the analysis /before/ the fight, so you don't get hit in the first place.

There's an old pilot's saying that says that a good pilot uses their superior knowledge and judgement to avoid getting into situations that would have required their superior skill to survive.