Anything Wrong With These Quotes About Book Learning < Learning from Experience?

[dadmonson]

DISCLOSURE: I haven't finished reading or comprehending ITOE yet.

Recently, I've seen people disparage reading books by saying basically that learning from experience is way more important.

Here are some quotes:

"I am not attracted to book smart. I could not care less about your college degree. I am attracted to raw intelligence. Really anyone can sit behind a desk. I want to know what you know beyond the realm of our society. And only living and seeking can give you that intelligence. We've got time. Let's sit on the rooftop at 2am and introduce me to your mind.."

"Books only contain information (which can be true or false). Information isn't knowledge. Knowledge is gained from personal experience."

"I'm an intellectual who doesn't read books"

 

It seems to me something is going on here with these quotes but I can't put my finger on what it is...  Maybe someone else can give their opinion on whether or not something is wrong with those quotes. 

Edited August 18, 2016 by dadmonson

[New Buddha]

You would have to tailor your response to the person making such statements.  Is the person some aging, Marxist professor still clinging to Class Determinism?  Or a philosophy student of such a Post Modernists as Jacquest Derrida?  Or is it just someone who lacks much education, has never read a book and gets defensive when challenged about a position he might hold.

In general, the capacity to transmit knowledge via books is probably the single most important accomplish that Man has ever made.  The invention of the printing press did more to free people of the theocratic and despotic rule of the Church that had a strangle hold on knowledge.

 

Edited August 18, 2016 by New Buddha

[softwareNerd]

7 hours ago, dadmonson said:

... I've seen people disparage reading books by saying basically that learning from experience is way more important.

It's a false dichotomy because most books contain a wealth of other people's experiences along with their evaluations and conclusions. I assume "books" includes other media. I assume it also includes listening to a teacher. What about browsing the internet? All those are forms of learning from others. In comparison to what you can learn from others, what you can learn from your own individual experience is nearly zero and restricted to very few subject-areas.

As for going up on a rooftop at 2am to chat with someone, how is that different from going to a classroom discussion at 2pm?

Of course, quotes are never enough. The person can mean all sorts of things. The typical gist seems to be that content is not so important...it's the processor of content (the mind) that is interesting. I think that's baloney.

[Repairman]

If I may rephrase New Buhhda's response, I have a long held rule: Consider the source. Recognizing the intent and experiences of your interlocutor(s) is/are an important part of the very same life's experiences that will enable you to be an effective communicator. Knowing nothing more about the persons you've quoted, I can add nothing more.

[Nicky]

Yeah, I'm with SN. The main thing wrong with those quotes is that they're out of context. They could be expressing a perfectly valid point of view...in context.

It's pretty obvious for instance that they're not meant as commentary on the historical role of written or printed materials.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Nicky

[Reidy]

One feature these quotes have in common is a failure to appreciate the division of labor. Trying to produce all your own knowledge is as futile as trying to produce all your own food or all your own gasoline. Some skills take relatively little input and a higher proportion of work on one's own: athletic skills may be the extremes, with dancing and musical performance not far behind, but few, if any, excel with no cooperation at all. Math and computer science are examples from the opposite end of the scale. If you do well at one end of this scale, fine, but your aptitudes and preferences aren't binding on the rest of us.

To take them up one at a time:

- "I am not attracted to book smart..."

Intelligence has to be intelligence about some topic or other. If you limit yourself to what you can learn from uninformed doing or unverified word of mouth, you won't be intelligent about much of importance. Not anyone can sit behind a desk, at least not productively. At least as many can run off at the mouth on topics he doesn't know much about, and that's really what's usually going on when you sit on a rooftop at 2am. I was an adolescent once myself.

- "Books only contain information..." And not all of them do at that. This is pretty much a tautology (a word I learned reading a book): books contain what books contain and not what books don't contain. The quote refers to the latter as "knowledge", which information from non-book sources might be but isn't necessarily. Personal impressions and haphazardly-acquired prejudices can be be true or false, too. The latter ways of learning may actually be more prone to error. "Knowledge is gained from personal experience" is true if it means some knowledge and false if it means all knowledge. The last statement probably traces its ancestry back to John Dewey. The originator of the quote may not have known this (mistrusting book learning as he did), but somebody along the chain of transmission took the time to read.

- "I'm an intellectual who doesn't read books." This is possible; Rand wasn't much of a reader after her school days. You might be the kind of intellectual (a mathematician, for example) who works it all out in his head or on paper or at a keyboard, but this requires having learned a lot and having read a lot of books beforehand, and it takes a lot or sitting at a desk. (Rand wasn't much of a reader after her school days, so it can be done.)