Redundant Learning

[Kriminal99]

Let me ask you a question... How much information that people are exposed to contains concepts that are truly unique and unlike any they have been exposed to before? You can probably see that there are a lot of similar concepts between disciplines. But perhaps this is a vague notion and not something that would allow you to avoid having to learn the new discipline because you already understood it with different (or no) labels.

 

But consider that if there were repeated concepts, you would be learning a lot of the same stuff over and over again.

 

Well there is a way to avoid this... and make it so that your recognition of repeated concepts is precise so that you basically do already know most of a new discipline before you start learning it.

 

It's an issue of your early conditioning. Communicating concepts is difficult without formalization. Children especially are not likely to formalize or be able to communicate a network of concepts. You can use metaphors to allude to the ideas, but it isn't the same as directly communicating a network of concepts. Metaphors in general simply identify similarities of any kind, and do not provide further information. They can be used to denote to ideas or situations that are almost exactly the same, or to relate two things that are nothing alike. But they are all that is required to persuade and move other people. And we are social animals so when there is no danger we concern ourselves more with this than with having an accurate network of concepts that can even be communicated well.

 

So we learn to favor metaphorical reasoning. Consider the following two understandings of sportsmanship and honor:

 

Metaphor user talking about 2 concepts he has learned which are actually the same:

 

Sportsmanship is about being a good sport. You take off your hat and shake hands with your opponent after the game win or lose to demonstrate you respect the outcome, you obey the rules, and you don't get mad and yell at the ref or other players.

 

Honor is kind of like sportsmanship, but different. Like a knight who has honor might respect his opponent just like your supposed to in sports. He has a code of behavior he follows just like a sports player follows rules.

Concept user:

 

A knight in a judge behave similarly: they don't look alike, they both have power but not even the same kind of power. The similarity is they don't do anything they want with their power, rather they defer to a set of rules that serve some greater purpose. We will call this general concept: Honor

 

A ship can acquire a hole in it's hull that defeats the whole purpose of the ship and causes it to sink. A chess game can have a player that gets mad at loosing and knocks the pieces off the board, which defeats the whole purpose of the game. We will call this general concept of something maintaining it's purpose integrity.

 

In a game of chess, and in a game of basketball, different people or groups are working towards mutually exclusive goals. But they are not willing to do anything to achieve these goals, but rather they follow some rules to limit the possible outcomes and avoid things like injured players or to make the process more interesting to participate in or watch. We will call this general concept a competition.

 

A competition has integrity. If the rules of the competition are broken, the integrity of that specific type of competition is threatened.

 

So the integrity of a competition depends on the honor of it's participants.

 

Sports are a type of competition. So the integrity of a sport depends on the honor of it's participants. In the context of sports, honor is called sportsmanship - it's a repeated concept.

 

Analysis:

 

The second approach didn't require learning the same concept (honor/sportsmanship) twice. It was only longer because it showed the person learning the concept, and several more that allowed a comprehensive understanding.

 

A person persisting in this manner will quickly gain a huge amount of comprehensive knowledge above and beyond the person in the first category. Not only will they learn new disciplines faster, but they will be much better at handling multi-discipline problems and will not need to try and pigeonhole them into one discipline they are familiar with. They can also use their experiences from anywhere to inspire them to new ideas in a different discipline... which means creativity.