Barbara Tversky: Action Shapes Thought  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Knowledge Project]] - Full Title: Barbara Tversky: Action Shapes Thought - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8154b550-1ee4-46c1-bead-288cc7946d2d ## Document Notes ## Highlights - How to Transfer Learning from One Situation to Another • Taking more than one case that are similar and abstracting what's similar about them is going to help you transfer learning. • A single case isn't going to help you, two cases are better and two cases and a diagram indicating the relationships is even better. Transcript: Barbara Tversky There's been research showing that if we want to transfer learning, and of course, that's one of the goals of learning, is taking more than one case that are similar and abstracting What's similar about them is going to help you transfer. A single case isn't going to help you. Two cases are better, and two cases and a diagram indicating the relationships is even better. So that in making those abstractions that can then get applied to new situations. Hard to go from abstractions to instances. It's even hard to go from instances to abstractions, but probably from abstractions to instances is even harder. I've seen so many phenomena in cognitive psychology be shown over and over again in particular situations, because until they're in a particular situation, no one believes them. And I see them and I say, it's just the same as X, what's new here, because I've got the abstraction, but other people need the concrete showing that particular thing in this situation. Same in politics, same in history. We have it all over. So going from instances to abstractions is one thing. It's not that easy. And more than one case, drawing the similarities and diagramming the abstraction helps you get to that abstraction. But getting from the abstraction to the particular is still a challenge. And I can't think of people who've worked on that, on teaching. I wanted to say one more thing about education. Most of our education is vicarious. We're not encountering. You said we learn from situations. The situations for us, schooled people, is classroom in many cases. Sometimes it's actually experiences. And, of course, classrooms that create experiences through laboratories or field trips or whatever are more effective because learning from experience is effective. But so much of our learning is vicarious and through language or other math, other abstractions. So making it concrete is important. Shane Parrish Just to riff on this for a second, experiences don't need to be a physical experience. An experience can be reading somebody else's experience. I'm experiencing it. A conversation is an experience. You know, reading a textbook is an experience. Doing something like building a sauna or a shed or something is an experience. So these are all different types. The way that we have an experience is very different from how we reflect on it and how we abstract it. And I think that the experiences don't necessarily need to even be firsthand. I can learn from your experiences, but this gets to a different point here, which is when we consume information, a lot of the times we're consuming the abstraction. So these diagrams are the abstraction, they're the salient points, but they're one person's idea of what the salient points are. That's not my encoding of it, that's their encoding of it. And I think of consuming other people's abstractions as the illusion of knowledge. I'm the line cook, not the chef, right? To use an example from a friend of mine, Tim Urban, which is, you know, when things go right, I look like a genius, I follow the recipe and everything works out. And because I've consumed the abstraction, the recipe in this example, everything turned out right, I look like I know what I'm doing. But when things go wrong, the chef who has distilled the experience, the reflection to create the recipe that has gone through the thousands of trial and errors, will taste it and be Like, oh, this needs more salt, you use too high of heat. And instantly, they will know what the problem is, because they've got the abstraction, but they've got the, it's almost like an earned abstraction versus a learned abstraction. And that's really interesting, because it changes when we're consuming information, we're consuming a lot of these abstractions, we assume their knowledge, and we assume their Knowledge, and we put them into practice. And when they don't work, we don't know why. And the way to go back up this chain is to actually decompose it and ask people, well, how did you come to these conclusions? What variables were important to you? And you need firsthand knowledge, not second, third, or fourth hand. So you want to get as close to the person who had the original experience or created the abstraction. And often when you pull back the onion here, we're two or three layers deep, and it's a very sort of weak relationship. Barbara Tversky No, ([Time 0:58:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76e746d8-f79a-4c12-a1b6-6922d0a8b66c))