Sounds like main problem in the examples you give is overconfidence about our ability to transform propositional knowledge into procedural knowledge.
Overweighting the propositional knowledge we have beforehand can cause us to discount ignore important information that we might pick up by doing—it can inhibit our ability to be empirical through the mechanisms of familiar biases. Planning fallacies, and problems of being unable to respond to unforseen circumstances—or recognize opportunity!--can come soon after.
Seems similar to the distinction Taleb makes between ‘Practitioners’ and ‘Theorists’, actually. I tend to be of the Not yet! I don’t know enough! group, so this summer I’ve been trying to find ways to encourage myself to be more of a practitioner than a theorist in certain domains of life.
My problem was more an emotional need to know as much as I can about the task and the context of the task before executing, or even practicing. I think this is a “nerd” tendency. Even excluding the epistemological pitfalls there is an opportunity cost for putting something off until later that needs to be part of the calculation.
Sounds like main problem in the examples you give is overconfidence about our ability to transform propositional knowledge into procedural knowledge.
Overweighting the propositional knowledge we have beforehand can cause us to discount ignore important information that we might pick up by doing—it can inhibit our ability to be empirical through the mechanisms of familiar biases. Planning fallacies, and problems of being unable to respond to unforseen circumstances—or recognize opportunity!--can come soon after.
Seems similar to the distinction Taleb makes between ‘Practitioners’ and ‘Theorists’, actually. I tend to be of the Not yet! I don’t know enough! group, so this summer I’ve been trying to find ways to encourage myself to be more of a practitioner than a theorist in certain domains of life.
My problem was more an emotional need to know as much as I can about the task and the context of the task before executing, or even practicing. I think this is a “nerd” tendency. Even excluding the epistemological pitfalls there is an opportunity cost for putting something off until later that needs to be part of the calculation.