Robert Aumann, the Nobel laureate who first proved that Bayesians with the same priors cannot agree to disagree, is a believing Orthodox Jew. Surely he understands the math of probability theory, but that is not enough to save him. What more does it take?
This reminds me of buddhist meditation: understanding the path intellectually may be useful, but what really matters is living it.
I think this applies to any kind of knowledge ; it’s fine to know something, but not so useful if we don’t act on it. We could even go as far as saying that we don’t truly know something until we act on it, for example on the premise that we want to be healthy and smart and sport is a cost-effective way to improve on these, then if we are not practicing sport clearly our brain doesn’t understand deeply enough the premise, because if it did the neurons would we wired in a way that would make us practice. So that’s what true understanding might be: having neurons wired in a way that make us do the thing.
Unfortunately my experience of school is that it doesn’t teach kids to act on what they know, maybe it assumes it happens auto-magically or maybe it doesn’t care, but it seems to like a blind spot.
This reminds me of buddhist meditation: understanding the path intellectually may be useful, but what really matters is living it.
I think this applies to any kind of knowledge ; it’s fine to know something, but not so useful if we don’t act on it. We could even go as far as saying that we don’t truly know something until we act on it, for example on the premise that we want to be healthy and smart and sport is a cost-effective way to improve on these, then if we are not practicing sport clearly our brain doesn’t understand deeply enough the premise, because if it did the neurons would we wired in a way that would make us practice. So that’s what true understanding might be: having neurons wired in a way that make us do the thing.
Unfortunately my experience of school is that it doesn’t teach kids to act on what they know, maybe it assumes it happens auto-magically or maybe it doesn’t care, but it seems to like a blind spot.