Not speaking for Ray, of course, but some of the things that occur to me:
Some people are desperately seeking guidance/help/something to cling to; they’ve been trying to make sense of things and failing, and when someone is already struggling, being like “here’s an opportunity for you to make it all up yourself!” can be extremely demoralizing. Especially when there really actually is a simple conceptual leap that they could’ve just been given, or when the process of helping them see for themselves is not well-formed/well-scaffolded (so it amounts to being invited to flail around and then also blamed for not having put the pieces together).
There are a million different dog breeds, and dog breeds themselves aren’t clear-cut categories but fuzzy borders around continuous variation; inviting people to all squint at dogs and see for themselves can break something pretty important.
There’s the social aspect of being able to communicate with each other, which is worsened by everyone having their own slightly different categories for all of the dogs.
There’s the information-overwhelm aspect of not being able to abstract away similarities and see that “dog” or (e.g.) “husky” is actually a valid and useful cluster, because you’re trying to process all the axes of variation simultaneously with no starting point.
There’s something important about usage; when I try to reify a new term it’s usually related to usage and if I asked someone to do their own original dog categorization I am sort of robbing them of useful predictive information about, like, “people will try to breed this one with that one” that will be hard for them to independently derive.
Oh, also, in some cases there’s much more convergence than others/much less in the way of cool and interesting and useful stuff to be found in the original seeing; there are some places where original seeing is 100x less payoff-y? Like, my shoulder Logan says something like “the vast majority of humans are extremely atrophied in their ability to see things originally; they should seize every possible opportunity to get in some practice” and I agree but nevertheless I don’t think every opportunity is equally good.
It takes so, so, so much longer, not just to write but also to consume, and I do indeed think that some forms of information learned this way are more deeply grokked and better integrated and better self-motivated but I think that one of the primary benefits of being part of a species that communicates with language is not having to reinvent every single wheel. I think I genuinely believe that the ideal point for most people is something like “fifteen percent of the way Loganwards from where Duncan is” and not “living in the region I conceive of as occupied by Logan/Robin/Anna/Benya.” Like, I think that the individualized education plan for Pokémon of your type is something our culture should absolutely have but that if everybody was taught in that way this would be actually worse?
Something like confirmation. The ever-fretful lovechild of Neville and Hermione does not, at the end of a guided self-investigation, know that they know something? Or at least, not a clumsily done one; I believe that at the end of your naturalism course people ACTUALLY know, and know that they know, something new they have seen and understood. But like, the failure mode of an attempt to cause people to originally see seems much less graceful than the failure mode of providing someone with a new conceptual template, even given that people in general are really bad about conceptual templates and confuse themselves into thinking they’re real.
Not speaking for Ray, of course, but some of the things that occur to me:
Some people are desperately seeking guidance/help/something to cling to; they’ve been trying to make sense of things and failing, and when someone is already struggling, being like “here’s an opportunity for you to make it all up yourself!” can be extremely demoralizing. Especially when there really actually is a simple conceptual leap that they could’ve just been given, or when the process of helping them see for themselves is not well-formed/well-scaffolded (so it amounts to being invited to flail around and then also blamed for not having put the pieces together).
There are a million different dog breeds, and dog breeds themselves aren’t clear-cut categories but fuzzy borders around continuous variation; inviting people to all squint at dogs and see for themselves can break something pretty important.
There’s the social aspect of being able to communicate with each other, which is worsened by everyone having their own slightly different categories for all of the dogs.
There’s the information-overwhelm aspect of not being able to abstract away similarities and see that “dog” or (e.g.) “husky” is actually a valid and useful cluster, because you’re trying to process all the axes of variation simultaneously with no starting point.
There’s something important about usage; when I try to reify a new term it’s usually related to usage and if I asked someone to do their own original dog categorization I am sort of robbing them of useful predictive information about, like, “people will try to breed this one with that one” that will be hard for them to independently derive.
Oh, also, in some cases there’s much more convergence than others/much less in the way of cool and interesting and useful stuff to be found in the original seeing; there are some places where original seeing is 100x less payoff-y? Like, my shoulder Logan says something like “the vast majority of humans are extremely atrophied in their ability to see things originally; they should seize every possible opportunity to get in some practice” and I agree but nevertheless I don’t think every opportunity is equally good.
It takes so, so, so much longer, not just to write but also to consume, and I do indeed think that some forms of information learned this way are more deeply grokked and better integrated and better self-motivated but I think that one of the primary benefits of being part of a species that communicates with language is not having to reinvent every single wheel. I think I genuinely believe that the ideal point for most people is something like “fifteen percent of the way Loganwards from where Duncan is” and not “living in the region I conceive of as occupied by Logan/Robin/Anna/Benya.” Like, I think that the individualized education plan for Pokémon of your type is something our culture should absolutely have but that if everybody was taught in that way this would be actually worse?
Something like confirmation. The ever-fretful lovechild of Neville and Hermione does not, at the end of a guided self-investigation, know that they know something? Or at least, not a clumsily done one; I believe that at the end of your naturalism course people ACTUALLY know, and know that they know, something new they have seen and understood. But like, the failure mode of an attempt to cause people to originally see seems much less graceful than the failure mode of providing someone with a new conceptual template, even given that people in general are really bad about conceptual templates and confuse themselves into thinking they’re real.
This is great. Thank you.
(I also endorse all these)