I know 2 reasons why people suck at bringing theory to practice, neither of which completely validates your claim.
1) They suck at it. They are lost in a sea of confusion, and never get to a valuable deduction which can then be returned to the realm of practicality. But they are still intrigued and still get better a little bit at a time with each new revelation granted by internal thought or sites like Less Wrong.
2) They are too good at it. Before going to implement all the wonderful things they have learned, they figure out something new that would require updating their implementation approach. Then another thing. And another. Then they die.
I suffered from 1 for a while when I was younger, and now from 2. I have found the best way to overcome this is to convince other people of what I have figured out thus far. They take what I give them and they run with it in their practical applications.
The act of explaining it to others is the thing that survives from your “dojo” model into the optimal approach to theory. It causes you to better understand it yourself and have more things to explain. It is this which brought me from identifying myself as an epistemologist to a mathematician who could create problem statements from the knowledge I had and provide functional solutions that could be programmed into computers or analyzed by computers to create optimal solutions. Before that I felt I was at my best when providing concise and elegant descriptions of functional knowledge that people could easily integrate into their approach.
A lot of that knowledge was thought experiment versions of the type of stuff you read on LessWrong. So to sum up, this site presents ready to consume concise functional knowledge, and promotes communication between people on interesting subjects. I understand a lot of people are going to be stuck at 1 for the foreseeable future, but so was I at one point. In the meantime, they can spread the ready to consume concise functional knowledge.
I know 2 reasons why people suck at bringing theory to practice, neither of which completely validates your claim.
1) They suck at it. They are lost in a sea of confusion, and never get to a valuable deduction which can then be returned to the realm of practicality. But they are still intrigued and still get better a little bit at a time with each new revelation granted by internal thought or sites like Less Wrong.
2) They are too good at it. Before going to implement all the wonderful things they have learned, they figure out something new that would require updating their implementation approach. Then another thing. And another. Then they die.
I suffered from 1 for a while when I was younger, and now from 2. I have found the best way to overcome this is to convince other people of what I have figured out thus far. They take what I give them and they run with it in their practical applications.
The act of explaining it to others is the thing that survives from your “dojo” model into the optimal approach to theory. It causes you to better understand it yourself and have more things to explain. It is this which brought me from identifying myself as an epistemologist to a mathematician who could create problem statements from the knowledge I had and provide functional solutions that could be programmed into computers or analyzed by computers to create optimal solutions. Before that I felt I was at my best when providing concise and elegant descriptions of functional knowledge that people could easily integrate into their approach.
A lot of that knowledge was thought experiment versions of the type of stuff you read on LessWrong. So to sum up, this site presents ready to consume concise functional knowledge, and promotes communication between people on interesting subjects. I understand a lot of people are going to be stuck at 1 for the foreseeable future, but so was I at one point. In the meantime, they can spread the ready to consume concise functional knowledge.