What Is The Best Teacher If Experience Isn’t?
http://www.hearandplay.com/main/experience-not-best-teacher-information-can
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Many people who have refused learning from information have learned from experience.
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Do you accept the author's view?

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 25, 2016

Wow, you're looking to spur quite a debate, aren't you?

In my experience – wait - according to my information . . .

Which would seem more valuable or incontrovertible to you?

The adage, "There is no substitute for experience," means exactly that: there is no shortcut or quick fix for what experience imparts, which is different in nature or in shading, and also in what it means to a person. Information (in the sense applied here) or being informed as opposed to being experienced, is different in nature and meaning. It's similar (but not analogous) to debating which is "better," Mac or PC.

Although I wouldn't trade my experience, musical or otherwise, for anything – because of how it interwove with other experiences in life – i do wish that I had been informed of some things in order to have saved myself a lot of trouble and time, so that I could have made faster progress. Experience and information complement one another in one's growth and one's progress toward mastery.

One thing I find is that it's hard to translate one's exprience, or what one has learned from it, into purely informational terms. That is, there is no way that I could say, "You do this, then this happens, and then you can do this or that, and then there's this additional thing . . .," without being aware that the "experiential" dimension, which is wisdom, will be lacking.

For example, I can tell my 27-year-old screw-up neighbor, "You have to learn to be good at something which will earn you money anywhere you might go, because soon you'll find that employers won't give you a chance, friends won't let you stay on their couches, and life gets a lot more real once you're out of your 20s." But that's something he'll just have to learn for himself (poor guy).

 

Here's an experiment for you: Stand up, walk across the room, walk back and sit down.
Now. How were you able to do that?

 

By carefully absorbing ALL the information in "Treaties on the Foundation of Movement and Motor Activities - A Theoretical Approach (Vol. 1-4)"? :P

Information is no doubt valuable and as Sir Isaac said 'stand on the shoulders of Giants' and build upon the knowledge and experiences of others. But experience through practice is IMO a necessity for turning all that information into Knowledge. You can read everything ever written on music theory, compression and guitar technique, but you'll never become any good at composing, producing or playing an instrument without the 3 P's: Practice, practice, practice!

pfft, nugatory hands-on experience... why not list all the information they've compiled over the years as credentials instead ? :D

 

Don't worry I won't, as I've never heard of it. The point was that you don't lean so walk based on information, but more on experience.

 

Hehe, I got your point man, I just made up a random dry title as I'm sure some academic has taken a theoretical approach to walking at some point

 

The book prepares you to memorize a page while life experience prepares you write the book. I would much rather learn from experimentation, trial and error, and have. Picking up tidbits along the way through playing and conversation with others more experienced than yourself will add to your knowledge base and will lead to your growth as an artist or musician. Criticism by those that you admire and trust to tell you their truth and observations about your work will fuel your fire and sharpen your vision of the creative horizon that you envision, your direction to home in on, and helps you by adding to your own definition and worth of self. Reading is not the main path or end all, but rather should play just a small part of the education (which is neverending until your last breath) of an artist, musician, craftsman or anyone else doing their part to render to consciousness that culled from the aethers.

Take your face out of your books and play your instrument is the moral of this story. Play play play.

 

Well, discovering hot water takes too much time.
If you want to write advanced music, you will need hundreds of years to reach the level of a trained composer with formal musical training with just trial and error.
Don Davis composed the score for the Matrix - mainly ripping off John Adams, Varese, Ligetti, Penderecky and others. Do you think that any amateur composer can learn to compose similar music just by experimenting instead of studying orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, scores by other composers and so on?

 

Nature versus nurture, in this case, experience versus information. The fallacy is that it has to be "versus"- "either/or". One does not exclude the other. Humans adapt using both together.

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge : Albert Einstein

 

Experience is 3D way of learning, where you can touch,feel and get to know new things, it does include information. while scope of information is limited.
Experience includes every possibility while information can never do that.
Information is just a part of someone's experience.