Learning

[andrewducker]

Learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."

From the rather spify article here on groups and how they work (or don't).

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

I'm off to post bits of this to lj_dev

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

"Learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something."

Except you can't really Know something without experiencing it. Of course it's better not to really Know that the alligators will tear you limb from limb if you wander into that swamp over there, but in many other cases really Knowing is of use, because you find out not only the what, but the why.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

I'd say you have to learn from experience sometime, but never knock learning from others.

Or as I say sometimes, "Learn from other people's mistakes."