Knowledge which doesn know itself

Imagine you had a bucket. Knowledge is power but you are wasting time acquiring it if you retain very little of it. This the key finding behind the study that produced the learning pyramid seen in the below picture.

The National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine measured the retention rate after 24 hours for different types of learning.

By teaching they began to understand. If you had to extend this to beyond the 24 hour period, you will have to apply what you learn. By applying you will run into difficulty, make mistakes and see gaps in what you know the same way you would if you taught someone.

No matter how good the original explanation is in the book or lecture, you will retain very little of it, if you do not understand it through application. Knowledge is power only when you truly understand it.

Understanding something involves internalizing a concept. Kung Fu lives in everything we do, Xiao Dre! It lives in how we put on the jacket, how we take off the jacket.

It lives in how we treat people! Everything is Kung Fu. All the reading you do will only have entertainment value if it does not change your behaviour and the way you think.

Understanding something brings this change in the way you think and behave, where as merely knowing something makes no difference to your life. Knowledge is power only when it changes your life. To truly understand what you learn, you must apply.

A friend of mine wanted to know how I form and stick to new habits so well. When I sent him articles which helped me, he told me he had read the same ideas in a book before. Though he knew the idea behind making and forming new habits, I understood the idea and applied it to my life which has made all the difference.

In the second section of this post, we will look at a system to acquire and apply information you consume, so all the learning you do automatically transforms your life. When I wanted to build an online business, I spent two years consuming information on making a website and running a business online. I was an expert in everything from social Media to copywriting. Take a guess on how much money I made by becoming an expert over the course of two years? Not even a single penny. How much I knew did not matter because I never applied what I learnt.

Knowledge is power only when you take action. All the knowledge without action only left me overwhelmed. I had been accumulating information without applying and when I wanted to apply there was so much information that I did not know where to begin. We spend so much time, money and energy acquiring knowledge that we will not use and that will leave us paralyzed from taking any action. We do it through our reading and online consumption. Knowledge is power but time is money.

I later discovered something about how successful people acquire knowledge that changed my own personal mindset about learning. Successful people start before they are ready, with incomplete information. They succeed in spite of lacking advanced degrees and skills by using the knowledge of other men and directing it to a definite purpose. Knowledge is power but by itself it cannot help anybody become successful. Science doesn't make aesthetic judgments Science can reveal the frequency of a G-flat and how our eyes relay information about color to our brains, but science cannot tell us whether a Beethoven symphony, a Kabuki performance, or a Jackson Pollock painting is beautiful or dreadful.

Individuals make those decisions for themselves based on their own aesthetic criteria. Science doesn't tell you how to use scientific knowledge Although scientists often care deeply about how their discoveries are used, science itself doesn't indicate what should be done with scientific knowledge.

Science, for example, can tell you how to recombine DNA in new ways, but it doesn't specify whether you should use that knowledge to correct a genetic disease, develop a bruise-resistant apple, or construct a new bacterium. For almost any important scientific advance, one can imagine both positive and negative ways that knowledge could be used.

Again, science helps us describe how the world is , and then we have to decide how to use that knowledge. To learn more about the different ways that humans have applied scientific knowledge, explore What has science done for you lately?

Science doesn't draw conclusions about supernatural explanations Do gods exist? Do supernatural entities intervene in human affairs? These questions may be important, but science won't help you answer them. For many, such questions are matters of personal faith and spirituality.

None of these things mean anything all by themselves, of course, but combined with everything else, learned in the intimate relationship of therapy, they can mean a great deal. Binswanger also talks about different modes : Some people live in a singular mode , alone and self-sufficient. Still others live in an anonymous mode , quiet, secretive, in the background of life. And most of us live in all these modes from time to time and place to place.

As you can see, the language of existential analysis is metaphor. Life is much too big, much too rich, to be captured by anything so crude as prose. My life is certainly too rich to be captured in words that you thought up before you even met me! Existential therapists allow their clients to reveal themselves, disclose themselves, in their own words, in their own time.

Existentialists may be interested in your dreams, for example. But instead of telling you what your dreams mean, they will ask you.

They might suggest that you let your dreams inspire you, let them guide you, let them suggest their own meanings. They may mean nothing, and they may mean everything. However, my question is only concerned with individuals in the United States in-so-far as they share the common circumstance of historical ignorance. What does it mean to operate socially without an accurate social map? What does it mean to operate politically without a working knowledge of political history… the history of political institutions and political relationships?

What does it mean to be disconnected from that matrix of meanings? On a related note, even if someone does have these maps at-hand, there are still consequences from living in a world where others do not. Overall, the question I want to get at is: what are some useful strategies and tactics for navigating this socio-poltical context?

Can they thrive? It appears so when you hear some of the shit that the rich say. Politics is concerned with categories that transcend individuals. Categories that live in a world of legal concepts and group identities. August 13, January 30, by Cyber Dandy. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life What kind of history and what sort of facts matter? What does this mean? Why does it matter? Attempt to articulate these ideas 3 Ok.