> Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a r

> Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization > The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own. Is that necessarily bad? I can totally buy individual differences in how people take to new information, but I've always had best results with applied learning, and later reading or realizing the rules. It's how we all learned to speak, and it's how I later learned this language. I'm sure that it's most efficient for a machine to learn the game of football by just parsing all the rules, but for a human I imagine it's much harder to retain those rules without having played some touch football in the park or watched games as a kid to build a model on which to apply those rules.