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I like your choice of phrasing on “impression”. I think it captures what is meant by embodiment, that the knowledge is in the body, so you can get at it by imi

I like your choice of phrasing on “impression”. I think it captures what is meant by embodiment, that the knowledge is in the body, so you can get at it by imitating the whole of a person.

travisjungroth 6y ago
Thanks. I think it’s much more effective to copy too much rather than too little.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Some people who learn to speak foreign languages fast seem to do this. They copy a native speaker exaggeratedly, almost to the point of parody. And of course young children learn in the same way, by imitating everything rather than trying to filter for the "relevant" bits and imitating those. Most of us are too self-conscious to do this properly though.
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    lol this is me with Spanish. I say common phrases with all the details right, so people think I know more than I do. I actually speak better than I understand.
  - Wistar 6y ago
    Ah, interesting. Back in my presentation days, I found that, if I pretended to be a fire and brimstone preacher when I practiced speeches, and dialed it back when I actually gave the speech, those speeches went a lot better, and were better received.
  - partyboat1586 6y ago
    I'm really good at accents because I imitate exactly. People think I'm a native when I say hello then I can't understand anything after that because I'm really bad at remembering vocabulary. It's kind of scaring me off moving to another country to learn the language because I struggle to remember words in English. At the same time I know I would master the words and phrases I do learn plus I've always wanted to try being immersed in another culture. Terrified of not being understood I guess.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  A big problem is that novices don’t know which parts need to be copied and sometimes don’t even notice what they are missing, so without either (a) getting a decent amount of expert feedback or (b) extensively reasoning things out from first principles and then doing a lot of trial and error, it’s easy to copy extraneous elements or skip essential ones. A lot of methods and devices that we end up stuck with today in various contexts are just watered down copies of things that were once great, because all of the superficial features were slavishly copied by multiple generations of people who didn’t understand the original constraints or think about which ones have remained constant and which have changed.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    If you go from non-functional to functional with extraneous crap that’s a success. Unless you’re working at the forefront of research or at the absolute limits of your capabilities an explicit mental model of what you’re doing is of surprisingly little use. Even that exaggerates how useful it is. The huge majority of improvement is by trial and error, with shoddy and incomplete mental models. Your last paragraph is just what happens when there’s no force demanding quality. If there’s not strong pressure to maintain or improve quality decline is inevitable.

I like your choice of phrasing on “impression”. I think it captures what is meant by embodiment, that the knowledge is in the body, so you can get at it by imitating the whole of a person.

travisjungroth 6y ago

Thanks. I think it’s much more effective to copy too much rather than too little.

dmurray 6y ago
Some people who learn to speak foreign languages fast seem to do this. They copy a native speaker exaggeratedly, almost to the point of parody. And of course young children learn in the same way, by imitating everything rather than trying to filter for the "relevant" bits and imitating those. Most of us are too self-conscious to do this properly though.
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  lol this is me with Spanish. I say common phrases with all the details right, so people think I know more than I do. I actually speak better than I understand.
- Wistar 6y ago
  Ah, interesting. Back in my presentation days, I found that, if I pretended to be a fire and brimstone preacher when I practiced speeches, and dialed it back when I actually gave the speech, those speeches went a lot better, and were better received.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  I'm really good at accents because I imitate exactly. People think I'm a native when I say hello then I can't understand anything after that because I'm really bad at remembering vocabulary. It's kind of scaring me off moving to another country to learn the language because I struggle to remember words in English. At the same time I know I would master the words and phrases I do learn plus I've always wanted to try being immersed in another culture. Terrified of not being understood I guess.
jacobolus 6y ago
A big problem is that novices don’t know which parts need to be copied and sometimes don’t even notice what they are missing, so without either (a) getting a decent amount of expert feedback or (b) extensively reasoning things out from first principles and then doing a lot of trial and error, it’s easy to copy extraneous elements or skip essential ones. A lot of methods and devices that we end up stuck with today in various contexts are just watered down copies of things that were once great, because all of the superficial features were slavishly copied by multiple generations of people who didn’t understand the original constraints or think about which ones have remained constant and which have changed.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  If you go from non-functional to functional with extraneous crap that’s a success. Unless you’re working at the forefront of research or at the absolute limits of your capabilities an explicit mental model of what you’re doing is of surprisingly little use. Even that exaggerates how useful it is. The huge majority of improvement is by trial and error, with shoddy and incomplete mental models. Your last paragraph is just what happens when there’s no force demanding quality. If there’s not strong pressure to maintain or improve quality decline is inevitable.