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At one level, this is word-games. I wouldn't personally construct a sentence with "educability" in it very often, but I have read them, and the sense of the wor
by ggm 2y ago
At one level, this is word-games. I wouldn't personally construct a sentence with "educability" in it very often, but I have read them, and the sense of the word is not a million miles from many of the others cropping up in this thread which go to the capacity to learn, distinct from the amount of knowledge acquired.
Personally, I think there's a set of outcomes here. To acquire knowledge usefully demands both retention and some ability to apply abstraction/synthesis to the knowledge acquired. Simply being a repositary of knowledge is not in itself usually useful, unless you want to win a competition for the most digits of pi, or ability to recite the Koran from memory, but latent within that ability are other skills which we often decry as "not intelligent" or "simply parroting facts" -the amount of facts you can recall aren't useful in the same way that synthesis over those facts is.
- xwolfi 2y agoOr hey, the courage to even act upon the most basic of conclusion. Being useful is very different from being aware or intelligent. It's sometimes more useful to be ignorant and brave, than scholarly and asleep high in an ivory tower. Knowledge, or its synthesis into derivative knowledge, have nothing to do with utility I think ? It's sometimes pointless to acquire knowledge, and useful to act upon the world. So I don't really understand what you meant by "useful" yourself there. What is the goal to reach ?
- ggm 2y agoThere's interior applicability to knowledge: it feeds thought and the inductive reasoning process. If you have never been exposed to TV, being exposed to TV changes how you think. There's exterior applicability to knowledge: feed a man a fish vs teach a man to fish. I see both as "utility" although I suppose achieving nirvana is seen as utility in other people's domains. It's subjective.
- pixl97 2y agoBy analogy is one of the most powerful tools that humanity has. Using a rod to get a lure where you want it might cross over later in to getting a rope across a ravine.