[SharedKnowing] Go live right now

[Fred Bauder]

>    1. Re: "Go live right now" (Nat Makarevitch)

> Take, for example, car-driving. Does any driver significantly learn by
> any other mean than 'go drive right now'?  Aren't most of them, right now
> and as drivers, at a 'high level of refinement'?

Actually, no. Compared to a professional driver, most drivers drive quite
unsafely. For example, most drivers don't have their foot posed above the
brake when they enter an intersection controlled by a traffic light when
they have the green light. They generally don't look both ways down the
intersecting street in that situation. And they have lots of crashes,
avoidable crashes. If they are not professional drivers, they are
considered to not be negligent. If they are professional drivers, for
example, even a taxi driver, they are considered negligent (with respect
to their passengers, not the other driver who ran the red light) and a
skillful attorney can demonstrate that to a jury by showing that they
have been trained to avoid that type of accident, in a classroom.

Interesting that you would have picked that example. It is glaringly
obvious to me, a former taxicab driver, who has had some sophisticated
classroom training, that some tricks of the trade, communicated verbally,
can result in a substantially improved performance.

However, as the mundane nature of this example shows, the sorts of skills
involved may not be professional skills of the graduate level, simply
craft. Encyclopedia editing, for example at Wikipedia, involves a great
deal of verbal feedback from others. For example, an article about a
journalist I was looking at recently involved information that was being
sourced from Private Eye, a satirical British journal. I've had some
experience with Private Eye before, but one of the first things I saw on
the talk page was an admonition from an experienced editor to not use
Private Eye as a source for controversial assertions.

So, yeah, go live now, or as soon as practical, but develop an active
culture with as much input from professional and experienced editors as
possible, refining your practice as you go along. The give and take of
the wiki format facilitates this.

Fred