[SharedKnowing] Go live right now

[Nat Makarevitch]

"Larry Sanger" <sanger at citizendium.org> writes:

>> Take, for example, car-driving. Does any driver significantly learn by
>> any other mean than 'go drive right now'?

> 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.

I was thinking of the ability to 'drive', to 'use the car commands and
instruments' (the verb 'pilot' may be more adequate?). You made a very
interesting point!

> Encyclopedia editing, for example at Wikipedia, involves a great deal of
> verbal feedback from others
 ((...))
> an admonition from an experienced editor to not use Private Eye as a
> source for controversial assertions.

> it's a major faux pas to sit in on a session and bang away on a guitar or
> drum and not know what the hell you are doing.  It might be fun for you
> (doubtful) but it can ruin it for everyone else.

Thanks for those!

One can efficiently, thanks to practice, explore any 'tool' (by driving in
some safe area, playing in a wiki 'sandbox', torturing a guitar in a remote
place...), maybe because language is not very efficient at describing the
Real World. Imagine explaining to somebody how to drive or play the
guitar... without any car or guitar and by phone! 100 hours of such an
ordeal may be much less efficient than one hour with the 'instrument'.

On the other hand nobody can, thanks to the sole practice, discover _usage_
_conventions_, which are about things to do in order to avoid mishaps
caused to others by our improper usage. This is shaped by the
responsibility towards others beared by each of us.

Conventions are to be applied when using the tool in/for a group. Moreover
they are to be respected as promptly as possible if ignoring/disregarding
them can cause harm (from car accidents to inept articles in an
encyclopedia, and even to cacophony :-) ). To learn them one has to be
somewhat mentored, to obtain some form of formal exposé, because individual
practice doesn't disclose errors done by others (which may also be
committed by us towards them).

Conventions are collaboration rules, one can hope grasp them by "going live
right now" but it can be painful or need a long time.

Is it to say that "go live right now!" only applies when there is no need
to immediately collaborate efficiently? Not in contexts not inducing any
danger or where others are ready to forgive and help on the spot!

A wiki can be such a context (a music jam session is often less convincing
and the streets are totally inadequate).

-- 
http://makarevitch.org/rant/
Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL:
"my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.
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