Henrik Karlsson, from “Scraping training data for your mind,” on the need for the right kind of information to learn new skills:
[You] want the input you observe to be as closely connected to a practice as possible. You want to see the process, not just the results. The results are often misleading. If you are a musician looking at successful bands, you might get the impression that you need to make music videos to succeed, whereas, in fact, a video only makes sense after you have achieved a certain level of success—so imitating that will lead you to misallocate your time.
You will also be led astray if you rely on advice and explanations unconnected to an ongoing process. Experts can rarely articulate the behaviors that allow them to perform at a high level. The knowledge is tacit. The explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; they do not produce the results.
But if you look at the performance, if you get close to it, it is all there.
Looking at the final product to reverse engineer the process can be an impossible task. This is why seeing doctors and surgeons practice medicine and operate is so important. Why it’s so critical to have good readouts when you first start radiology training.
You need to be exposed to the unfiltered expert approach. The “teaching” isn’t just the discrete teaching points and other pearls; it’s seeing the expert practicing natively that helps create the scaffolding to incorporate book learning, real world experience, and ultimately be able to learn the most from the emotional microtraumas of repeated failure that are an unavoidable part of medical training.