Intellectual Fencing
What is the difference between understanding and experiencing?
What is the value of something you don’t understand? What is the difference between understanding and experiencing?
The sport of intellectual fencing is good for some things, and bad for most. When we operate in the subjective domains (giving advice, designing, consulting), it is interruptive all the way down.
An overly intellectual practitioner (stuck in the head, can’t embody meaning) will forego intuition in favor of a book (or a PhD, or an expert quote). Then they would study that book as a source of authority–still foregoing intuition–and ask everyone else around them to do the same.
The cost is vast. Firstly, it becomes expensive to make progress on things that should be intuitive and subjective. Knowledge becomes debilitating. Unless we’re doing science, we should be able to bridge the objective (expertise, and data-driven) with the subjective (interpretive, and interpersonal) with a simple mental check-in.