Knowledge vs. Skill (Theory vs. Practice)
Knowledge is what you know theoretically. It is a conceptual understanding. Knowledge is the bridge between observation and action. The better your absorb the patterns you see, the better you will do in literally everything.
Skill is being able to apply your knowledge into something useful, something practical.
Knowledge vs. Skill
I thought about this when I was first working on Kurius and arguing for Project-Based Learning.
When you read about philosophy or more of the social sciences, I would argue that these things are more knowledge.
Engineering teaches more skills. Actually, skill is harder to teach, to some extent.
Knowing the principles of bricks and cement (theory) does not mean that you can build a grand palace.
From Visual SLAM book: “In SLAM, we believe that engineering implementation and understanding of algorithm principles should be at least the same important.
- The algorithms are like blocks in the building. We can discuss their properties clearly, but just understanding the basic units will not enable you to build an entire building.
I think justifying practical knowledge is obvious. But what about practical → theory direction? Do you even need to know the principles?
- Yes, because, else you don’t really know how to get started even
Ideas related to Foundational Knowledge.
Understanding vs. Doing
There is also my page on Learning vs. Having the Impression of Learning.
This is the idea that it takes a lot of time to do understand something. Like you can plug and play a Neural Net, even if you don’t understand it at all.
However, to pioneer and make new contributions, you need to understand at a deep level.
Andrej Karpathy keeps saying, the single source of truth is the code itself. Unless you know how to write the code, you don’t truly understand.
- I also recently realized that unless you can really explain something to someone, then you don’t really understand.
But on the other side, you don’t have time to understand everything. You only have a finite time on Earth, and you want to spend more time doing.
Understanding is extremely important if you get stuck, if you run into problems. Also, as you run a YouTube channel, you need to be explain to others what you are doing.
- But I mean, you don’t really need to explain every single detail, the audience doesn’t really care about that, they just want to see it work.
Geoffrey Hinton also says this here: If you really want to understand something, you should build it.
- If you really want to understand how the brain works, you should build a brain
- You don’t really understand how a car works unless you build one, and really understand what is going on under the hood