Best idea I've heard in a long time

Apr 20, 2012 22:51

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c1 April 21 2012, 02:57:50 UTC
In my friendships, I probably have 1-2 years' experience, over and over.
Of all the paradigms you've listed, this one gives me the most pause, especially regarding you and me.

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awfief April 21 2012, 09:09:05 UTC
Our friendship is deep and meaningful, and long. Individually we've been there for each other while the others' life has been complicated. But as far as friendships go, I don't feel like I've had to develop a lot of friendship skills in order to be friends with you.

For example, you aren't a high-maintenance person with lots of crises...I have a hard time being patient enough to be friends with a person like that. In general I lack skills to be more than acquaintances with a LOT of different types of people.

It's easy to be friends with you, is what I'm saying :) Does that help?

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hammercock April 21 2012, 03:17:56 UTC
For relationships, there were definitely those in which I had the same n years of experience over and over. This time, with trowa_barton I would say that I have 5 years of marriage experience and 10 years of relationship experience. It's a nice change. :)

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lyonesse April 21 2012, 05:15:56 UTC
what an interesting perspective! thanks for sharing it :)

fwiw, i have about twenty-five years of experience in science, and every minute counts. but a better way to look at that would be to look at it in terms of minutes, since many years i've done science maybe quarter-time or whatever, so that math gets complicated.

my marriage is about one year of experience over fourteen years of relationship, but i'm still trying to get all the subtleties within. my spouse is a simple and a subtle creature :)

i have about twelve tricks as a geek, all of which were founded in my first three years or so, so maybe that's three years of experience?

actually i sort of want to count things in terms of "experiments" or "projects" or "tricks" rather than "years" in all cases. hmmm.

thanks again :)

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awfief April 21 2012, 09:21:38 UTC
I think counting things in terms of experiments or projects or tricks is inherently understanding that years are not the best metric. Take those 12 tricks as a geek, for example - you learned them in 3 years, but is that what most people learn them in? It may be that in those three years, it's actually more like 18 months or 2 years' experience.....or maybe it's 1 day of reading a man page....is a "trick" just knowledge, like "how to use grep/sed/awk", or is it more like "how to debug" or the basics of data structures and algorithms ( ... )

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lyonesse April 22 2012, 22:23:51 UTC
wow, so much to think about here :)

some experiments don't require creativity. other times, each result challenges what you thought you knew before, so you have to create new understanding of your phenomenon to even imagine what hypotheses might now apply, in order to decide what experiment to construct next. i once spent about eight months in perfect bafflement that way, in graduate school, and if it weren't for some random conversations with other people might never have moved on at all. as it was, i not only got a lot of mental movement done myself, i changed the way we think about the way the brain processes syntax and language errors. so i'd have to say that's some kind of "experience"!

possibly one might measure in terms of "ah-ha" moments, or new insights....?

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awfief April 23 2012, 00:11:21 UTC
Yes, something like that. Learning new thinking patterns. Getting your brain to forge new electronic pathways amongst your neurons (I think I got that right) is really what I mean by experience.

You can do a whole book of logic problems and still only have 1 skill. It's being challenged and having to think differently that really makes a difference.

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