There is No Reason You Should Understand What a Teacher “Teaches”

If a teacher presents a precise definition, there is little reason to believe you will understand it in that moment. That precision has taken decades to become refined into a statement that avoids most/all inconsistencies and is robust to examples. At this point, the definition has been stripped of the context and surrounding juxtaposition that gives it meaning. Its purpose is not clarity, but robustness.

If you want to understand what the teacher is presenting, you need to have a high variability in the conversations and/or sources of information you are exposed to, where different words and examples are used to describe the same concept.

You do not understand something by a thing’s refined definition, you understand it because the countless examples have all indirectly spoken to some same unlabelled truth.

Learning has everything to do with invariance, and nothing to do with direct observation.

Return to those precise definitions later, when you know far more than it communicates.