4.a 获得知识的基本途径

所谓的体验，通俗地说就是来自我们五官的感觉——视觉、听觉、触觉、嗅觉、味觉。当我们看到某一事物的时候，“看到”本身就是一种体验。

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20110927235225/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/434.html

Make Time Your Friend 4.a: The Basic Ways to Gain Knowledge

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-18 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20110927235225/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/434.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

**Everyone's most basic means of acquiring knowledge is through "experience."**

So-called experience, in plain words, is the sensation coming from our five senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. When we see something, "seeing" is itself a kind of experience. So we know the Great Wall is magnificent, the "Ode to Joy" is pleasing to the ear, a newly bought computer feels good to the touch, the smell of ammonia water is unbearable, Sichuan cuisine or some other famous cuisines are delicious. You can imagine what a span of time and space humans had to cross from eating raw meat and drinking blood to fully understanding that cooked food is good for digestion and health—obtaining and using fire was the greatest limitation, and how long did it take for the understanding of fire to go from fear to mastery?

**A means of acquiring knowledge a bit more advanced than "experience" is "trial and error" (Trial and error).**

A college classmate of mine once astonished everyone at a gathering at a friend's home. To prove she could cook, she said she'd make kung pao chicken for everyone. Of course everyone was very happy. A few minutes later a scream came from the kitchen; everyone rushed in and found her with her finger in her mouth, moaning with tears in her eyes. We were all puzzled and didn't know what had happened. Only later did we figure out that she had poured the oil into the wok and then lit the gas stove. After a while, not sure whether the oil in the wok was hot yet, she stuck out a finger and dipped it in to test……

I guess this classmate of mine will never again in her life stick a finger into a wok of oil to test whether it's hot. That's trial and error: after trying, you know it was wrong, and then you don't make the mistake again. Of course, perhaps after trying you find that not only was it not wrong, it was quite right, and then you have one more new piece of knowledge. "Trial and error" is so important that so-called "education" in the most ancient times relied on the whip—when you did right, rewards were stingy, but when you did wrong, you were punished. Even today, many parents still treat punishment as one of their main means of education.

"Trial and error" often takes courage. So Mr. Lu Xun said that "the first person to eat a crab" is admirable—"who but a warrior would dare eat it?" Mr. Lu Xun went on, "The first person to eat crab surely ate spiders too, because the two look extremely alike; it's just that he found crab tasted good and spider didn't."

**On the basis of "trial and error," another, "cleverer" and much more important way of acquiring knowledge is through "observation."**

After the classmate I just mentioned had burned her finger, another girl in the room murmured, "Oh, so you're not supposed to use your finger……" Everyone was taken aback again, and then finally the whole room burst out laughing; even the girl who'd just been burned couldn't help herself.

"Observation" extends the range of what we can "experience." So we can often gain experience or lessons from others' experiences, and thereby add to our own knowledge. However, "experience," "trial and error" and "observation" all have limits. First, not all knowledge can be gained through personal experience. For example, what the structure of the Earth actually is, nobody can experience; what the temperature of the sun actually is can only be inferred. Second, some knowledge is hard to gain through trial and error. It's unimaginable for a stock investor to make decisions through trial and error, because the consequences of being wrong are often unbearable. Finally, not all knowledge can be gained through observation either. Historians can't personally observe history from hundreds of years ago; before Galileo invented the high-powered telescope, the outer space that could be observed with the naked eye was also quite limited.

**So "reading" became a more important means of acquiring knowledge, and of course also a means that relatively requires more mental ability.**

Species other than humans can only accumulate experience in the most backward yet so-called magical way: genetic inheritance. Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan mention in the book [MEAN GENE](http://www.meangenes.org/) that woodpeckers can instinctively use the optimal algorithm to obtain food—while an MIT doctor of mathematics facing the same problem may not be able to solve it quickly; and how does a woodpecker's little head, without higher education, get the result? The answer is: through genetic inheritance.

Humans can of course accumulate experience through genetic inheritance. Although babies have never seen a snake, they burst out crying as soon as they see one; babies have never seen a gun either, but they aren't afraid of this thing that's who knows how many times more dangerous than a snake—humans have been bitten by snakes who knows how many times over the generations; whereas people have recognized the danger of guns for less than two hundred years so far, not enough time to form an "innate" fear that can be passed on through genetic inheritance.

The appearance of writing set humans apart from other animals. The appearance of writing meant that the accumulation of human experience no longer relied only on genetic inheritance. Humans began to use writing to record and accumulate information, gain knowledge, spread experience…… The information explosion has put us in the most astonishingly progressive era in human history; the phrase "changing with each passing day" is no longer enough—"changing with each passing minute and second" isn't an overstatement.

After humans finally had writing, they did not immediately receive the benefits they should have. The spread and accumulation of knowledge did not suddenly become too easy. From knotting cords to keep records to carving stones to praise virtue, from bamboo slips exhausted in listing crimes to scholars in silk headscarves debating, from rice paper recording history to leather hides storing maps, the carriers of writing were never easy to preserve or convenient to spread. The novel *Journey to the West* vividly tells such a story: in an era when spreading writing was extremely difficult, how arduous acquiring knowledge was.

However, today, the ease of spreading writing has reached an unprecedented height. It can be said that the internet changed everything. Word processors, blog programs (blog engine) and search engines have made writing, and the recording, spreading, sharing and retrieval of experience and knowledge, easier than ever before. Anyone with a little common sense can "publish" written records [Translator's note: the original writes 文字记, dropping the final 录 of 文字记录 ("written records"); translated by the intended sense] of their own "experience," "trial and error" and "observation." Behind the simple, clean interface of a search engine is information on almost a cosmic scale (the word "massive" is no longer enough). The spirit of knowledge sharing has been carried forward as never before, and the most direct and most significant product is the free [Wikipedia](http://www.wikipedia.org). Today, anyone with enough reading ability can gain "doctoral"-level knowledge that was hard to get in the past.

All internet users who have used "[Fantong](http://www.fantong.com)" (饭统网) or "[Dianping](http://www.dianping.com)" (大众点评网) can appreciate the benefits of using writing to share information and experience. Even if you've lived in a big city like Beijing since childhood, there's no way to know every good place to eat and drink. Without this sharing of writing, people would have to go back to the "Stone Age" and lose many chances to enjoy life. Sayings like "he who hasn't been to the Great Wall is no true man" are, today, when writing (and pictures, videos and other information-recording media) is so developed, rather baffling.

In such an era, "reading" breaks through the various limits of individual "experience" or mere "trial and error." "Experience" is often limited to oneself, and "trial and error" is limited to one's own experience of life. But through "reading," we can learn the results of others' "experience" and "trial and error" (so-called "experience"). We can cross time and space, not to mention race and nation—translation tools are more and more advanced, and the number of people who master two or more languages keeps growing.

The precondition of "reading" is that the experience of predecessors recorded in writing already exists. And writing makes rapid accumulation of experience possible—"the fear of snakes (reptiles)" may take hundreds of generations to become "innate knowledge" through memory inheritance, but with writing, within one generation it's possible to accumulate and gain knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. Modern people need only about fifteen years in total of primary school, middle school and university to have the chance, at school, to take into their own heads all the knowledge possessed by historical giants such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, or Darwin, Mendeleev, even Einstein.

Writing is so important. But another obvious fact is that about fifteen years in total of primary school, middle school and university seemingly can't, and haven't, "educated" another Copernicus, another Galileo, another Newton, or another Darwin, another Mendeleev, or even another Einstein. Obviously, there should be a more important way of acquiring knowledge, so difficult to use and to teach that even the "formal education" system, carefully designed by generation after generation of elites who poured their hearts into it one after another, often ends in failure.