When abstraction needs a reality check
On the true value of ideas vs experiences
There is something about a lot of intellectual discourse and content—and here I’m referring to courses, lectures and panel talks at, say, conferences or academic symposia or whatever—that makes them uniquely frustrating, especially for someone who’s maybe more interested in learning about the actual landscape of reality, rather than the sort of abstract, epistemological rambling that often passes for insight, is that they seem to be intentionally designed to frustrate the very human desire for, if not narrative, then at least something approximating clarity. The kind of clarity that, ironically, usually comes from examples, anecdotes, or some kind of illustrative data that helps tether the abstract theory to, you know, reality.
To illustrate my frustration: when I’m at a panel discussion on, say, the future of manufacturing, and none of the speakers tell me about some actual factories they’ve visited, or the specific challenges faced by workers on the floor, or even just one real-world instance where a new technology or process has transformed how something gets made, I start to feel like the speakers are less about helping me actually understand what’s happening—or what could happen—in the world of manufacturing, but rather about racking self-promotional material. Abstractions and projections and theoretical frameworks without any tangible, lived experience to ground it, makes the whole thing feel less like a meaningful conversation and more like an intellectual exercise that, frankly, leaves me none the wiser.
Yet, to attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to malice, it strikes me as though as speakers are not really equipped with much life experience to be able to share it. This leaves me with nothing but skepticism on the quality of their thoughts and postured theory.
In a 2 day course I took about advanced strategy execution, the author—much to my pain—gave us a booklet stacked with very theoretical bullet points that were supposed to teach me how strategies are executed in an advanced way. The three case studies he presented— conveniently with LLM-generated sounding names: “Solutions AI” “Health AI” and another company that was a basic name + AI—had very theoretically failed strategies with very theoretical causal analysis, and they were supposed to teach us a side of the world we never saw. I later learned that the lecturer never really executed a strategy, let alone a successful one. It felt somewhat disrespectful to us.
In a world where a whole compressed library, in the most literal sense, exists in the palm of our hands, philosophical contributions means much less than our actual experiences. Those who broaden their friction surface with the world strike me as the most interesting conversationalists and most valuable to my own growth.
And it’s not that theory itself is not valuable—if anything, quality thinking always resonates with my thoughts and gives them building blocks for even more quality thought. It just seems to me like there is sometimes an incomprehensible urge to share only our interpretations of the world, to collapse our wisdom into abstractions. But to be fair, not every one is given a setting with a comfy timeframe to share their experiences as well as their conclusions. In the end, the best thinkers are the ones who can do both—who can show and tell—who can balance the abstract and the concrete in a way that feels both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant. It’s a kind of intellectual generosity that makes the listener feel like they’re being let in on something real, rather than being talked at from some lofty, unapproachable height.
The irony here being that I’m now telling you this without providing much concrete examples. But you get the point.
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P.S. I think that valuable experience doesn’t need to be felt first-hand, even a citation of an anecdote was seen or heard or read about adds much more compounding value to the wisdom being shared.