Experience vs Knowledge

[Tenebrarius]

It’s all about knowledge, I finished reading Gray’s Anatomy— Im ready to perform neurosurgery.

I'll be sure to keep you in mind next time I find myself with a brain tumor

 

[Dennis Nedry]

You need a balance of both. Experience is good and all but experience isn’t always going to prepare you for a new species/genus you’ve never kept anything like before. Same goes for knowledge, I could read as many Wikipedia pages about the different species of mamba but is that going to prepare me for working around them? No. What I’m wondering about knowledge vs experience is couldn’t experience be counted as knowledge as it is knowledge you gain through practice?

 

[Tenebrarius]

You need a balance of both. Experience is good and all but experience isn’t always going to prepare you for a new species/genus you’ve never kept anything like before. Same goes for knowledge, I could read as many Wikipedia pages about the different species of mamba but is that going to prepare me for working around them? No. What I’m wondering about knowledge vs experience is couldn’t experience be counted as knowledge as it is knowledge you gain through practice?

stop you'll break the matrix.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

Both is definitely key. I spent a great deal of time researching Ts, lurking on here, watching videos and the like, but none of that prepared me for the absolute new parent terror of actually getting a tarantula.

 

[cold blood]

Experience equals knowledge.

Reading is great, research is great, but the most important knowledge will come directly from experience.

 

[Greasylake]

You can read all you want, and take all the courses you want, but if you apply to American Airlines with 0 hours of flight time, they'll laugh at you and tell you to go away. The conceptual side of it is important yes, but it can't replace hands on experience.

 

[EulersK]

So, here's the best analogy I can come up with.

We've all been there in math class. You've done the homework, you've attended the lectures, and it's time for the midterm. You feel prepared, but when you go over the exam, you have no idea how to do most of the problems. It's more than just nerves, you legitimately don't know how to solve the majority of the exam. How can that be?

It's a perfect example of experience versus knowledge. You gained the knowledge by attending the lectures, but knowledge is like a horse with blinders on. You can only see the correct answer, the path on front of you. The reason you're going to fail that midterm is because you lack the experience, which would have come with more studying. Experience allows you to deal with variables you've never seen before. Going back to the horse with blinders, experience would be everything behind those blinders. In other words, it's often hard to see the right answer when you're presented with a million wrong ones. So, with that being said, I believe experience trumps knowledge. You can gain knowledge from reading a book, but nothing will help you see the big picture other than getting your hands dirty and actually doing the task.

Whoa. Anogy within an analogy. Pretty sure there's an English major out there I just gave an anxiety attack.

 

[WildSpider]

Just like anything else, one needs a balance of theory and practice. One is not more important than the other. The theory will prepare you for what to expect with tarantula husbandry, but the practice will show you the theory is often times wrong. For example, reading about how to capture a fast, defensive, high strung tarantula in a cup to rehouse is one thing, it will prepare someone on what to expect, but doing it is quite different! Sometimes that species you read to be a handful to work with turns out to be an easier experience. It works the other way around too where a species known to be docile turns out to be high strung and quick to run and bite.

Exactly what I'm trying to get at. Mostly. As I said I am awful at wording on keyboard, I feel like an idiot knowing I could have said something similar. Lol

I agree with you guys that both knowledge and experience are important .

I only skimmed this thread so please forgive me if my opinion doesn't really apply to the discussion but I would like to share my ideas on sharing advice. Before becoming a member of AB a few months ago, I was researching constantly behind the scenes on AB for almost a year and I had also been keeping a T during that time. I originally thought this meant I had enough knowledge/experience to help newbies with their Ts, but after being here for a while, I changed my mind.

It had turned out that some of the info I had found was old. Some of the threads I had looked up were from years like 2004 and I had assumed the information would be pretty stable throughout the decade like info is in some of my other animal husbandry hobbies. It wasn't however. A lot of new information has been learned it appears in just the last decade.

I have decided to mostly stay away from giving newbies advice on Ts just because there is someone else who will come along in a few minutes probably who has had more experience/knowledge than myself. I generally try to just stick to the areas where I think I have a bit more experience/knowledge now.

So, I guess my opinion is to make sure the information you have is up-to-date and accurate before sharing it. I'm still finding out some of my info is outdated and am slowly unlearning it and learning the right info, but it will probably take some time I'm guessing to get it all straightened out.

The reason I thought I would give my opinion on this is because I gave some bad advice to several people when I first got on here because my info was outdated. Sure, I usually tried to look up several threads to make sure I was getting the right answer, but since a bunch of the threads I'd found when researching were older, they sometimes would all give similar outdated advice.

 

[FrDoc]

Not an either/or, but a both/and proposition.

 

[SonsofArachne]

In keeping T's, I gained knowledge through other peoples experience, mostly from people on arachnoboards. If you can apply other people's experience, you can avoid many of the mistakes new keepers make, and become "experienced" much quicker.

 

[MintyWood826]

Knowledge is very important, but only experience will adequately prepare you for some things. Experience is also its own kind of knowledge.

I'd prefer to have an OW's bad rehouse to happen with minimal research and years of experience than minimal experience and years of research, for example.

 

[grayzone]

Say what you want, experience trumps knowledge hands down.
I see way too many people nowadays that know every name change in a revision, can tell you the place of origin on any given spider and all sorts of other know-it-all trivial information, yet they cant keep their spiders alive or are scared to actually deal with them when its game time.

Anybody can read up on spiders online but working with them firsthand is the best teacher

 

[SonsofArachne]

Say what you want, experience trumps knowledge hands down.
I see way too many people nowadays that know every name change in a revision, can tell you the place of origin on any given spider and all sorts of other know-it-all trivial information, yet they cant keep their spiders alive or are scared to actually deal with them when its game time.

Anybody can read up on spiders online but working with them firsthand is the best teacher

I agree, but by the same token I have seen where people will refuse to consider new information or other peoples' observations because of their experience level. They refuse to believe someone with less experience could find something they missed. Not being able to teach a old dog new tricks, as they say.
As I said in my earlier post, when I was new I learned a lot from people with more experience, but that doesn't mean I'm going to accept everything they say as gospel forever, especially if my own observations are different (but even then I still consider the other persons point of view)

 

[grayzone]

Well, would that not boil down to personal hands on experience vs reading others info online/knowledge?

I mean, 95% of what we actually know about these inverts is purely anecdotal anyways.

 

[DeepSea]

I'm new to the board but this discussion pops up and it grinds my gears. People learn at different rate and that goes for both knowledge and experience. One person can carry out complicated physical task after being show a couple of times and another can take days to become proficient. One person can read a manual to operate a machine, put it in the draw never to be needed again because they retained the information. Another will laminate it because they know they will be referencing it regularly. We are all different but in my experience the best thing is to have the ability to know your own limits especially if something living is depending on you getting it right.

 

[antinous]

I'm new to the board but this discussion pops up and it grinds my gears. People learn at different rate and that goes for both knowledge and experience. One person can carry out complicated physical task after being show a couple of times and another can take days to become proficient. One person can read a manual to operate a machine, put it in the draw never to be needed again because they retained the information. Another will laminate it because they know they will be referencing it regularly. We are all different but in my experience the best thing is to have the ability to know your own limits especially if something living is depending on you getting it right.

I get what you mean, but a machine shouldn’t be used as an analogy for a unpredictable animal. Yes, everyone can become more comfortable working with NWs and move up to OWs at different rates and if you have kept other exotic animals, like snakes, it can help prepare you more for tarantulas. Hell, I moved up pretty fast as I’ve worked with other venomous animals. But in the end, you can read up all you want, and it’ll help, but no matter how much you read, it won’t compare to actually doing a rehouse of a flighty tarantula.

 

[DeepSea]

I get what you mean, but a machine shouldn’t be used as an analogy for a unpredictable animal. Yes, everyone can become more comfortable working with NWs and move up to OWs at different rates and if you have kept other exotic animals, like snakes, it can help prepare you more for tarantulas. Hell, I moved up pretty fast as I’ve worked with other venomous animals. But in the end, you can read up all you want, and it’ll help, but no matter how much you read, it won’t compare to actually doing a rehouse of a flighty tarantula.

You have not worked with very many machines then. Complicated machine do more than bite. It's not just exotic animals, a calf can hurt you a bull can kill you without trying. You approach the two differently or pay the price.

 

[antinous]

You have not worked with very many machines then. Complicated machine do more than bite. It's not just exotic animals, a calf can hurt you a bull can kill you without trying. You approach the two differently or pay the price.

Fair enough, I don’t know why I said exotic animals, I’ve been chased by my fair share of cows and bulls so. I don’t have experience working wit heavy machinery, just lab equipment

 

[weibkreux]

Experience and knowledge are both inseparable and what's important is how fast you adapt with what you learned.

 

[Glorious Baboon]

Knowledge and experience go hand in hand in any field if you don’t have a general idea of how things work why attempt it, that’s like sending a guy who knows nothing about electrical but has experience in general construction to change out a braker box leading to catching your house on fire cause he doesn’t know a negative from a positive wire with knowledge you gain experience with experience you gain knowledge