Chris Arnade has a blog (newsletter) called Chris Arnade Walks the World, and his beat is, well, walking and the world. Those are two topics that I am a big fan of, walking and the world. I appreciate that Chris writes his observations and includes ordinary1 pictures of what he sees out there. Pictures are not the point of his blog, they’re just incidental. I like them. In fact, it’s the main reason I originally signed up to receive his blog in my electronic mail box.
- Techne is technical, scientific, and formal knowledge. It describes methods, procedures, and rules that can be systematically learned and applied. It tends to be codified, explicit, formal, standardized, top-down, abstracted, generalized, and universally applicable.
- Metis is practical, experiential, tacit knowledge. It’s the accumulated wisdom or know-how that comes from practice or lived experience. It entails adaptability and the ability to respond intuitively in context. It tends to be local, situational, informal, decentralized.
Those pictures usually come with a lot of words, like a lot a lot of words but not as many as Scott Alexander. The quote above, it comes from the footnotes of the linkpost,2 and its origin is right near the beginning. I agree3 with this observation, both formal and experiential learning are necessary to understand. Neither alone is good enough.
jg
footnotes
This is a compliment of his subject matter. He takes document pictures of regular things. ↩︎
Man, something about a good footnote. Chris’s post has eleven! There’s even a picture! ↩︎
I don’t think I agree with all the things that Chris concludes or steers toward. But I am mostly there for the pictures and pick up some words here and there too. I do appreciate that he write carefully and I can understand his points well enough to disagree if that is what I do. Keep writing, Chris. And taking pictures. ↩︎
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