Difference between scientific learning and empirical learning

Thinking of my own learning experience, one of the most important things I summarised is the difference between scientific learning and empirical learning.

Back to the date when I was studying physics olympiad during high school, those scientific concepts were either intuitive or abstract. Specifically, I don’t even think I have fully understood the rotating reference frame after a certain period of time.

While it’s true that people are being aware that there are differences between those science disciplines and humanity ones (DDC might be relevant), they are not covering all kinds of topics (at least not to normal folks). One obvious category is “empirical”, which is usually containing large portion of non-scientific stuffs. Examples of empirical learning are: cooking, gymastic, etc.

The reason it matters is that, we nerds are very unhappy when finding the world cannot be all formalised by rules. When I restarted street workout two years ago, I was struggling for long time about the metric for my progress. Of course, the max number of pull-up or dips can be good at the early stage. But later when the progress becomes slow, I might fail to see visible progress for long time.

There are tutorials, a lot, repeatly, on Douyin (Chinese TikTok) or Youtube. During the period I was having the highest passion, my dinner time belongs to those videos. While, again (I know I don’t have to always do this, but it’s easier to motivate my idea), I categorise the videos into the following breeds:

1. For beginners. The most frequent video is about how to do your first pull-up/muscle-up.
2. Skill progression. They are describing a routine on step 1,2,3 to finally achieve the concrete skill
3. High-level training methods. For example, people are having different opinions on whether the skill is a result of the progressions or basic strength+adaptive training. Or like, strength training is only 5*5 or mixing 5 reps with 8-12 reps in a circle.
4. Error correction. Some are about differences between bad form and good form. Also including those high-level tips (e.g., warm up is important).

Let’s skip for one second. If you know someone whose cooking is awful, have you found any common characters on them? Actually, cooking can be complex, but if you just want to have a good meal, it’s not hard, since there are so many recipes/videos to follow step-by-step. A common group of people who cook awfully are those “too creative to follow the instructions”. Of course, being innovative is good, but when not being knowledgeable enough, errors on the basic operations are very likely to happen. This is similar for street workout. The worst thing can happen is that, by watching so many videos, the trainer can be confused by the different opinions.

While at the beginning of my personal training I was spending much time on concluding some universal rules to follow, now I am more and more aware of the fact that for empirical learning, the most important thing is actually not to do something. You can be creative, but only by avoiding the common mistakes you are then guaranteed to be on the right track.

(Is this article motivated by incorrectness logic? I dunno.)