[Cruiser]

Originally Posted by PiP.Squeak »

So I have to actually hit my own thumb with a hammer in order to know it hurts? I can't watch someone else do it and learn from all the cursing and dancing around the room with a throbbing thumb that smashing the crap out of it is probably not a good thing to do? ...

I think you are confusing knowledge with experiance. The question was about experiance not knowledge.

You can have the knowledge that hitting your thumb will cause pain but knowing that does not give you the experiance having it happen nor the skill of preventing it. Have you every done a job that requires a great deal of hammering? I'm neither a craftsman nor a carpenter and most of my hammering involves things like hanging a picture on a wall. But many years ago I built a large wooden shed from scratch. I had to hammer in literally hundreds and hundreds of long nails. I knew ahead of time that hitting my fingers with the hammer would hurt and never did it intentionally but did it far too often. But as the hours of hammering progressed I figured out techniques to hold the nails and hammer that resulted in fewer and fewer finger hits. As I gained some experiance at hammering I became better and better at not hitting my fingers. That period of experiance lasted only a couple days and at the end my fingers were hurting and the carpentry was less than square and true. Just imagine how better things would have been on that one particular job if I'd been building sheds and doing other carpentry for a few years beforehand. I might not have hit my finger once and my shed might have been perfectly square and even.

You might not need experiance to know what the consequences or rewards of an action will be but knowing and doing are two different things. Sometimes being able to do well, and constantly, requires a level of expertise and accomplishment that can only be developed through experiance.