metonymy4u

Our culture tends to value knowledge over skill. This is a habit learned from 2500 years of Neo-Platonism. The notion that the “truth will set you free” is as unshakeable from our social lexicon as the idea of some “special genius” as the motivating force behind fame, wealth and success. Yet contemporary psychologists have discovered that the success of experts in their field is not so much due to the possession of a superior intellectual problem solving heuristic as it is to the fact that they have practiced certain skills over and over again. Skillful performance is actually more valuable than truth. It adds a new slant to the old joke, “when in doubt, do right!”