True education isn’t just transmitting information. It’s the information filtered through experience that makes it real.
Experience matters because it allows us to convert all that expensive type-two thinking into long-term memory. It can, in a sense, help convert type-two into type-one thinking—or at least less expensive thinking—by taking a complicated world full of many discrete ideas and concepts and chunking them into a smaller number of discrete elements.
When radiologists read a scan, we do not evaluate each individual pixel as we gain experience; we are able to take in larger and larger swaths of structures as units for interpretation and pick up discrepancies that don’t match our mental model of what something should look like.
This is why chess grandmasters can, at a glance, recreate a chessboard after viewing it for only a few seconds, but novices can only remember a handful of pieces. It’s why “1-9-8-5” is a string of four numbers, but 1985 is my birth year.
One of the unappreciated components of a liberal arts education or general skills is that someone who is generally skilled or smart is actually somebody with a large volume of mental models and a large amount of relevant information stored in long-term memory that they are capable of bringing to bear on novel situations.
Learning to think is an organic, holistic process of taking on more and more things and doing the hard, meaningful-but-not-always-fun work to integrate them into the person you are. There is no shortcut for that. That’s why using AI to write something that’s actually important doesn’t really work for many people, and that’s one reason why a score on a standardized test is a helpful but woefully incomplete metric.
As a trainee, I disliked interpreting spine imaging. This is in part because there are a lot of discrete decision points to make at every level regarding canal and neural foraminal stenoses, the location of disc pathology, the degree of joint degeneration, and so on and so forth. That’s a lot of work if each decision requires deliberation, and it’s psychologically unfulfilling when your attending changes all your grades.
But then you read thousands of scans, and much of that type-two thinking is well chunked into a near-automatic type-one process. It doesn’t even feel like thinking—you see a canal, and you see a foramen, and you know what it is. That’s why, as an attending, reading a degenerative spine can have more in common with meditation than nearly any part of my job.
Learning curves are high, and there’s enough internal cognitive load that we can only learn so much at a time. When everything is new and challenging, everything is hard, and everything takes time and energy. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is, as yet, very wrong that “the most highly technical part of the job has gone away.” There is as yet no mastery of any topic—no inborn system-one ability or computer skill that you can simply offload parts of the scan to.
The experiences mediate the learning and move the learner down the pathway from effortful to intuitive abilities.
This is why, when a well-trained radiologist reviews a scan, only a small fraction of the findings actually require thought. The rest conform to the library of pattern matching they can bring to bear.