No, I am afraid you misunderstand or 'fill in ' in ways that are fictional.
What was stated is that watching is not learned, I am surprised a professor
of English didn't notice the passive voice.
watching is not learned in general, even less in the particular instance
under discussion of chess.
What may or may not be learned is what to appreciate in what one sees, and
in chess, or so I surmise, it may take playing in order to be able to do it.
whether one adds to understanding by watching is a completely different
question, my own presumptive answer being, maybe if one look in the right
places
best
Quatsch wird gelöscht, ohne gelesen zu werden
пора
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 5:16 PM david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Jun 16, 2020, at 5:33 AM, adriano paolo shaul gershom palma <
palmaadriano@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In spite of spiteful suggestions there is lots of watching which is not
learned in any meaningful way.
Lawrence's point is magnificent, nothing trains one in watching war and
even less in watching intelligence being collected or analyzed.
Quite interestingly, i found out out today there is a public that watches
chess (as exciting as watching paint dry unless you play yourself) on the
internet, I for one very often watch Sven Øen Carlsen and found watching
him exciting.
Compare and contrast (here David Ricthie is zeroing on the right note)
soccer playing is far less widespread that soccer watching-
I find all three responses interesting. I’m puzzled by Adriano’s opening
line. My brain fills in “there is lots of watching does not lead to
additional knowledge or understanding,” but I may have misunderstood. If I
am right we are in the realm of the artist who says that looking and seeing
are not the same thing. When I went to the Galapagos I took a watercolor
pad rather than a camera. I wanted to be still and understand a little of
what I was seeing. The rules barely allowed what I wished—tour groups have
to stay on the path and move through at the pace a guide dictates. We
reached a compromise that allowed me to paint. I can’t say I discovered
anything extraordinary while looking slowly, but the longer I looked, the
more I saw.
Lawrence’s piece brings to mind lots of writing about distinguishing
people who have been in the forces from those who have been in combat.
There are two contradictory versions of this: "everyone in the force
contributes" or "our combat experience is significantly different from
yours in the clerical department." During the Civil War the distinction
was expressed thus: soldiers who had been in combat had “seen the
elephant.” Later this phrase was painted on some wagons on the Oregon
Trail. People who had walked from St. Louis to Oregon believed they were,
like people who had visited a sideshow or a cabinet of curiosities,
experiencing what others had not. They claimed deeper or at least
different understanding.
I mentioned racism because it’s a topic on everyone’s mind at present. We
know that race has no biological basis and that racism is “systemic,” (the
quotation marks are there just so you see the word fully) which is a
biological term of course. It seems to me that the argument here
https://www.cwu.edu/diversity/sites/cts.cwu.edu.diversity/files/documents/constructingwhiteness.pdf
draws its central metaphor from physics—racism is like a (I can’t see any
way around the unfortunate wording) black hole—you know it’s there because
it has effects on everything. I understand why the physics metaphor is
wrong—it suggests that the current state of affairs is not only natural, as
does the biological metaphor—but it implies it’s unchangeable, which—along
with the associations of black makes it entirely the wrong metaphor.
As you see I’m grappling with the idea of “racism by consequence."
Racism has in common with the combat distinction the fact that some people
live it differently from others, and it has in common with the
seeing/looking distinction that it’s possible to miss much of what is there.
I understand how you can encourage people who look but don’t see to look
longer and harder. And I understand how you can learn what the intense
experience of combat is like. Thus when people say racism won’t go away
until those of you who are not on the receiving end every day of their
lives “do the work,” I think they mean bridge the gap not between watching
or reading and moving towards a deeper understanding. Is that what you
understand?
David
