Experience is the greatest teacher.
There are 3 types of experiences we can have, and they all have their pros and cons.
First-hand experiences
These are direct and personal.
We get these kinds of experiences every time we face a new challenge, try something new, or go outside our comfort zone.
The pro is that these are the strongest and most impactful of the three. We learn a lot from these teachings (or, at least, we should). They are mandatory on your path to mastery and excellence.
The cons are that they can be very risky, hurtful and sometimes pretty dangerous. Also, they are very time-consuming.
Second-hand experiences
These occur when someone shares with us their first-hand experience.
When our mother warned us as children not to touch a hot pan for fear of injury, we learned a lesson without suffering any personal harm.
The pro is that, through second-hand experiences, we can learn faster and access lessons that would be too time-consuming or expansive for us. Books are an amazing source of high-quality lessons. This includes novels, too.
The cons are that we don’t integrate these lessons very quickly into our lives unless we empower them with precise, first-hand experiences. Also, the world is full of misleading, false and damaging second-hand lessons. After all, if you trust the wrong people, you learn the wrong lessons and make mistakes that can be permanent (the COVID era with all the pro-vax misinformation that is still destroying millions of lives is the perfect example).
Third-hand experiences
This is new, and it’s all about AI.
Why third-hand? AI is a fancy word for software that answers your questions by taking second-hand experiences, filtering them through a complex algorithm and giving you synthetic answers.
I see no pros in third-hand experience.
But I see a lot of cons. Starting from the fact that the algorithms are written by people with conscious or unconscious agendas. Which, in return, will influence the results and give you very railroaded, woke-intensive and misleading answers.