Let’s take a simple example: you go into a grocery store in Italy. You look where the fridge is and grab a piece of butter. You go to the cashier, pay and leave.

You know the universal rules: butter must be in a fridge, one needs to pay before getting out. One does not have to speak Italian to get by in Italy.

Rules are first of all something you need to understand. You do not necessarily have to know their reasons. You learn and subsequently understand the rules by standing by, you grasp them by watching your parents or people etc.

In following the rules you acquire competence to put them to action. Some animals even seem to have competence that is present at birth. In that case they do not even have to understand. I find that hard to believe.

Termitenhügel
Buildings by Termites and Humans

In any case, understanding and competence is an important first step in any endeavour. If you want to achieve something, understand the rules and get competent.

One other thing is if you want to break the rules or write new ones: in that case you need to comprehend the existing rules, you need to know their reasons.

So I make the distinction between understanding/competence on the one hand and reasoning/comprehension on the other.

I have this from Immanuel Kant, he made his most important distinction between wits (“Verstand”) and reason (“Vernunft”). Wits is to understand the rules to deal with stuff appearing at some time somewhere. To grasp some-thing is important here, and sensation – pls. appreciate the Prussian vindicating the double meaning of the English word “sense” as something bodily (appreciation) as well as spiritual (meaning). Then comes reason, which is to comprehend the rules of wit, to subordinate and sum them into principles. So he learns us. He stresses that pure reasoning is important but can easily lead even the most competent astray. Hence “Critique of Pure Reason”.

And indeed, economic practice like paying at the cashier seldom does harm, but while conceiving a homo economicus in principle is very useful, it is very harmful to try to produce such an ideal rational investor in practice. Same for praying/holyness, social/socialist.

Kant finds that “ideas in individuo” make the “good in the idea suspicious”. He advises that instead of “realising the ideal as appearance”, one should go one level up and imagine an ideal god. But one must not conceive such a deity as a thing in space and time or even as necessary, but instead a useful possibility (given the alternatives).

I’d like to add that ideas underlying a practice are expendable: the rules for estimating the necessary energy to speed up a train have been the same for 200 years, but the principles had to change from Newtonian to relativistic Einstein reasoning.

Two more hints to avoid pifalls of pure reasoning: the world as a whole (like god and soul) does not exist in space and time. You give money to charity because of bad conciousness and generosity both at the same time (yes, cause-effect and free-will coexist).

So, sticking to best practice can be rewarding. I think one is in a good place when one encounters a new situation and one is given some simple rules to understand. One can start to do something successful immediately.

On the other hand, it is important to not get complacent by a comfortable situation: the one who does not go with the time, goes – with time. After all, the rules for estimating the bang of colliding protons were not known 200 years ago. Not even the rules, that is, far from knowing the prnciples. The rules were, in this case, only establiched by principled reasoning.

But we are not that type of complacent person, because we strive for comprehension, right?

So, being thus not afraid of best practice as a convenient first step, competence it is. We want ways to learn by first understanding without the burdon of arduous reasoning. That is hard enough already in itself. Let that be the slogan of our preferred way of learning: “First the rules, then the principles: Competence before Comprehension”.