Right, I think—as usual the devil’s in the implementational details!

Even if your piece is a bit extreme, I think that’s important to “jolt” us into thinking about it in the first place, then we can drill down.

This also makes me think about the behavioral learning liteature in psych, which basically boils down to what we’ve been talking about: Learning something yourself (ie you’re the one in the middle of the stimulus-response pattern) is almost always the the strongest, but vicarious learning can also be especially strong in some instances (we humans seem to have a particualrly good knack for this comapred to other species). I think Bandura is the one who spearheaded a lot of this research. Also, the research on Mirror Neurons role in observational learning is pretty interesting stuff…