How guessing helps you move better
Do you remember the experiment where lots of people guess how many jellybeans are in a jar? The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jellybeans. You have a distribution curve, with a cluster of outliers and a cluster of guesses that are more accurate.
The thing is, you need a lot of guesses to see the curve. Ten guesses won't do it. A hundred or five hundred might. More guesses equals more accuracy.
The point here is that when you are calculating the mean, the outliers matter. You need all the random, wrong guesses to see the curve clearly.
With lots and lots of contributors, Wikipedia crowd-sources knowledge the same way. The more contributors, the more accurate the article. It turns out, it works. Both Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, where articles are sourced by experts, have been analyzed for errors. Using scientific articles as a reference, Wikipedia ends up with four errors per article, and Encyclopedia Britannica ends up with three. So not much difference. (Although, reason follows that Wikipedia contributors consulted the Encyclopedia Britannica...)
The invisible hand of self-correction
Paradoxically, the only way for Wikipedia articles to work is if the system self-corrects. The owners of the site do not exert authority over the articles. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says that this is a self-optimizing mechanism.
Why am I saying this? Because for decades, Moshe Feldenkrais implored us to, "fail well, muck about, make mistake after mistake after mistake." Most people don't believe him at first, a fact to which I can attest having taught this method for over twenty-five years, but "mistakes" are vital to becoming clear in our intentions, to be able to orient our life in the direction we want to go. How do we know if anything feels right unless we know what feels wrong? He understood that many mistakes—meaning, all the outliers—help us find the mean, the accurate answer. This is a brilliant use of a self-correcting system.
All Feldenkrais lessons are guessing jellybeans. Guessing and guessing and guessing again. No one makes an accurate guess the first time around. That's why there are so many variations in each lesson, to give your nervous system the chance to feel how many ways, how many answers, you can find in your movement to the suggested experiment.
These lessons are about aggregating your guesses, not performing a movement correctly. To make all these guesses, the thinking brain must step back and let the system self-correct. You can't tell yourself off and say, "Move the arm 32 degrees left and 24 degrees up." It's absurd, we all laugh, yet that's what we try to do in these lessons, more or less.
I tell all my clients: Stop thinking and start sensing. Discover problem-solving through kinesthetic experiments instead of cognition-intensive analyzing. That never works for this kind of learning. Instead, start guessing your jellybeans.