Do you want to discuss pedagogy, and why some people only need one youtube video to do this task just fine, while you could show 100 to others and they would fail every time, regardless of experience?

As an experienced software engineer and also an experienced home remodeler, you make a great point.

A kitchen remodel typically requires skills in plumbing, electric, framing carpentry, finish carpentry, drywall, painting.

None of this will be appreciated or understood by someone watching a video.

Each of these skills can take quite a while even for basic proficiency, let alone mastery to the level required to work smoothly, and quickly enough to make any money at it (or avoid divorce as your kitchen sits for months in an unusable state).

This has nothing to do with age, and little with experience.

You mix up knowledge, skills and proficiencies.

If you watch 10 youtube videos, you might gain the knowledge of building a kitchen, but you neither gained the skills of using tools, nor the proficiency of planning and building a kitchen.

Those are very distinct things, which pedagogues are aware of.

> This has nothing to do with age, and little with experience.

It has to do with experience because skills can only be honed through experience. It has to do with age because honing skills via experience requires time.

> It has to do with experience because skills can only be honed through experience.

Yes, but it does not take a learner lots of experience to learn a skill (with some caveats, ofc). It takes the teacher experience to teach a skill, though.

> It has to do with age because honing skills via experience requires time.

I agree.

But it was not about honing skills or becoming perfect, it was about learning and "building a kitchen".

> it was not about honing skills or becoming perfect, it was about learning and "building a kitchen"

We must have different priors regarding OP's specific example. I think that "building a kitchen" would require a hell of a lot of skill, all of which needs to be honed over a decent period of time. I'm 100% confident that given an empty room, building materials, tools, and some appliances, I would do more harm than good.

I'm 100% confident that given an empty room, building materials, tools, and some appliances – and an infinite amount of time – I would make a masterpiece on the first try. (I attribute this skill to LEGO, of course...) ;) So guys like that do exist. Orson Wells is one such a guy, just to drop one name from the arts. I'm saying this because I have experience cleaning up after "professionals" who did a worse job then I did, despite purportedly having "experience". I sadly have more than one such examples. (Perhaps I'm in the wrong line of work?) On the other hand, since we're actually discussing a statistical problem here, it should be pretty clear that guys like Orson Wells inhabit the tail of the distribution.

No, I think we just have a different view on what knowledge, skills and proficiencies means.

I'm not saying experience is irrelevant, I'm saying you can teach somebody the skills to use tools and the proficiency to build a kitchen and he would afterwards be able to build a kitchen, even though his experience is very little.

I'm not saying it will be the best kitchen in the world, neither am I saying the teaching process will be super fast (it depends on teacher and pupil), but I am saying that it is first and foremost not about the age and experience of the trainee, who then later attempts to build the kitchen.

I would say it is a prime example of the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient".

The time investment is necessary. It is by no means sufficient.

Except age and experience are not necessarily correlated.

Age and experience are strongly correlated. Sure you can have zero experience and be old, you can have tons of experience and be young. But normally: Age and experience are strongly correlated.

I did not indicate otherwise.

I think this was precisely his point. Also knowledge, skills and proficiencies are called just 'experience' when you don't want to go into great detail.

Seems like the better question would be to hire someone under 30 (who has some means to demonstrate basic qualifications) to do step (2) if you want your point to have any meaning.

He explicitly said that experience does matter. It's just that it was a well known argument so he wouldn't bother retreading it. So, I'm not sure what your point is.