Nicole Junkerman on Walking the Same Route Twice

Why the second time is different

The first walk along an unfamiliar route is spent almost entirely on navigation. Which turning, how far, is this still the right path. The surroundings are present but unregistered, because attention is fully occupied by the question of where to put the next foot. It is an enjoyable kind of effort and it produces very little memory.

The second walk is the useful one. The route is known, so attention is free, and all the things that were invisible on the first pass arrive at once: the height of the hedge, the house with the odd roof, how long the hill actually is compared with how long it felt. Nothing has changed outside. What changed is the amount of attention available to spend.

The same pattern with an unfamiliar tool

First attempts with anything new are navigation. The whole of the effort goes into getting it to do something at all, and whatever it produces is judged mainly by whether it appeared. Almost nobody forms a sound opinion at this stage, which is why first impressions of new technology are so unreliable in both directions.

The second attempt is where judgement becomes possible. The mechanics are familiar, so there is room to notice what the thing is genuinely good at, where it is confidently wrong, and what it quietly assumes about the person using it. That is the point at which a sensible decision can be made, and it is why the responsible adoption pages keep recommending a second look rather than a longer first one.

What repetition is not

It is not practice for its own sake, and it is not a case for doing the same thing indefinitely. A third and fourth pass along the same route return steadily less, and at some point the familiarity that made noticing possible starts to prevent it. Two is usually the interesting number. One is navigation, two is observation, and five is habit.

It is also not an argument that the second impression is always right. It is only an argument that the first one was formed under conditions that made it nearly worthless, and that almost nothing is understood on the strength of a single encounter. The plain-language glossary exists for much the same reason: a word met once is recognised, a word met twice is understood.

A route worth repeating this week

Late October is a good time for this, because the light changes enough between one week and the next that a familiar walk is only partly familiar. The route is known and the conditions are not, which is close to an ideal arrangement for paying attention without having to work at it.

The same week is a reasonable moment to go back to something tried once in the summer and set aside too quickly. That is the habit Nicole Junkerman recommends across this guide, and the note on reinforcement learning, plainly put describes the machine version of the same idea: almost nothing useful is learned on a single try.