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on an individual level, sure- to a point after which experience becomes lack of flexibility. On a societal level, it has the opposite effect thanks to imperium being the worst society humanity ever created, and designed to drive the species to extinction.

Flexibility is a myth. You mean, unpredictability. A less experienced individual is likely to choose "wrong" solutions and thus, you can't know what they are going to do. Any solution they come with are one time wonder if it work at all, because they can't properly judge all parameters which come into making something work every time you apply it. An experienced individual appear to be inflexible, because he had already figured out solution to the matrix that they are solving, any other solutions are sub-optimal. It takes more time to find solution to more complex problem than a primitive one. So, if we are dealing with for example an art form which had millenia to develop, it will take you very long time to master what others before you had figured out. Anything which you would figure out as novice would be inferior version of already existing solutions. In order to be truly flexible, you need first know the most optimal solution and then to become actually better than your teachers who had taught and figured out those concepts themselves.

It is a lot of theory. Here is are two practical examples. Do you believe that new chess player can create his own opening which would be good enough to be entered to list of common openers? Or lets take more mainstream example. Start playing Starcraft 2. Do you believe that your flexibility in playing any style with any unit composition is better than pro player's build refined through thousands of games? Do you believe that you have something to teach pro player at which units to build and when?


This is why races like Orcs seem flexible and Imperium as inflexible. The only difference is that Orcs do not have martial culture or experience. Each generation starts from ground zero. One ork even tried to hide in lava! Here is your flexibility. Imperium on the other hand were fighting for thousands of years against anything that this and the next galaxies can throw at it. Imperial doctrine already knows the most optimal response to any situation and nothing that you can figure out will actually be better. It takes long years of experience, knowledge and immense skill to actually improve and become better than existing amount of information allows you to be. Imagine learning math. There is tons of it, but like in war, you focus on your specific field of warfare. Even then, it will take decades of intense learning until you will go through most of relevant information that your race can provide you with. You will spend even more time until you will develop your own math theories and calculations which would expand the actual field of mathematics. Those "brilliants" solutions which you did as a student won't seem nearly as brilliant then. Same thing is and in war. If a race needs to innovate when fighting a major war, it only highlights their youthfulness and lack of wisdom, experience.


Tau innovate, but Eldars never do. Think about it.

 Ernestas wrote:

Tau innovate, but Eldars never do. Think about it.

Thats demonstrably false.

I..did you even read what I wrote? On an individual level, experience matters. Up to a point. In chess, we know that the game has limited amount of moves, and as such, even the most experienced human that'd live a million years would still lose to a computer more often than not. In starcraft it'd probably be the same, there's a reason gaming companies make AI dumb in most games. The same pretty much applies to every walk of life-experience is, in essence nothing more than being able to calculate probability of action's outcome correctly. At some point more experience no longer translates to more skill, because there is only a limited amount of permutations even in real life. And those can be taught at a societal level, when you have a society that passes down knowledge and evaluates it critically. Tau are not at any disadvantage vs humans for their "youthfulness" because war is, in essence, very simple thing, and Imperium is very bad at it, in comparison. Imperium's entire tactics is a glorified human wave, and using it's massive resources to facilitate it. But Imperium is not Britain or the US, there is no ocean to secure it's industrial infrastructure from invasion- the more it loses, the less it is capable of rebuilding the population and wargear that it relies on to wage wars in the same way. Once a critical point is reached, it can no longer utilize the same strategy...and because it's based on dogma and experience of this kind of warfare always working, it will be incapable of adapting. We know, because we know 40k ends with destruction of Imperium to chaos and xenos.

While that discussion seems interesting it is really off topic. You might want to start a new thread for it

Once an individual finds a solution to a problem, that solution is neurologically hotwired and massively interferes with an individuals ability to create, or even be taught, a new solution (even if this new solution is superior to the previous one).

It absolutely is a documented phenomenon in psychology that experience in this regard can have a detrimental effect on what we might call 'flexibility'.