How is that we understand better with examples.
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Knowledge doesn’t come out of thin air. Mostly it has to do with learning new words and concepts that you wouldn’t be able to conceptualize without relating to something you already know. If you ask me a question and my answer is made up of words you don’t know, it’s much easier for me to give an example of what I mean that you have experience with than to try to define every single word in my original answer.
The physicist Richard Feynman said that, when listening to an explanation of a new thing, he would construct a concrete example of the thing in his head. Then he could modify and manipulate this in his head as he listened. By comparing his mental model with the explanation, he could look for differences and contradictions.
An example will (hopefully) involve things you’re more familiar with, which therefore gives you a reference point from which to build knowledge.
The phrase “objects with mass bend space-time” is so abstract that it’s impossible to understand without context. A rubber sheet with a bowling ball on it “simulating” this phenomenon gives you a step up towards understanding (although in this particular example you’re still far from it..).
Examples show how abstractions work in practice. Examples are good to build intuitions around an abstraction. You often get introduced to topics through examples as they are probably familiar. Now you have a practical idea of what the topic is about. Without that initial idea the topic would be too vague to start building understanding. Examples aren’t required for learning but for building understanding they’re essential.
Yes this description is a bit too general so here is an example: I could tell you the general mathematics of distributions, but you don’t get why do we care when we have functions. So lets start with an example and point out the major difference. A function maps points to points but a distribution is like IQ, if you select an area under the curve that area is proportional to the number of people inside that IQ interval.
So as you can see giving an example makes concepts easier to grasp. Like if your math teacher telling you about functions with a certain definition but it might be difficult to imagine what kind of functions satisfies that criteria so of course you are given an example. And once you analyse the example you can start to understand why that definition is useful or special.
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