A little bit is natural and expected, but this kind of change in meaning feels like a consequence of a culture that in the last decade has accelerated the practice of re-framing specific words and concepts as something that's "actually a positive" or "actually quite negative if you think about it".
Part of this is a result of our (in the US) culture wars and hijacking of popular terms, but it's also a symptom of social media culture that's always seeking a hot take and creators who are looking to distinguish themselves with (what seems to me) clever re-framing.
The result is a culture that is increasingly fragmented and in which a word can have dramatically different meaning and insinuations depending on it's use in certain social groups or intellectual cliques.
It increasingly feels like I need to download a massive amount of linguistic context before I step into the world of a niche online community because their tight-knit dialogues and shared experiences have now re-framed a word or concept that was largely understood to mean something else.
We don’t engage. It’s the only shot we have.
There was a useful article at 404 Media recently about our failure to prevent those on the extreme edges of culture from normalizing their language and behavior: We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons[0]. See the article, but essentially by engaging we cede ground. Sorta like how both-sides journalism gives space to anti-science nuts and lets them spread falsehoods.
0. https://www.404media.co/we-have-learned-nothing-about-amplif...
Choosing a good abstract dichotomy is hard (mine is also faulty, as you have noted).
They chose "instruction" versus "calibration" which I feel is a terrible splitting plane (muddying whatever they are trying to articulate).
I have been fascinated listening to a smart nursing friend of mine explain some of the intuitions they learnt through observation (not explicitly taught). I believe they had an outlier skill for noticing patterns. They might have been able to teach the patterns they saw, but they probably couldn't teach the skill of discovering patterns ≈intelligence.
Intuition and other forms of knowledge are stock quantities while calibration and instructions are types of flows which change the stock. I'd love to know if there a better word for learning through trial and evaluation than calibration.
How about training. Implies practicality. You can be trained or do your own training. Avoids the bad academic/factual associations of "teaching".
Calibration makes some sense to people that work with tools, but the word is a poor metaphor for honing our intuitions.
It is quite amazing how little of what we do or know is actually explicitly taught. I learnt the most in the sandpit.