The fallacy with this article about a "fallacy": That mental models for a physical activity (MMA) are comparable to mental models about ideas.
Of course that doesn't mean you can learn everything from a mental model. By nature, they abstract away plenty of important details needed for expertise. But they are not deficient in terms of ability to convey some level of understanding.
If you think about it, this has to be the case. In many ways, knowledge is simply a series of mental models built on each other. Yes, much of it comes from empirical observation, but that ends up encoded into mental models.
Of course that doesn't mean you can learn everything from a mental model. By nature, they abstract away plenty of important details needed for expertise. But they are not deficient in terms of ability to convey some level of understanding.
If you think about it, this has to be the case. In many ways, knowledge is simply a series of mental models built on each other. Yes, much of it comes from empirical observation, but that ends up encoded into mental models.