> 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.

You're arguing against something I wasn't trying to imply.

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.

I would call the difference intuitive knowledge versus rational knowledge.

I've never seen the word calibration used this way:

Judgement is learnable through calibration. It is not transmissible through instruction.