The Art of Unlearning
“It ain’t what you know that gets you into
trouble. It’s what you know for sure that
just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
Most people think about learning as adding
knowledge and skills. When you learn French,
you learn that the word, avoir means “to have.”
You now have a new fact in your mind that
didn’t exist before.
Adding knowledge like this, I’d like to argue, is
actually the less important case. The most useful
learning isn’t usually a strict addition of new
knowledge, but first unlearning something false
or unhelpful.
To see why unlearning might matter more than
strictly additive learning, consider that, for any
area of your life in which you operate regularly,
you must acquire facts and knowledge about that
area. You need to understand your work, where
you live, the language you speak, culture you
exist in, etc..
This means that, for the parts of your life that
matter for you right now or in the past, you
already have quite a bit of knowledge. For new
knowledge to come in, and not replace or alter
anything you know already, that knowledge
either needs to be about a detail in your current
life that was too insignificant to merit
observation earlier, or it has to be about a
domain with which you still have relatively little
experience.
That additive learning must pertain to either
unfamiliar domains or relatively unimportant
aspects of domains you are familiar with may
seem a strange fact. Most of what we learn in
school is of this type of additive learning. Yet, by
this very assertion, much of it must not be very
important for our day-to-day lives.
When you first need to unlearn or modify what
you currently know, that knowledge must
involve something you had already learned. This
doesn’t guarantee that it is important, however,
since most of our knowledge is acquired for
living practically in the world, there’s a higher
chance something that must be first unlearned is
more important.
Types of Unlearning
There’s different ways you might unlearn
something in light of new information. The first
is a straightforward refutation of the old idea. If
you thought that Abraham Lincoln was the first
American president and then read in a book it
was actually George Washington, you might, if
you believed the book, completely revise your
view.
This complete refutation is atypical. More likely
the new knowledge doesn’t contradict the old
one, but it may modify it in some way . If I
believe my best friend is very trustworthy, but I
learn he is cheating on his wife, I may not
completely revise my opinion of him, but I may
trust him a bit less or trust him less in marital
matters.
Other times new knowledge revises a simpler
picture by filling it with more complex details.
This is similar to adding new knowledge,
although because the older, simpler view of the
issue has been overwritten with more detail,
there is some unlearning going on. When Albert
Einstein discovered special relativity, this
overthrew Isaac Newton’s laws of motion.
However, this wasn’t a complete refutation, but a
modification—Newton’s laws still hold
approximately in areas where near light-speed
or extreme gravitation aren’t issues.
In all of these cases, however, you have to first
let go of something you thought you understood
to make way for a new understanding. This isn’t
always easy to do.
Difficulties Unlearning
The first challenge of unlearning is that when
something contradicts your current
understanding, you are likely to dismiss it. This
may be adaptive in a world where many of the
things people say or information you encounter
are false, or lies constructed to manipulate you.
Things that you don’t currently believe are,
ceteris paribus , more likely to be false. However,
this confirmation bias can make it harder to
unlearn when that’s valuable to you.
A deeper problem, I believe, is that human
beings tend not to deeply represent doubt and
uncertainties in a fine-grained way. That is, the
things you believe now, you tend to believe
completely, even if provisionally. However,
whether those beliefs are near-certain or highly-
doubtful, the way they are represented in the
brain is much the same.
It’s true that a more doubtful belief is more
likely to be dismissed than a certain one. If I try
to argue that the moon is made of cheese, for
instance, I’ll be met with a lot more resistance
than if I try to argue something you only
believed loosely. However, this revision occurs
in an active sense—when one is directly
assessing reasons for the belief in question. I
believe that, when a belief isn’t being actively
considered, it can still inform your thinking in
other ways and, that, in those cases the relative
certainty of the belief isn’t used.
If this view is true, then that means that many of
the things we learned aren’t dangerous because
they are immune to counterargument, but
because they can subtly influence our thinking
in adjacent areas when we aren’t being vigilant
to how likely they are to be true.
If this sounds confusing, consider the
example I mentioned earlier: a best friend
who you discovered was cheating on his
spouse. However, suppose you didn’t learn
it firsthand, but through a rumor by a
third-party. You don’t dismiss the charge
outright, but you tentatively accept that
there’s some probability that your friend
is being unfaithful. If forced to confront
this belief directly, through debate or
reasoning, you might come to the
conclusion that there’s only a minor
chance that he is cheating. But, consider
instead, if someone asked you, in an
unrelated context, of whether your friend
ever lies to get what he wants in business.
Now, it’s my opinion that this latent,
provisional belief that “X cheats on his
spouse” may implicitly inform your
intuitions about his trustworthiness, even
though that belief itself may not be very
reliable.
The intuition I want to present is that
beliefs, in our capacity to inform us, tend
to be a lot more black-and-white as either
believed or completely dismissed, rather
than, a more accurate picture where many
beliefs tend to have middling likelihood of
being true. While we can have more
nuanced views when the belief is being
debated directly, the dangerous case is
when they are being used to infer about
other topics, yet their doubtful status is
simply being ignored to make that
inference.
The main challenge of unlearning, therefore, is
that most of our false or doubtful assumptions
about the areas that impact our lives are never
examined. We use these assumptions to operate,
but because they aren’t actively reflected upon,
studied or challenged, they maintain their full
force, even if fairly simple arguments could
overturn them.
To be continued....
Reference:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/04/12/the-art-of-unlearning/
“It ain’t what you know that gets you into
trouble. It’s what you know for sure that
just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
knowledge and skills. When you learn French,
you learn that the word, avoir means “to have.”
You now have a new fact in your mind that
didn’t exist before.
Adding knowledge like this, I’d like to argue, is
actually the less important case. The most useful
learning isn’t usually a strict addition of new
knowledge, but first unlearning something false
or unhelpful.
To see why unlearning might matter more than
strictly additive learning, consider that, for any
area of your life in which you operate regularly,
you must acquire facts and knowledge about that
area. You need to understand your work, where
you live, the language you speak, culture you
exist in, etc..
This means that, for the parts of your life that
matter for you right now or in the past, you
already have quite a bit of knowledge. For new
knowledge to come in, and not replace or alter
anything you know already, that knowledge
either needs to be about a detail in your current
life that was too insignificant to merit
observation earlier, or it has to be about a
domain with which you still have relatively little
experience.
That additive learning must pertain to either
unfamiliar domains or relatively unimportant
aspects of domains you are familiar with may
seem a strange fact. Most of what we learn in
school is of this type of additive learning. Yet, by
this very assertion, much of it must not be very
important for our day-to-day lives.
When you first need to unlearn or modify what
you currently know, that knowledge must
involve something you had already learned. This
doesn’t guarantee that it is important, however,
since most of our knowledge is acquired for
living practically in the world, there’s a higher
chance something that must be first unlearned is
more important.
Types of Unlearning
There’s different ways you might unlearn
something in light of new information. The first
is a straightforward refutation of the old idea. If
you thought that Abraham Lincoln was the first
American president and then read in a book it
was actually George Washington, you might, if
you believed the book, completely revise your
view.
This complete refutation is atypical. More likely
the new knowledge doesn’t contradict the old
one, but it may modify it in some way . If I
believe my best friend is very trustworthy, but I
learn he is cheating on his wife, I may not
completely revise my opinion of him, but I may
trust him a bit less or trust him less in marital
matters.
Other times new knowledge revises a simpler
picture by filling it with more complex details.
This is similar to adding new knowledge,
although because the older, simpler view of the
issue has been overwritten with more detail,
there is some unlearning going on. When Albert
Einstein discovered special relativity, this
overthrew Isaac Newton’s laws of motion.
However, this wasn’t a complete refutation, but a
modification—Newton’s laws still hold
approximately in areas where near light-speed
or extreme gravitation aren’t issues.
In all of these cases, however, you have to first
let go of something you thought you understood
to make way for a new understanding. This isn’t
always easy to do.
Difficulties Unlearning
The first challenge of unlearning is that when
something contradicts your current
understanding, you are likely to dismiss it. This
may be adaptive in a world where many of the
things people say or information you encounter
are false, or lies constructed to manipulate you.
Things that you don’t currently believe are,
ceteris paribus , more likely to be false. However,
this confirmation bias can make it harder to
unlearn when that’s valuable to you.
A deeper problem, I believe, is that human
beings tend not to deeply represent doubt and
uncertainties in a fine-grained way. That is, the
things you believe now, you tend to believe
completely, even if provisionally. However,
whether those beliefs are near-certain or highly-
doubtful, the way they are represented in the
brain is much the same.
It’s true that a more doubtful belief is more
likely to be dismissed than a certain one. If I try
to argue that the moon is made of cheese, for
instance, I’ll be met with a lot more resistance
than if I try to argue something you only
believed loosely. However, this revision occurs
in an active sense—when one is directly
assessing reasons for the belief in question. I
believe that, when a belief isn’t being actively
considered, it can still inform your thinking in
other ways and, that, in those cases the relative
certainty of the belief isn’t used.
If this view is true, then that means that many of
the things we learned aren’t dangerous because
they are immune to counterargument, but
because they can subtly influence our thinking
in adjacent areas when we aren’t being vigilant
to how likely they are to be true.
If this sounds confusing, consider the
example I mentioned earlier: a best friend
who you discovered was cheating on his
spouse. However, suppose you didn’t learn
it firsthand, but through a rumor by a
third-party. You don’t dismiss the charge
outright, but you tentatively accept that
there’s some probability that your friend
is being unfaithful. If forced to confront
this belief directly, through debate or
reasoning, you might come to the
conclusion that there’s only a minor
chance that he is cheating. But, consider
instead, if someone asked you, in an
unrelated context, of whether your friend
ever lies to get what he wants in business.
Now, it’s my opinion that this latent,
provisional belief that “X cheats on his
spouse” may implicitly inform your
intuitions about his trustworthiness, even
though that belief itself may not be very
reliable.
The intuition I want to present is that
beliefs, in our capacity to inform us, tend
to be a lot more black-and-white as either
believed or completely dismissed, rather
than, a more accurate picture where many
beliefs tend to have middling likelihood of
being true. While we can have more
nuanced views when the belief is being
debated directly, the dangerous case is
when they are being used to infer about
other topics, yet their doubtful status is
simply being ignored to make that
inference.
The main challenge of unlearning, therefore, is
that most of our false or doubtful assumptions
about the areas that impact our lives are never
examined. We use these assumptions to operate,
but because they aren’t actively reflected upon,
studied or challenged, they maintain their full
force, even if fairly simple arguments could
overturn them.
To be continued....
Reference:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/04/12/the-art-of-unlearning/
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