How to Unlearn Things
How do you go about unlearning the things you
think you know? This isn’t a trivial task. Simply
throwing your hands up and admitting you know
nothing may be a Zen kind of solution, but it
doesn’t really offer a way forward to true
knowledge. It simply admits ignorance of any
theory for explaining the terrain, rather than
trying to come up with more useful ones.
One way to begin unlearning is to seek additive
knowledge in familiar areas and then use that
new knowledge to start pulling up and modifying
old knowledge. For me, learning about
psychology and cognitive science often had this
effect: I would start with a particular belief that
seemed reasonable about myself, and then
digging deeper, I would encounter careful
arguments that showed why those beliefs were
probably false. From that point of tension, I
could start reworking some of my old beliefs.
This approach can work, but it’s difficult and it
requires a lot more patience for theory and
academic learning than most people have an
appetite for. Another approach is to seek other
people’s experiences of the world . Other people
may not give you *the* theory for understanding
the world, but the more diverse their
experiences are from yours, the more likely they
are situated in a different position in the space
of life possibilities and how their lives differ
from your expectations can itself give you
information about your own thinking.
Travel, in this way, can be a potent form of
unlearning. For me, the best travel experiences
of my life haven’t been going to a place that
exceeded my expectations, but going to ones
which deeply undermined them. I’ve written
about how going to China forced me to radically
rethink that place . But talking to people in
different places has also shown me how
arbitrary many of my own culturally-specific
views are of things.
This kind of travel means actually talking to
people. Learning languages helps because you’re
more likely to encounter people who differ from
you more dramatically. The normal process of
sightseeing and taking Instagram-worthy photos
of famous landmarks is fine, but it’s stamp
collecting, not acquiring model-altering insights.
A third approach to unlearning is to be more
varied and bold in your experiments in life.
Pure randomness can have a destructive quality
to it. However, if you avoid obvious risks, many
directions in life can be explored more
thoroughly than most people do.
I think the main drawback of this third approach
is that it depends on a kind of self-confidence
that itself tends to depend on having had positive
experiences venturing outside your safe, little
local maxima in the past. Without confidence,
people have an instinctive aversion to explore,
and so this approach to getting out of life’s local
maxima has a feedback component to it. The
more successful your unlearning and exploration
of life’s possibility space, the more likely you’ll
take larger leaps on theory rather than direct
experience alone.
Being Comfortable with Mystery
A good meta-belief to this whole unlearning
endeavor is to be comfortable with the idea that
everything you know is provisional, and that
underneath what you know is likely a more
complex and stranger picture.
Human beings seem to be naturally afraid of this
groundless view of things. I’m not quite sure
why that is. It may be that this kind of epistemic
flexibility might start to question societal norms
and rules of conduct, and so people who think
too much about things may have an amoral
character. That’s certainly the perspective of
many traditional religious viewpoints on things,
which discourages open-ended inquiry in favor
of professing allegiance to dogma.
However, there’s probably a more basic level
aversion to groundlessness rooted in a feeling
that uncertainty is bad and that certainty is good.
Like most aversions, however, I think this is
something you can condition yourself to be
comfortable with via exposure.
I used to be very afraid of heights. When I was a
child, I had a hard time even going near the
window if I was in a tall building. Sometime
around my late teens, however, I started pushing
myself to be exposed to more heights. First
roller coasters, then ziplining and paragliding.
Last year, I went skydiving for the first time and,
although it was scary, I felt a lot less anxious
than I used to feel with much less extreme
exposures to heights.
Psychologists have known for some time that
progressive exposure can remove many
conditioned fears and aversions to things.
Sometimes, if the exposure gets paired with a
reward, something initially aversive can
eventually become desirable as spicy-food eaters
and adrenaline junkies can attest to.
Similarly, I think exposure to the unknown, to
unlearning comfortable old beliefs about things,
to the deeper mystery of things for which our
current knowledge is only a temporary foothold,
can be something that can switch from we shy
away from to something you enjoy. The thrills of
finding a new, more accurate, way of looking at
things, start to eclipse the aversion to uprooting a
previously stable way of thinking.
Reference:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/04/12/the-art-of-unlearning/
How do you go about unlearning the things you
think you know? This isn’t a trivial task. Simply
throwing your hands up and admitting you know
nothing may be a Zen kind of solution, but it
doesn’t really offer a way forward to true
knowledge. It simply admits ignorance of any
theory for explaining the terrain, rather than
trying to come up with more useful ones.
One way to begin unlearning is to seek additive
knowledge in familiar areas and then use that
new knowledge to start pulling up and modifying
old knowledge. For me, learning about
psychology and cognitive science often had this
effect: I would start with a particular belief that
seemed reasonable about myself, and then
digging deeper, I would encounter careful
arguments that showed why those beliefs were
probably false. From that point of tension, I
could start reworking some of my old beliefs.
This approach can work, but it’s difficult and it
requires a lot more patience for theory and
academic learning than most people have an
appetite for. Another approach is to seek other
people’s experiences of the world . Other people
may not give you *the* theory for understanding
the world, but the more diverse their
experiences are from yours, the more likely they
are situated in a different position in the space
of life possibilities and how their lives differ
from your expectations can itself give you
information about your own thinking.
Travel, in this way, can be a potent form of
unlearning. For me, the best travel experiences
of my life haven’t been going to a place that
exceeded my expectations, but going to ones
which deeply undermined them. I’ve written
about how going to China forced me to radically
rethink that place . But talking to people in
different places has also shown me how
arbitrary many of my own culturally-specific
views are of things.
This kind of travel means actually talking to
people. Learning languages helps because you’re
more likely to encounter people who differ from
you more dramatically. The normal process of
sightseeing and taking Instagram-worthy photos
of famous landmarks is fine, but it’s stamp
collecting, not acquiring model-altering insights.
A third approach to unlearning is to be more
varied and bold in your experiments in life.
Pure randomness can have a destructive quality
to it. However, if you avoid obvious risks, many
directions in life can be explored more
thoroughly than most people do.
I think the main drawback of this third approach
is that it depends on a kind of self-confidence
that itself tends to depend on having had positive
experiences venturing outside your safe, little
local maxima in the past. Without confidence,
people have an instinctive aversion to explore,
and so this approach to getting out of life’s local
maxima has a feedback component to it. The
more successful your unlearning and exploration
of life’s possibility space, the more likely you’ll
take larger leaps on theory rather than direct
experience alone.
Being Comfortable with Mystery
A good meta-belief to this whole unlearning
endeavor is to be comfortable with the idea that
everything you know is provisional, and that
underneath what you know is likely a more
complex and stranger picture.
Human beings seem to be naturally afraid of this
groundless view of things. I’m not quite sure
why that is. It may be that this kind of epistemic
flexibility might start to question societal norms
and rules of conduct, and so people who think
too much about things may have an amoral
character. That’s certainly the perspective of
many traditional religious viewpoints on things,
which discourages open-ended inquiry in favor
of professing allegiance to dogma.
However, there’s probably a more basic level
aversion to groundlessness rooted in a feeling
that uncertainty is bad and that certainty is good.
Like most aversions, however, I think this is
something you can condition yourself to be
comfortable with via exposure.
I used to be very afraid of heights. When I was a
child, I had a hard time even going near the
window if I was in a tall building. Sometime
around my late teens, however, I started pushing
myself to be exposed to more heights. First
roller coasters, then ziplining and paragliding.
Last year, I went skydiving for the first time and,
although it was scary, I felt a lot less anxious
than I used to feel with much less extreme
exposures to heights.
Psychologists have known for some time that
progressive exposure can remove many
conditioned fears and aversions to things.
Sometimes, if the exposure gets paired with a
reward, something initially aversive can
eventually become desirable as spicy-food eaters
and adrenaline junkies can attest to.
Similarly, I think exposure to the unknown, to
unlearning comfortable old beliefs about things,
to the deeper mystery of things for which our
current knowledge is only a temporary foothold,
can be something that can switch from we shy
away from to something you enjoy. The thrills of
finding a new, more accurate, way of looking at
things, start to eclipse the aversion to uprooting a
previously stable way of thinking.
Reference:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/04/12/the-art-of-unlearning/
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