In praise of ignorance

I was fortunate to speak with Liberty Fitz-Claridge about David Deutsch’s article “In praise of ignorance” which can be read here: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/in-praise-of-ignorance/

Liberty teased out a number of crucial insights about how learning best happens and the role of “innocence” in the development of a mind. Chief among these insights is how unwanted knowledge foisted onto a learner does not only (possibly) cause learning to be associated with negative feelings (and so people do not like mathematics, for example, because they are punished in classes and examinations for errors they make) but that learning literally changes minds. And so, if a person is forced to learn lessons they do not want, the knowledge they gain may actively cause them to be a worse learner when it comes to things they are more interested in. Liberty explores this through the lens of language learning (learning one language may cause specific, systematic ways of speaking or understanding grammar that makes it all the harder to learn some other language, for example).

I might add to that example how all physics undergraduates (and even graduate students) are forced to take many, many classes in mathematics (and of course physics) all of which may cause systematic errors in thinking when it comes to their making progress in new areas. So, for example, all physics students “just know” that many laws of physics are expressed in, for example, differential equations. And the deeper one goes in physics, the more sophisticated must the mathematics become (for what it’s worth this is exactly what Feynman suggested was false and warned against - see here:

So it may simply not be true that because physics began in algebra and then became dominated by calculus and later tensor calculus on manifolds and topology and now certain speculative areas of physics like String Theory literally create whole new kinds of even more sophisticated mathematics - and so this seeming-trend means the future of (fundamental) physics can only be ever more complicated mathematics. So unless one starts very early (excelling in mathematics in infants or high school say) one has no hope catching up later on if one wants to contribute to our comprehension of the cosmos.

These examples, and this idea that if you want to solve your problem (i.e: learn) then in general you are the person best placed to have a go at trying out new ideas. This is not an argument for reinventing the wheel but rather for you learning about the invention of wheels, or not, or even improving the design of wheels if you think it will help. But if you are often told that someone else knows better (the teacher, the authority, the parent, the professor, the priest, etc) then you fail to learn to think you can be just as creative as anyone else so can solve problems no one ever has before. You may think that there is something inherent about you that “cognitively closes” you to - for example - mathematics. You just lack the “IQ” or the genetics for “deep mathematical thinking”. All because the mathematics you were forced to learn and tested on in school and perhaps at university was found “difficult” and it was difficult because it was first boring and it was first boring because you saw no problem you had that it solved. Except perhaps the problem of being worried you’d be punished or shamed if you did not learn it to the level needed to excel on some examination.

That is an example of both the harm caused by associating bad experiences with learning mathematics as well as gaining particular knowledge (say learning something naive about counting, summation and infinities) means one now has greater difficulty thinking about, say, integration or limits (which can involve adding an infinite number of terms to get a finite sum). I’m not arguing here that is a common problem necessarily but rather that kind of thing can occur anytime one is required to learn something they weren’t really interested in…but now, at some time later, when it comes to something they are interested in they don’t understand why they’re finding it so difficult to “grok” when others seem to get it much more easily.

The education system from infants school through to the mandatory classes PhD students are required to take may be the single most important factor in progress across the planet being slower than it otherwise might be. It foists knowledge on people which tends to make them all think the same, hampering their capacity to think in genuinely original ways because they “already know” about what not to pursue, what not to even try, what is sure to fail and what just cannot be the case because that’s what their formal education taught them.

The choice is not: deny children the ability to learn OR force them to learn some prescribed list of lessons (a mandatory curriculum). It is to help them in their own quest to solve their own problems and therefore foster the inherent fun of creativity. Fun, and creativity that is systematically destroyed by a tradition of anti-critical, anti—creative thinking that is inculcated by compulsory schooling and coercive education. This is a special case of authoritarianism as it appears in learning but in the long run it is more significant than economic or political authoritarianism because it aims to directly affect the individual mind and change it before it has a chance to change itself by forcing tedious problems upon it rather than allowing the individual to find fun in their own.

Compulsory learning is irrational. It may damage one’s ability to reason and that always has the effect of hampering our ability to understand reality.