Stuff you learned and forgot feels like rent paid. You lived in it for a while but are now left with no equity in it. Most schooling only rents you some knowledge for a while.
-
-
We often fetishize ignorance (stuff we’ve never yet known) by performing some sort of pious humility to exhibit our consciousness of it. But curiously, we have no cultural attitude towards stuff once known but now lost. Or at least stored in ways requiring restorative work.
Show this thread -
Temporal partitition of known-unknown: Once-known unknown: Stuff you used to know that’s now degraded Could-be-known unknown: Stuff you know is out there that you could know, like apartments you could rent Never-knowable unknowns: Stuff you know is beyond your learning reach
Show this thread -
Thing about knowledge degradation is that it is arbitrary and has only a weak relationship to retention desires. “It’s like riding a bike” effect. Ancient environment of evolutionary adaptation dictates that my somatic hardware retains bike-riding knowledge weirdly well. Shrug.
Show this thread -
2x2: Knowledge you’d like to retain/lose vs knowledge that actual sticks vs degrades. Aptitude = Stuff you’d like like to retain and naturally does get retained, making maintenance cheap (it sticks with little/no reinforcement like bike-riding, which I actually do want to retain)
Show this thread -
Curious that people find this to be a tragic line of thought. I find it liberating and am not really upset by it. In fact I kinda appreciate knowledge being naturally lossy. https://twitter.com/tahsin_mayeesha/status/1272191000803336193?s=21 …https://twitter.com/tahsin_mayeesha/status/1272191000803336193 …
Show this thread -
“Use it or lose it” has a hugely important corollary: how much you have to use something to retain it varies enormously from “riding a bike” (afaict that’s once every decade after acquisition) to “must use every week and will be lost in months/years if not” like advanced math.
Show this thread -
Your knowledge degradations form a unique fingerprint that create a signature style of how how you do new things. Like the gold seams on a kintsugi bowl uniquely identify its past of cracks and breaks. It still holds stuff, but in a unique way. Your brain is a kintsugi bowl.
Show this thread -
Writing is a good example. Everybody retains/loses particular preferred/not-preferred words/idioms/usages that form a particular unique “voice” ... one that could be identified by an AI classifier and reproduced by gpt-2 type algorithms.
Show this thread -
Feels like Homo sapiens is ready to evolve past uncritical fetishization of knowing for the sake of knowing (Homo... studentus?) to actual “sapiens” ("discerning, wise, sensible") by treating knowing as a commodity rent/buy decision for the most part.
Show this thread -
There is certainly a kind of pleasure to learning and acquiring knowledge, whether to rent or own. But uncritically maximizing that pleasure is a kind of hedonism. We just don’t notice because society approves of it morally, and rewards it economically.
Show this thread -
Erudition: What you know Wisdom: What you know about what you know Humbletalebry: What you don’t know Prowess: What you can do Nihilism: What you must do Scholarship: What you know about who knows what Craft: What you’ve forgotten Artistry: What has irreversibly degraded
Show this thread -
Religion: What you refuse to know Tribalism: What you refuse to do Bureaucratism: What others must know Imperialism: What others must be able to do
Show this thread -
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.