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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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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 …
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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