A Journey Of Knowledge
If you've ever felt like you knew everything about a subject, only to realize later how little you actually understood, or perhaps you've become so knowledgeable in a field that you started doubting your expertise, then you've probably experienced the Dunning-Kruger effect firsthand.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or expertise in a specific area tend to overestimate their abilities.
As they gain more knowledge, they begin to realize how much they don't know, leading to a dip in confidence.
This journey of knowing can be broken down into stages:
- Peak of "Mount Stupid": We start with little knowledge but high confidence.
- Valley of Despair: As we learn more, we realize how much we don't know, and our confidence plummets.
- Slope of Enlightenment: We begin to gain real understanding and our confidence slowly rebuilds.
- Plateau of Sustainability: We achieve a realistic assessment of our knowledge and abilities.
To put it lightly, the valley of despair is where I tend to struggle the most, confidence plummets when I realize there's so much ground to cover just to have a good understanding of a particular subject. Should I abandon the subject entirely or take it one step at a time? If it's the latter, how?
HyperLogic Isn't Logical
A while ago, I came across a subject called "hyperlogic" from reading a fictional book about a potential future of humanity. This subject interested me so much that I spent a whole day just getting into the basic aspects of it.
Hyperlogic can be broadly defined as going from point A to point B, without having to transverse the whole distance between both points.
A rather interesting definition is "jumping into conclusions without any logical reason whatsoever on how the process happens".
For example, an artist suddenly visualizes a complete artwork in their mind, skipping the usual brainstorming and sketching process. They go from a blank canvas to a fully formed idea without the apparent intermediate steps.
Or even someone who can walk into a room and instantly sense the mood or interpersonal dynamics, without needing to observe individual interactions or ask questions.
In my view, it's more of an intuitive knowing, a subconscious process that transcends rational logic. In a way, this makes it hard to grasp the subject in the first place because there's a huge aspect of it that's "out of mind", you can't think much about it or analyze it in a conventional, step-by-step manner.
Despite my initial optimism about the subject, I did end up putting it on the backburner. The vastness of the topic and the difficulty in grasping its intangible aspects is what actually led me into the Valley of Despair. It's a seemingly impossible task of understanding something that, by its very nature, defies conventional understanding.
Optimism And Realism
That said, this experience with hyperlogic can serve as a microcosm of the larger journey of knowledge acquisition, particularly when viewed through the lens of optimism and realism.
Initially, unbridled optimism drives us to dive headfirst into an interesting subject, super excited by the possibilities and confident in our ability to grasp this new concept quickly.
But, when the initial stages have passed, delving deeper and encountering the complexities and ambiguities of hyperlogic, realism set in.
I began to understand the true scope of what I was trying to learn, and my confidence dipped. This is where many of us struggle, myself included. Some stop there entirely, since it's very tempting to abandon a subject entirely when faced with its true complexity.
In a way, this can be a good thing if it's temporarily abandoned, and it's also where the interplay between optimism and realism is experienced.
Realism helps us accurately assess the challenge ahead, optimism gives us the courage to persist despite the difficulties. If optimism dies out, then reality might appear insurmountable.
Yet, it's often at this very juncture that we interestingly discover new ways to approach the subject with both renewed enthusiasm and pragmatism.
Now, one can have both optimism and realism, compared to the beginning when it was mostly optimism. The former may perhaps be the key characteristic on the Slope of Enlightenment phase.
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