Us and Stuff We Don’t Like

I am sitting on a plane as I type this. Before we left for the airport, the topic came up about how some people would wear pajama-like clothing to airports for flights. One of the viewpoints was that this act was wrong because it was a breach in etiquette. Now, those of you who know me know that I am no fan of etiquette. I will concede that some of it is useful in that having certain customs helps a society get along more smoothly; in dealing with others, it helps to have somewhat of an expectation of what the other person will do. What one wears to the airport, however, does not fall into this category. Instead, I believe that it falls into another category of etiquette that we label “fashion”. Fashion is a much more arbitrary beast – basically nothing more than a collective preference, and it frustrates me to this day.

I’ve got no problem with people wearing what they think looks nice. Instead, what really frustrates me about fashion is people’s (including myself) response to it. I can comprehend why people like what is currently in style. If a person becomes very familiar with something, then they acquire a taste for it – the same as with food. If many people are wearing the same style, you grow accustomed to it and like it. At this point, you have an entire group of people for which a large percentage all likes a similar style. If it ended here, I’d be fine with that, but people take it one step farther; they believe that their preference (for that’s all it is, and we must never forget that) is right, like in a more absolute sense. They believe that there is something intrinsically right about the fashion and intrinsically wrong from deviating from it. It is at this point that people begin to judge, and when people begin to judge others based on arbitrary preferences, bad things start to occur. People look down on each other; gulfs can form; it may be something as simple as just not being comfortable with each other.

A little later, at the airport, I saw this woman checking in. She was of the “granola” variety – her face and figure honestly were pretty good, but she had these huge, long dreds and more body hair in certain areas than I do. My first thought was that she needed to shave; she needed to change that look. Then I thought that women did not always shave legs and pits, so this used to be the norm, and during that time, did all the guys go around thinking, “Man, all that hair is gross,”? No, they would have liked it just fine. Right now, smooth legs are simply a majority preference. I can still have my preference, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that she needs to change anything. She is who she is. And I end up judging just like everyone else. My frustration stems not only from what I see it causing others to do, but what I see it causing myself to do as well.

Now, the takeaway from all this for me (and this is stuff that’s been running through my head for years) is that we must be extremely careful with our knee-jerk reactions. We see things we don’t like, and that naturally causes a negative response within us, and the natural response to negative emotions within us is to project a label of “bad” or “wrong” on the cause of those emotions. While that may be something useful for surviving in the jungle, to apply it to other people is not always the most appropriate response. In cases of fashion, our negative response is not caused by anything they did, but by our own preference for the familiar. We see someone who is different and automatically believe that our dislike for what we see says something about them. In actuality, that dislike and how we react to it say less about the other person and more about ourselves. It’s our own problem, not theirs.

Brain Musings Part 1: You Don’t Always Know What You Know

I’m always thinking about how our brains work – how they give rise to perception, memory, decision making, etc. While I’ve wanted to write about some of this for a long time (i.e. several years), I’ve always been a bit daunted by the task because of the scope to which it can lead. While the brain may be a specific starting place, I always end up connecting it to other, more encompassing ideas – behavior, culture, the general behavior of large systems, problem solving, and on and on. I want to bring those ideas in, but it all becomes unwieldy, and overall structure suffers. So I decided to do this in parts. I’ll do one part that seems somewhat self-contained and perhaps try to link it back to earlier parts, and perhaps as time goes on, a somewhat coherent picture will start to emerge (useful knowledge gleaned from unconnected or loosely connected ideas is actually a topic that may come up later). If not, well maybe the individual pieces will at least be interesting. These are just musings that wander in my head from time to time. So without further ado, this will be my first post in this thread. It seemed like the simplest and most self-contained, so I thought it would be a good starting place. Here we go…

I heard from someone once that there are four stages of knowledge: you don’t know what you don’t know, you know what you don’t know, you know what you know, and you don’t know what you know. This seemed a great expression, and I absolutely agreed, but I think the stages may require a bit of explanation – especially that last one. For our purposes here, we’ll restrict our discussion to knowledge of a specific area, such as math, although the idea is equally applicable not only to scholastic subjects, but to anything that has to be learned.

The first stage is relatively straight-forward. You don’t know what you don’t know. This is true before you even know that the subject is there to be learned. A three-year-old does not know about math. Someone who has never been exposed to computing machinery does not know about computer programming. There is knowledge that the person does not have, and they are ignorant not only of what the subject comprises, but even the presence of the subject. There is knowledge that you don’t have, and you don’t know that you don’t have it.

The second stage occurs when you learn of the existence of the knowledge of which you were previously ignorant. Here, you know math exists, but you don’t yet know how it works or how to use it. It’s there, and you know it’s there, and you know that you don’t know the subject.

When you have become somewhat knowledgeable in a subject, you have entered the third stage: you know what you know. In general, knowledge about a craft or art or subject has certain facts or rules. To solve an equation, you follow steps one, two, and three. To design a certain structure, you take into account X, Y, and Z. Not only are you able to arrive at a solution but you can tell how and why you arrived there. To put it another way, not only do you have knowledge of the subject (able to arrive at a solution), but you have knowledge of your knowledge (are conscious of and able to express your reasoning about your application of the knowledge). Ideally, I think that this should be descriptive of our highest level of knowledge, but realistically that is not the case since our brains don’t always work that way. There is still one more level above this one.

When someone attains mastery at a certain skill or subject, they often reach what I consider to be the most interesting stage: you don’t know what you know. To put it succinctly, you have knowledge of which you are unaware, you cannot express, or about which you cannot reason. This phenomenon occurs when you are so familiar with a subject that you begin to apply that which you have not necessarily been taught explicitly, but instead gleaned unconsciously from a large amount of experience. A mathematician may look at an equation and know the steps to solve it without having to figure out or remember what steps they may be; a craftsman may apply just the exact right amount of pressure with his tools to make a piece being fashioned from wood come out perfectly; a software designer may be able to come up with a robust and simple architecture for a large system. When asked how they were able to solve the problem, many times their answer is simply “practice” or “experience”. Even though they know or are able to carry out the correct answers, they will not be able to retrace their steps. They don’t know how they know, but they do, and they are right. Any sort of muscle memory falls into this category, as does anything people do without thought. If you think about it, driving a car is done mostly reactively. I remember how much I had to consciously pay attention when I first learned to drive, but now it is second nature. This ability of our brains – that we can collect skills and knowledge of which we are not consciously aware – truly fascinates me. One would think (or at least I would) that as you gained more knowledge and experience about something, you would always be able to reason about the knowledge you have, but the fact of the matter is that as we become more adept at something – as our brains become more used to it – it can handle things more and more automatically before we become consciously aware of it, and if we are not consciously aware of it, then we cannot reason about it. More goes on in our heads than we are aware of, and we do not get to choose that of which we are aware. It kind of makes you wonder about how much of yourself consists of your conscious self. Is your conscious self most of you, or is it just a little tacked-on piece of you that has the privilege of being passed a small fraction of the totality of what is going on in your head?