How to Understand in the Information Age
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“Networked humans today have a far higher information intake than the average person a few generations ago, and worry about far more things — by several orders of magnitude. And almost none of that is actionable nor even relevant”
-Francois Chollet, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Google, on Twitter
In the digital era, humans face daily information overload. However, a small fraction of it has meaning, and even less will be remembered in the long run. Understanding how your brain understands might be the only way to survive in the information age.
Knowledge as the power to predict
Information comes at your brain through perception. Everything starts with a smell, a noise, a light, a taste or a caress. But then you start to discern patterns. A few seconds after the flash of lightning comes the thunder. You remember every time the pattern has happened, and you expect the same pattern to repeat itself every time the first cue appears.
Feynman uses a nice analogy to illustrate humans’ understanding of Nature. Imagine someone is looking at players playing a game of chess without knowing the rules. At one point, the observer will understand that the pawns can only move forwards, that the horse moves in a strange manner, etc. He will, by observation and induction, infer the basic rules of chess.
But at the moment the observer thinks he understands the game one player does something impressive: a pawn on the last row is transformed into a queen for the first time in multiple games. This behavior was not expected at all, and the simple rules made by observation must be altered. That’s what happens with Physics, and with Scientific Methods in general. More and more complex laws of Physics are built to explain Nature, and whenever a new case appears, the rules are updated.
To understand is to encode information in your brain
Tim Urban, the writer and illustrator of waitbutwhy explains in his Neuralink article that in order for your brain to remember a complex idea, it must have some robust prior knowledge about the field. That’s why he begins his article by explaining the fundamental structure of the brain, and then explains the subtle limits of Brain Machine Interfaces. The same idea is expressed in the popular course by Barbara Oakley on Coursera.
“When you first look at a brand new concept it sometimes doesn’t make much sense[…]. Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning.The new logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember, and also makes it easier to fit the chunk into the larger picture of what you’re learning. Just memorizing a fact without understanding or context doesn’t help you understand what’s really going on or how the concept fits together with other concepts you’re learning.”
Understanding is about encoding the knowledge we acquire from our perception into our brain.
What it means for the future
In the information age, knowledge is accessible at any moment from the tip of our thumbs. So why bother remembering anything at all?
There are things you don’t know and have no idea that you don’t. Understanding concepts should be about knowing the limits of your understanding. Knowing what you can prove to be true, and what you cannot (e.g. knowing that you can prove a theorem from first principles in Mathematics). That’s why, in order to deepen your understanding of a concept, you should try to separate what you can prove (based on first principles) from what you take for granted.
Another way to detect the holes in your knowledge is to explain what you learn. Explaining things makes sure that the knowledge is correctly encoded in your brain. Sometimes, you receive an idea by your senses and, because it is formulated so clearly, you believe that you will remember it. But the knowledge might not last in your neurons because it may lack the fundamental knowledge the new idea relies on.
Deepening our perception of the world means building our model of the world block by block. If the base ain’t strong enough it won’t last. The only way to build strong foundations is to understand how we understand.
