Do You Know or Understand?
Any fool can know. The point is to understand — Einstein
“Read a lot, and get older.” There’s no way it’s that simple. I thought to myself frustrated as I mulled over the advice I received. My former professor had given puzzlingly simple advice to what I thought surely was a very deep question — “how did he seem to know so much on so many topics?”
What should I even read?
What on earth does growing older have to do with anything other than wasting time?
Thoughts like these raced through my impatient mind as I tried to complicate six words into 600. After minutes of pacing, I decided my takeaway was to read whatever I feel like.
I knew, but I didn’t understand.
Now, ironically four years and several books later, I understand the advice in a new light. This has happened to me repeatedly: rewatching a movie, rereading a book (I highly recommend revisiting an old favorite after a while), or remembering a conversation from an exchange long passed. Things hit me differently now than they once did. The experiences I’ve gained, the advice I’ve garnered, and the realizations I’ve attained between then and now have all changed me — and thus my understanding. Revisiting content gives the clearest cross-sections for understanding because even though the content is the same, the takeaways can be vastly different.
There IS a difference between Knowing & Understanding
You have almost surely had that “aha!” moment where something clicked for you after a while of not getting it. Or perhaps you were trying to communicate with someone but your earnest words seemed to fall on deaf ears. Or perhaps you’ve been the one nodding along to the stream of words washing over you because you hear words but can’t make meaning of them.
For instance, one of my favorite movies that explores this concept is Good Will Hunting. For those who haven’t seen it (you should), the relevant information is that there is a genius orphan, Will Hunting, who unwillingly sees a therapist that helps him find direction in his life. Here are two nuggets of wisdom the therapist shares with Will:
- “You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist?”
- “You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. You’ve never been out of Boston. So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written…Michelangelo? You know a lot about him I bet. Life’s work, criticisms, political aspirations. But you couldn’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling.“
These quotes capture the essence between knowing and understanding.
Knowing is possessing facts and memories of information whereas understanding is tightly integrating such knowledge into broader worldviews and being able to apply it. I like to think of knowledge as a seed needing the fertile soil of experience in order to grow into a tree of understanding. I later learned that just as the tree continues to grow, our understanding continues to grow. (If you want to learn more about this kind of continued growth in the field of education, check out Bloom’s taxonomy)[1].
Understanding can be broken down into 3 aphorisms:
- You can understand only in the context of your current understanding.
- You can truly communicate only what you understand.
- You can understand yourself by understanding your understanding.
These aphorisms may seem simple or obvious, but they have profound implications for how we learn, communicate, and grow as individuals and as a society. This blog post is the first of 3 that will explore each aphorism in-depth and see how they can help improve our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
Aphorism #1: You can understand only in the context of your current understanding.
ABSTRACTION
The power of abstraction: How can we communicate beyond the immediate context?
Ever heard an inside joke you didn’t get? Of course you have — we all have. We didn’t get it because we weren’t in on it and didn’t have the shared context. On the other hand, when we have a shared context it automatically resolves the ambiguity. For instance, if someone asks you to “pass the mouse” in a computer class versus a petting zoo.
Since we share senses with other humans, we consequently share a sensory understanding that allows us to communicate about our environment (ie the mouse in the petting zoo). As we move away from the immediate setting to conversations requiring additional information, we implicitly assume our audience has that context. The context could be the occurrence of an inside joke long ago in a galaxy far far away, the familiarity with physics for discussing the implications of quantum mechanics, or even understanding English well enough that hearing “move away” in a sentence doesn’t leave you perplexed (an interesting metaphor for concepts that is based on the idea of concepts being located in some common space).
Sharing context requires abstraction. Abstraction is one of the most powerful tools we have in understanding because it allows us to discuss and hear about things we’ve never witnessed, yet it has inherent limitations. Without abstraction, you could only talk about the most immediate, grounded concepts. A perfect example of this was when I was conversing with a colleague about how mangosteens were a favorite fruit of mine. The exchange went something like this:
Colleague: “What’s a mangosteen?”
Me: “It’s a fruit with a thick purple rind that is from Southeast Asia. It has a milky color and a sweet, clear flavor.”
Colleague: “Where do you get them from?”
Me: “You can sometimes buy them from the local H-Mart.”
This colleague was able to get an idea of what the fruit is like via the abstractions of fruit, purple, sweet, and all of the other nouns without having ever experienced it. A spatial association with this mystery fruit was also created via a location which makes it more real. However, the understanding is incomplete compared to the richness associated with actually eating and experiencing the fruit.
The problem of abstraction: How we lose information and introduce ambiguity:
Despite the benefits when conversing with others, the process of abstraction is inherently lossy; there is some level of information that must be foregone to get the generalizability that it brings. Consider describing an orange at a grocery store. The fact that this could refer to a blood orange, a mandarin, a clementine, or a navel orange is inherently a useful part of the abstraction, but it also precludes fine-grained description of any particular orange.
RESOLUTION PATH AMBIGUITY
Since abstractions can refer to many things, there is an inherent ambiguity in the abstraction. This leads to a problem I call resolution path ambiguity. Resolution paths are how people end up resolving a general concept for a specific occurrence (ie the particular orange you envision when hearing the word orange). There is ambiguity in these resolution paths because by design the abstract words do not contain the information about how they should be resolved. The greater the abstraction, the longer the resolution path will be. A great difficulty stems from this since the longer the resolution path, the more likely the concept that is being conveyed is being distorted from its original intention.
As a simple example, let’s say my friend was making a blood orange tart. If she asks me to buy oranges, and I go and buy mandarins, then this could lead to disappointment or exasperation because it is not the kind she needs. However, if she says she wants large blood oranges then I have a much more specific idea of what to get as the abstractness is very low.
On the flip side, if she only asked me to buy fruit, she would be taking a much larger risk since I don’t know anything about which fruit she wants. In each example, as the length of the ambiguity path varies, my understanding of her answer vastly changes. This fundamental limitation of abstraction dominates the way we (mis)communicate. This is one reason it’s crucial to ask “why do you think that?” when there’s one thing we disagree with because we don’t necessarily understand their reasoning.
Now, how can we communicate more effectively given the conundrum between long resolution paths or monotonous minutiae? The old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has our answer.
Consider the definition of Impressionism:
“Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience.”
This is a very abstract and technical description that may not convey much meaning to someone who is not familiar with art history. However, when contrasted with also receiving an example of impressionism, such as this painting by Monet, the difference is striking.
The painting gives us a concrete and visual representation of what impressionism looks like, and helps us quickly understand what the definition could not. This is why using examples is crucial as it acts as a test for the other person to gauge their current understanding.
COMMON UNDERSTANDING
True context is more than just knowledge; it is common understanding. We use this common understanding as a lens through which we see the world in the process of integration.
Have you ever seen a homeless man on the street? Your thought processes, response, and assumptions are based on your worldview and understanding. So two people seeing the same man may have very different thoughts (biases). Even knowing he is homeless as opposed to camping on the sidewalk is the result of “common sense” being applied to make these inductive inferences. Just the data of seeing a man on the street near a tent isn’t useful to us without integrating it into our existing understanding. Whether we respond with pity, fear, disdain, or empathy is dictated by our understanding.
Shared understanding is taken for granted and establishes a baseline while different understandings cause contention and talking past one another. This is why classes oftentimes have prerequisites — to encourage students to have a common understanding upon which to build.
When we don’t understand something, we relate it to terms we do understand. As mentioned earlier, understanding isn’t binary. All of the time we hear about places we’ve never seen, of times we’ve never lived in, and of sensations we’ve never felt, yet we use our general understanding of language (an abstraction itself) in context to imperfectly understand these ideas. Well, at least up to the skill of the speaker and the limitations of language itself.
RELATABILITY + EFFORT
One of the first factors that influence how we understand something is how close the perception and knowledge are to our own understanding (how relatable it is). If it’s close, we can use related high-level concepts in order to understand the new phenomena (relate what we know to what we don’t know). For example, if we already know how to play chess, we can easily understand how to play checkers, since they have similar rules and strategies.
On the other end of the spectrum, when we try to understand something from the ground up, we use abstraction to build conceptual structures (understanding blocks) from the fundamental building blocks. These fundamental building blocks can be grounded language that relates to sensory experiences, observation, and data or other similar low-level concepts. For example, when we want to learn a new language, we have to start with the alphabet, the sounds, the words, and the grammar, before we can form sentences and have conversations. However, this is a lot of work.
The larger blocks take less effort to build the understanding, whereas the smaller blocks (low-level language and experience) are much more labor intensive but are more flexible. Therefore, we have to balance the trade-off between relatability and effort when we try to understand something new.
PATH DEPENDENCY + DIVERSITY
This raises an interesting point on the role of these conceptual building blocks. Is there a path dependency to understanding? That is, if I get to understanding chemistry from a physics background and if you understand chemistry from a biology background, would our chemistry understanding differ if we understood chemistry to the same degree?
It’s clear that there is a degree of path dependence since the blocks used are shaped by the previous understandings. While they may build the same structure, they leave indelible traces on the building. For instance, if one grounds oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions in the quantum mechanics of electron movement (physics point of view) versus with cellular respiration (biology point of view), one would have very different (correct) understandings of redox reactions. This is similar to how different cultures or languages may have different ways of expressing the same idea or concept, but with subtle nuances or implications that reflect their history and values.
FOUNDATIONALISM + PRAGMATISM
A third factor that influences how we understand something is foundationalism: the level of depth or detail that we go into. Depending on our goals, needs, and values, we may decide to go deeper or shallower in our understanding of a topic. For example, if we want to understand how a car works, we may learn about the basic parts and functions, such as the engine, the wheels, the brakes, and the steering. This would give us a sufficient understanding to drive the car safely and efficiently. However, if we want to repair or modify the car, we may need to learn more about the mechanics and electronics that are involved in the car’s operation to understand its performance. In the latter example, we have to invest more effort to achieve that level of understanding.
This naturally leads to the question of how foundational should I go? I do not think there is a single correct answer, but it would likely depend on:
- How urgently you need a solution. More urgently means less deep.
- The task itself. There are somewhat natural breakpoints that are based on predictability. If there is a rule that is generally true and can be used for reasoning, there is little inherent need to go deeper. A good example of this is gravity. Many people understand it as “what goes up must come down”. Others understand it in a more technical way Newton’s Law of Gravity and the 9.81 m/s^2 measurement. There is an arguably more foundational understanding when people study Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, but for many applied settings this is unnecessary since it doesn’t lead to any differences from the Newtonian version. Thus, the classical version is better, which is also much simpler and faster.
- What you value. The most important of the three, what you value is the ends by which all these means bear fruit. Aligning your knowledge and understanding to pursue what you value (or figure out what you value) is the crucial step.
The described hierarchy is within a certain domain, but understanding isn’t siloed. This means that your existing knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shape how you interpret new information and experiences. For example, if you have a background in physics, you might understand the concept of time differently than someone who has a background in philosophy. Even the understanding within a given field such as between a mechanic and a mechanical engineer are different but neither is necessarily better than the other, each is better for certain tasks.
CONCLUSION:
Understanding is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that influences and is influenced by various factors, such as context, path, and depth. It is not a fixed or final state, but a dynamic and evolving process that requires constant reflection and revision. Therefore, understanding is not something that we have or don’t have, but something that we do or don’t do.
To understand something better, we have to do more than just know or believe. We have to explore, question, challenge ourselves and others, and seek out new perspectives while being curious and critical. We have to understand understanding.
END OF BLOG CHECKPOINT:
- We understand in the context of our own understanding
— Ask “why do you think that?” to get a better idea of people’s understanding and context - Context is most clear when rooted in biology or immediate surroundings and common experiences
— Be aware of the experiences of your listener and yourself and ask if unsure
— As we get more abstract, the meaning is more easily muddled as there is increasing resolution path ambiguity, though we get denser information in return
— For more abstract topics, ground them with examples germane to the listener - We can gauge how much effort is involved in learning something by understanding the context and building blocks we have
- Understanding is neither binary, nor unidimensional; generally it can be built backwards from the salient topic depending on timeline, field, and value
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