Getting to Know Life

The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know, the less you know the more you think you know.

What is the discrepancy between what you actually know and what you believe you know? No matter who and how intelligent you are, I'm sure there is a gap between how confident you are about certain pieces of knowledge and the reality of how well you actually know and understand them.

I want to narrow the scope of my question regarding the existing discrepancy, down to the knowledge and understanding of the basic objects, phenomenons, and workings of our daily life.

I'm talking about all the utilities, technologies, and objects that we take as a complete given. Those that are so common and we all use almost every single day of our lives. Those that we might think we know how they work just because we know how to use them or we experience them.

But the reality is, that we probably don't hold even 99% of the information we need to, in order to argue that we have a complete understanding of how they work. We have created a certain illusion that we all live by, an illusion that makes you think that you know how a doorknob works.

Niagara Experiment.

Everything I wrote in the paragraphs above is the aftermath thoughts of reading about the “Niagara experiment”. This experiment is an extension of an experiment done by two yale researchers (Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002). They coined the “Illusion of explanatory depth” effect.

The extension was done by the notorious Dan Ariely, an Israeli Behavioral economist. In his version of the experiment, All the participants were asked to rate their understanding of how the ordinary toilet flushing system works on a scale from 1 to 7 (1 being no knowledge and 7 being a professional on the topic in hand). The average rating of knowledge stood at 5.1. This is a pretty high score. They were so confident that something they all use many times a day is a piece of knowledge they must have.

Side note, some of the participants were so confident that they rated their knowledge as 6 or higher. Those were the people that lowered their score the most at the end of the experiment.

They were then asked to draw out the inner workings of the flushing system.

This is the first step of the experiment where things got complicated and the participants were faced with reality. For the first time, the discrepancy between reality and a personal belief revealed itself. But only a tiny exposure…

Believe it or not, even though most of the participants were not able to draw the inner workings, the average only went down by 1 point! The current average is 4.2. Still very high and confident. (You could probably explain this by saying that some people don't know how to draw or they do not know how to visualize complex objects).

The next step was the real slap in the face. The participants received a box, and in the box, there were all the different components of a toilet flushing system. They were asked to put it together and construct the system that they understand so well.

Obviously, you would expect them to know how to put it all together if their knowledge of how it all works is so good.

The participants looked at all the different parts scattered around them, speechless and lost. They then lowered their rating to an average of 2.7.

They had no idea how a flushing system works. I guess you and I don't either.

A Slap in The Face — Discrepancy Exposed.

Reading about this experiment only exposed the obvious and I felt that I too am lying to myself about how much I actually know about basic objects, natural phenomena, technology devices, mechanical workings, and anything else that serve us as humans, in literally everything we do. This realization drove me crazy until I came up with a solution. Which you could probably guess is the “getting to know life” project that I will soon explain.

As in writing this, I have Bluetooth headphones connected to my computer and playing a song for me. And up until I decided to take the “getting to know life” project upon myself, I had no idea how on earth my phone sends the music over to my earbuds. Now I do, and every time I use Bluetooth devices, I appreciate them more because I know how they work.

Some people may be okay without knowledge about how basic things work, but I know that I'm not.

Personally, the eager desire for knowing and understanding everything a human can possibly understand with our limited mind emerges from my fascination with the human mind and the human world we have created (society, technology, art, etc). I am also intrigued by the world that we perceive, using our minds. And that is why I added Nature, phenomenons, self-analysis, and other categories that come with life to the list of things I need to know in the scope of this project.

So I'm writing this post for all the people who have that fundamental curiosity in them, driving you to learn more and more, every day.

Now ill explain my project. The setup is pretty simple but requires some dedication and a lot of curiosity.

Three things:

• Open a set of folders to summarize in google drive
• Create a list on Trello (An app I use to keep track of tasks & ideas) of all the things you want to get to know and keep updating it
• Create a list of go-to resources that will give you the knowledge you need
• Learn! (Okay it was 4 things..)

What I did was create a folder in my google drive called “Getting to know life” and in that folder, I created many subfolders for different categories. See the picture below

Examples of what I get to know in the different categories are microwaves in “electronics”, the banking systems in “social constructs”, touchscreens in “technology”, doorknobs in “mechanics”, lighting in “natural phenomenon”.

These are the categories that I felt like most of us encounter every day, If you think of other categories I would be more than happy to hear your curious ideas.

I then created a list on my to-do list (i use Trello for my life to-do list) and obviously, I called the list “getting to know life” and there I jot down everything I encounter in my daily life that I would want to know the inner workings of.

My goal is to tick one item off that list every day. (You can pick your interval, according to your personal schedule and desire).

Before I started I scraped the internet for websites, youtube channels, online education platforms, podcasts, or anything that can serve as my go-to resource for learning something new.

Once I pick a subject, I look at the resource list, open google docs in the corresponding folder, and just start taking notes about what I just learned.

Every day that I do this, I finish the day with a bigger smile and have one more piece of knowledge that I didn't have the day before. It always leaves me wanting to know more.

Its been more or less a month since I've started this project, and obviously, there were days that I missed but overall I feel like my appreciation for the small things in life has grown drastically and that feeling of satisfaction when using something that I now know a bit better about how it works, is priceless and gets me closer to the human experience that I strive for.

This project even made me enjoy warming up food in the microwave because I know now how it works and I think of what is happening to my food when it is spinning around in that black box getting radiated by those microwaves.

I hope this article triggered or strengthened your desire to get to know life better. I truly believe the more knowledge and curiosity you have, the better and more interesting your experience as a human in the journey of life will be.

Would love to hear your thoughts!