It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble.

It’s what you know for sure that

just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
where you live, the language you speak, culture
you exist in, etc..

Types of Unlearning

There’s different ways you might unlearn something in light of new

information. The first is a straightforward refutation of the old idea.
If you thought that Abraham Lincoln was the first American president and
then read in a book it was actually George Washington, you might, if you
believed the book, completely revise your view.

This complete refutation is atypical. More likely the *new knowledge

doesn’t contradict the old one, but it may modify it in some way*. If I
believe my best friend is very trustworthy, but I learn he is cheating
on his wife, I may not completely revise my opinion of him, but I may
trust him a bit less or trust him less in marital matters.

Other times new knowledge revises a simpler picture by filling it with

more complex details. This is similar to adding new knowledge, although
because the older, simpler view of the issue has been overwritten with
more detail, there is some unlearning going on. When Albert Einstein
discovered special relativity, this overthrew Isaac Newton’s laws of
motion. However, this wasn’t a complete refutation, but a
modification—Newton’s laws still hold approximately in areas where near
light-speed or extreme gravitation aren’t issues.

In all of these cases, however, you have to first let go of something

you thought you understood to make way for a new understanding. This
isn’t always easy to do.

Difficulties Unlearning

The first challenge of unlearning is that *when something contradicts

your current understanding, you are likely to dismiss it*. This may be
adaptive in a world where many of the things people say or information
you encounter are false, or lies constructed to manipulate you. Things
that you don’t currently believe are, /ceteris paribus/
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus>, more likely to be
false. However, this confirmation bias
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias> can make it harder to
unlearn when that’s valuable to you.

A deeper problem, I believe, is that *human beings tend not to deeply

represent doubt* and uncertainties in a fine-grained way. That is, the
things you believe now, you tend to believe completely, even if
provisionally. However, whether those beliefs are near-certain or
highly-doubtful, the way they are represented in the brain is much the
same.

It’s true that a more doubtful belief is more likely to be dismissed

than a certain one. If I try to argue that the moon is made of cheese,
for instance, I’ll be met with a lot more resistance than if I try to
argue something you only believed loosely. However, this revision occurs
in an active sense—when one is directly assessing reasons for the belief
in question. I believe that, when a belief isn’t being actively
considered, it can still inform your thinking in other ways and, that,
in those cases the relative certainty of the belief isn’t used.

If this view is true, then that means that many of the things we learned
aren’t dangerous because they are immune to counterargument, but because
they can subtly influence our thinking in adjacent areas when we aren’t
being vigilant to how likely they are to be true.

If this sounds confusing, consider the example I mentioned earlier:

a best friend who you discovered was cheating on his spouse.
However, suppose you didn’t learn it firsthand, but through a rumor
by a third-party. You don’t dismiss the charge outright, but you
tentatively accept that there’s some probability that your friend is
being unfaithful. If forced to confront this belief directly,
through debate or reasoning, you might come to the conclusion that
there’s only a minor chance that he is cheating. But, consider
instead, if someone asked you, in an unrelated context, of whether
your friend ever lies to get what he wants in business. Now, it’s my
opinion that this latent, provisional belief that “X cheats on his
spouse” may implicitly inform your intuitions about his
trustworthiness, even though that belief itself may not be very
reliable.

The intuition I want to present is that beliefs, in our capacity to

inform us, tend to be a lot more black-and-white as either believed
or completely dismissed, rather than, a more accurate picture where
many beliefs tend to have middling likelihood of being true. While
we can have more nuanced views when the belief is being debated
directly, the dangerous case is when they are being used to infer
about /other/ topics, yet their doubtful status is simply being
ignored to make that inference.

The main challenge of unlearning, therefore, is that most of our false

or doubtful assumptions about the areas that impact our lives are never
examined. We use these assumptions to operate, but because they aren’t
actively reflected upon, studied or challenged, they maintain their full
force, even if fairly simple arguments could overturn them.

Learning as Stamp Collecting Versus Diving into Strangeness

I see two main views of learning. *The first is like stamp collecting.
The person wants to collect more and more knowledge, mostly for the
purposes of showing it off to people they want to impress.* The
knowledge here is largely inert and unimportant for their lives—it’s
just a collecting hobby accruing more facts and ideas.

There’s nothing wrong with stamp collecting. Knowing facts and ideas,
even if they aren’t particularly useful or central to our lives, isn’t a
bad thing. It’s probably a superior hobby to many other pursuits, since
knowledge can, at least some of the time, spillover to more practical
consequences.

*The other view of learning, however, is centered around unlearning*.

This is the view that what we think we know about the world is a veneer
of sense-making atop a much deeper strangeness. The things we think we
know, we often don’t. The ideas, philosophies and truths that guide our
lives may be convenient approximations, but often the more accurate
picture is a lot stranger and more interesting.
Stamp collecting is more popular than diving into strangeness. For one,
it is strictly additive. Every new trivia fact, book of the month and
water cooler topic gets added to your collection, which you can whip out
in conversations and impress people who want to talk about them.

Diving into strangeness, in contrast, involves a cyclical process of

first undermining the things you thought you had learned. Facts, ideas
and theories, are no longer a comforting collection, but a temporary
foothold as you leave them to try to get to something deeper.

What is Strange?

Almost everything is much, much weirder than it looks at first. Science

is the clearest example of this. Subatomic particles aren’t billiard
balls, but strange, complex-valued wavefunctions. Bodies aren’t vital
fluids and animating impulses, but trillions of cells, each more complex
than any machine humans have invented. Minds aren’t unified loci of
consciousness, but the process of countless synapses firing in
incredible patterns.

Science confirms the underlying weirdness, but for most people, knowing
science is another kind of stamp collecting. Knowing quantum strangeness
doesn’t overlap with most areas of practical life, so it can be an
additional fact or idea one knows and can bring out in conversations.

More interesting, for me at least, are all the skills and knowledge that
we depend on and use everyday that have hidden weirdness beneath them.
When you remember something, did it actually happen that way? When you
give a reason for your behavior, did reasoning have anything to do with
it? When you think that achieving something will make you happy, will it?

Just as science has incredible depths of strangeness underneath,

everyday life also floats calmly upon a deeper weirdness that first
requires unlearning in order to appreciate.

Unlearning and Local Maxima

*Unlearning is unpleasant for most people.* Finding out something you

thought you knew was false, or a misleading simplification, feels bad.
Since strangeness tends to predominate, and we manage to get by in our
lives without worrying about it most of the time, why bother? Why not
just collect stamps and leave the bedrock of our intuitions comfortably
untouched?

For most people, this aversion to unlearning may not be so bad. Skillful
action exceeds skillful knowledge, so, for most people we manage to get
by okay even if our articulated theories of the world are out of sync
with a deeper reality.

*The main advantage, I see, of trying to get a deeper picture is that it

helps climb out of local maxima.* Theories can, to the extent they are
accurate, shine a light on potential things we could do, change or
experience that are outside what we’ve experienced directly before.
Theories help us make predictions about whether those unseen places are
good places to be or not.

A powerful algorithm for machine learning is gradient descent

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent>. It has a complex
mathematical formulation involving vector calculus and partial
derivatives, but the intuitive picture of what it is doing is quite
simple to understand. Imagine yourself standing at the edge of a valley.
Your goal is to get to the lowest possible spot you can. However, the
terrain is quite complex, and you aren’t sure exactly what it looks
like. What should you do?

The gradient descent algorithm is simple: go downhill. If you always

walk in the direction of steepest decline, you’ll eventually reach a
spot where every direction goes uphill again. This must be a low spot in
the terrain.

The problem with gradient descent is that you can get stuck in little
pockets where, to go further downhill, you must go uphill for awhile at
first.

This is a computer analogy, but I believe that human learning methods

for acquiring many practical skills through experience work in a similar
way. We are pushed and pulled by our intuitions to reach a local maxima
of “goodness” in how our lives could be. Although we aren’t always at
this equilibrium, if our lives are relatively stable, we tend to return
to it.

The problem with our lives is the same as with computers, however. *Many
people get “stuck” in local maxima*. *The person who is addicted to
alcohol is in a local maxima*. Drinking less causes pain, to make things
better, they first have to feel worse.

*Procrastination is a local maxima.* Starting work first involves

pushing through an unpleasant feeling about the task at hand. However,
as anyone who procrastinates often knows, the state of procrastination
isn’t particularly good, in an absolute sense. It feels awful, it’s just
that any immediate action you anticipate makes you feel a little worse
than that, so you stay stuck.

What’s the connection between unlearning and local maxima? Well one way
you can get out of local maxima is if you have some notion of what the
terrain is shaped like. If you know, for a fact, that you are sitting in
a locally optimal, but globally awful, position, you can push against
your intuitions and accept transitional badness in hopes of longer-term
goodness.

Knowing what the terrain is shaped like, however, depends on having an

accurate picture of the very facts and knowledge that are closest and
most fundamental to your life right now. If those facts are wrong, your
ability to make guesses about what places further from your immediate
vicinity are actually like diminishes rapidly. Depending on how large
the local maxima is that surrounds you, it may not be possible to see a
better future when one does exist, or there may appear to be one which
is actually a mirage.

In many ways, unlearning has the same properties of the local maxima
problem for your overall life situation. To get a more accurate picture,
you have to first sacrifice some certainty in the things you take for
granted. This sacrifice involves going against your natural
local-optimization inclinations.
 Strangeness, Randomness and Unlearning

So far, I’ve spoken about one method for overcoming the local maxima
problem: having a better theory of what unvisited places in the vast
space of possible life experiences might be like. This helps spot
genuine opportunities for improvement and avoids mirages of
hope-inspiring, but ultimately illusory directions to follow.

Unlearning fits into this because, unlikely with the stamp collecting of
purely additive learning, we all have pre-existing theories of what the
terrain of nearby life spaces is already like.

*Another method, however, for getting out of local maxima is simply

randomness*. Programmers often use some amount of random motion in their
gradient descent algorithms. This randomness means that their solutions
don’t snag on relatively insignificant dips.

Human beings can use randomness too to avoid the same problem. Exposing
yourself to a larger variety of experiences can pull you out of
temporary snags. The main disadvantage of this approach is that
randomness can sometimes be destructive. Trying heroin, cheating on your
spouse or joining a cult may all offer unique experiences, but their
dangers may not be worth the payoff.

Unlearning, to me, proposes a relatively safer way of exploring larger

swaths of the terrain of life possibilities. It may create a mental
discomfort and instability, as you contend with the fact that many of
the things you took for granted before may not be true. However, this is
often a lot less dangerous than undirected randomness may have on your
life.

unlearn
dIFKSEW
easiest----------most difficult
things
mind-heart-intellect-think-thoughts
toughest task
true k
explain
seek additive k in familiar areas
use that new k
pullup modify old k
start with a particular belief abt myself that seemed reasonable
dig deeper deepest
encounter arguments that showed why that belief was probably false
tension
start reworking that belief
travel explore unlearn
going to ones which deeply undermined
them
view culture specific
travel talk to people
learning languages
differ from you
more dramatically
sightseeing and taking photos
stamp collecting not acquiring model-altering insights.
*A third approach to unlearning is to be more varied and bold in your
experiments in life.* Pure randomness can have a destructive quality to
it. However, if you avoid obvious risks, many directions in life can be
explored more thoroughly than most people do.