Conquering my fear of feeling stupid
"wait, I don't understand how gradient descent works?"
Clickbait title: “He who has no shaky foundation cast the first stone”
[This one is all over the place but I don’t want to spend time revising this one. very nuerondumpy article, you have been warned! day 3/30 of my writing challenge]
For as long as I can remember, I’ve greatly valued intelligence in myself and other people. I’ve always liked feeling smart and talking to people I consider smart.
I have also, for as long as I’ve been alive, feared that I’m not smart enough to do the things I consider cool. (This article changed my mind on this, strongly recommended) 1
Even after that epic psychiatrist nerdsnipe, I still feel viscerally stupid sometimes, like I won’t be able to do the thing I want to do even with infinite effort. It’s gotten worse since I now have friends that I consider way smarter than me. I feel mogged!!! Who likes feeling mogged!!!?
I would very much like to divorce my self-perceived intelligence from my ego/self-worth, but I’ve found it very hard to stop. I’m kind of accepting it’s just part of who I am. One way this has impacted me detrimentally is that I notice I’m afraid to ask questions when I feel like the answer is “something I should know already“.
I distinctly remember getting fucking fed up in high school, one of those moments where you get deep into a subject that builds heavily on itself but your foundation sucks so building on top of it is very hard. The situation in question was a chemistry class that I was horribly failing and the teacher was trying to desperately explain something to me involving ions. I was taught what an ion was a year before that but I was drawing an eye or something.
During her explanation I just blurted out “what the fuck is an ion!!!!” and the whole class laughed at me because it was assumed to be basic knowledge. I’m 23 years old and this obviously doesn’t matter anymore. Kids are horrible and I probably wasn’t the only person in that room who didn’t know. I think about this when I try to sleep sometimes.
I’m proud of my younger self however, if you never ask what an ion is you can never fully understand the thing that relies on you knowing what an ion is.
Sounding smart
My favorite writers have one particular trait in common. They never use complicated words when simple words suffice. Some people who’s ideas I want to understand don’t do this. This is something that has frustrated me immensely trying to read philosophy. And I’m not even talking about the hard stuff like Kant! I mean Albert fucking Camus!!!!
I was at a conference many years back, and I come to listen to a debate between two philosophers about the point of life, And what happened instead was lots and lots of long words, when in fact they were talking about very graspable stuff – “What are we doing here”, “what’s the point in being alive”, etc., And I sat there for hours thinking: “You could just talk like normal people. Why aren’t you talking like normal people? The meat of what you’re actually saying isn’t that complicated.” And I realized those folks on stage were probably scared – scared of being seen as stupid. And so instead, they’d ended up being all obscure with big silly long words. But really, isn’t it way more impressive to say a complex thing in a simple way than a simple thing in a complex way? If you’re writing or making something that isn’t working, it might be because you’re worried about being called stupid, and you’re making it too complicated. I do this all the time! I reckon it’s way more awe-inspiring to watch a cartoon and notice the thing goes deeper than you first realized, than to read something patting itself on the back for being “high art” and notice there aren’t actually any decent ideas in there underneath all the pretension and pomposity. - Exurb1a in Thoughts About Writing
There may be something to say about take culture being partly to blame for this as well. I don’t think people used to give opinions on (or just talk about) things before understanding them as frequently before social media. The internet trains you to sound smart, which is not the same as being smart. In an age of takes, asking “guys, where is Israel on the map again” is brave.
meta intelligence
I want to be smart yet I seem to often be frustrated by learning. Intelligence is the area under the time spent learning curve. I dislike learning in a lot of contexts, it’s exhausting. Soooooo am I just chasing something doomed?
do other people even learn like me?
Is this some fucked up other minds thing?
I feel like my foundation is almost always shaky, and ~80% of my work when learning a new concept is brushing up my foundations, then starting to build (which feels hopeless) and all of a sudden it’s trivial2. Does everyone secretly have a shaky foundation?
Worst of all, this effect obviously snowballs! Learning something new is way easier and nicer if you first don’t have to (significantly) brush up 10 different concepts!
While we’re on the topic, does anyone else get extreme Extraneous Cognitive Load3 when seeing math/formal notation? I can’t be the only one who just gets really scared/wants to give up the second complicated formulas come up.
Yet, every single time I’ve feared “this is too hard, I can’t understand this, I should stop” it’s ended with me going “ahhhhhhh!” somewhere in the next 6 months.4
meta reason I write this meta post about meta understanding
Okay celeste from celeste-land? why write this at all? I don’t care!!!
I place a lot of value in being an open book. My coping mechanism for dealing with emotions I consider embarrassing is broadcasting them to everyone who will listen.5 I’ve found this to work great.
I don’t like keeping secrets. Which includes mind-secrets (anxieties are mind secrets to me), it makes me stressed.
I don’t understand most things, math is scary and despite my best efforts I seem to care about that a whole lot.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed and courage to raise my hand and ask what the fuck an ion is. (It’s an atom/molecule with a charge, which means a difference in electrons compared to it’s ordinary form, which I am no longer ashamed to say I had to google :) )
incredible, I read this article like half a year ago and go to find it now only to realize it’s fucking Scott Alexander!!!
Something something “All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.” - Ernest Rutherford
Concept I learned in my teaching degree, very valuable concept. It’s basically how much of your RAM something takes up. Intrinsic cognitive load is because the thing itself is hard to understand, extraneous cognitive load is how it’s presented
okay not every single time, I stop reading research papers all the time when I realize they build on things that build on things and it’s papers all the way down in a field I’m not particularly interested in.
I should write a blogpost on that woman shouldn’t I.
I love you thank you