Which hand do you brush your teeth with?

Try switching to the other hand

It’s not so comfortable, is it

Now, imagine that the other hand is actually your stronger hand,

It ought to perform this task better,

But you’re not going to believe it, are you? You trained your other hand to brush your teeth

Do you unlearn now?

If there’s something to gain — you should

Will you?

You may be reluctant

Because the habits are strong

You may forget that you were to use your other hand to brush your teeth in less than a week

 

Unlearning is a very different skill to learning

Learning only goes one way — you absorb

Unlearning means erasing the previous program — and replacing it with a new one

Problem is — that which you’ve already learned — is now a HABIT

With learning — you merely interact, immerse yourself in the thing, with more or less strategy — and it is learned

With unlearning — you have the added difficulty of keeping yourself from falling back to old HABITS and REFLEXES

 

There’s also the extra drawback of DESTRUCTION, that comes from unlearning

We don’t want to unlearn

Our knowledge, our memories, is our wealth

We like to look over all the fucking nonsense we accumulated, and feel like we have so much

It’s another form of greediness

And

It’s also our castle, our shelter

It literally makes us feel safer

You don’t have to think, you don’t have to learn, you don’t have to do anything — because you already know everything, you already did everything right

Unlearning obliterates this safety

 

Thus,

Even idiots can learn

It’s a skill we’re born with

But unlearning?

Not every wise man can unlearn

It’s a skill which must be honed

 

And of course it is utterly necessary

Perhaps it’s the single most important skill

 

See we learn UP UNTIL WE HAVE LEARNED, are learn-ed

Even idiots learn

…up until they think they ‘know’,

At which point, by definition, they don’t learn

Because they already know

You tell them something new — they say they disagree

They see their beliefs working poorly in real life — but they say that there’s nothing more to see here, it’s just how the world is, clearly it’s rigged against them

 

Wise man are as guilty of this affliction as idiots

Wise man have more knowledge to cherish, to fall in love with, to become addicted to, depend on, desperate to uphold,

Idiots the opposite: they know so little, comprehend so little, that this little that they have becomes very precious to them… and the much that they don’t know becomes very SCARY, very ALIEN to them

Wise man looks at what he doesn’t know — and pretends his understanding already includes it, or transcends it

Idiot looks at things they don’t know — and pretend it’s all stupid nonsense, or irrelevant

 

Of course when you stop learning — your ability to learn becomes irrelevant

You’re now as dumb as a fucking stump

You’re as capable of acquiring new information

Therefore you’re as capable of being intelligent

i.e. utterly incapable

You just repeat like a fucking parrot: “I know I know…”,

It can happen to anyone

All because unlearning is so hard

 

It is therefore why it’s important to view UNLEARNING as separate from LEARNING,

Or perhaps a subset of learning.. however, unlearning would be then the bulk of the difficulty of learning.

We of course have words and cognate concepts for it:

-critical thinking

-falsification

-thesis and antithesis

-epistemic humility

-accountability, skin in the game

-building habits -> rebuilding habits

-etc

But single word “UNLEARNING” perhaps captures it better,

As it directly focuses attention on the necessary RECYCLING of old habits and beliefs,

Not merely ‘updating’, not merely fake humbleness, not merely ‘trying something new’, not merely ‘exploring’,

again, all that is easy and natural,

but fucking DESTROYING old beliefs,

because they are now an impediment,

They are now AT ODDS with the new model of reality

You can’t use two models at once

2 + 2 can’t simultaneously be equal to 4, and 5

 

Again,

Destroying old knowledge is hard

Unlearning is hard

It must be viewed as a different problem altogether, and tackled strategically

If you’re failing to move forward, failing to progress, failing to understand..

the first advice is to LEARN more, and EXPERIMENT more

obvious, easy, but not everyone does it

but the second advice is,

UNLEARN

and that is hard

but necessary

Perhaps some cherished beliefs of yours are just NOT going to work, with what you want to achieve, or understanding you want to acquire

UNLEARN