Thoughts on Knowledge

Not the culmination of a journey, but the beginning of one.

Knowledge as the Opportunity to Improve

The inconsistencies in my childhood ended up leading to one of the constants in my life, an island of stability in the chaos: I’ve always been a martial artist, and it does in fact form a major part of my self-identity, my vision of who I am as a person. Although I work for a large software company, I don’t see myself as a “computer programmer”. It is something I do, one more thread in my life’s tapestry.  That doesn’t, however, mean I don’t bring the peripheral skills of that job to bear in many other facets of my life. The skills and thought processes necessary to be a successful computer programmer are  as embedded in my DNA as bowing in doorways, or making a correct fist.

400lbs. Also not the culmination of a journey, but the beginning of what I now know I am capable of.

To me, the interconnectedness and universal application of knowledge have always been apparent to me; If you know a lot about something, chances are that at least some of the principles are applicable everywhere in life, if not the specifics.

My college career was as diverse as my childhood. My meandering through different majors led me to Computer Science, where, in a very theory-heavy program, I learned the intellectual rigor required for proofs and discrete mathematics.  It is this same intellectual rigor and training that I use to determinine my how best to train, and to methodically tackle problems I face while teaching, to chip away at students’ problems and barriers bit by bit.

It’s my natural inclination to use all of the tools at my disposal to increase my skill at doing what I love, teaching what I love, and being able to see a wider vista of the things that are possible. To limit my vision only to a subset of what I’ve been taught is impossible for me. It’s true to some extent that I’m always looking for “the next best thing”, and to improve on my current processes and abilities, not only for myself, but for the students that I teach, so that I can better help them reach their dreams and goals.

In some ways, failure is as important as success. It’s impossible to know if a road leads to a dead end unless one travels down it first. As the old saw goes, the worst that can happen is that you discover one more way to do things that just doesn’t work. We should all seek failure to some extent. It’s an important marker of where our barriers lie, and gives us the first inkling of a strategy to hurdle them. If we do not expand our horizons of knowledge though both new triumphs and crushing defeat, we don’t know what type of person we are now, much less the type of person we could possibly become.

For that reason, I’ve dedicated myself to trying all sorts of new things, particularly those in the physical and martial arts realm, areas of knowledge to which I am drawn like a moth to a flame. As I extinct inferior behavior, and hone my imperfect knowledge to an ever finer edge, I am irrevocably changed as a person, something that is always reflected in the way that I perform and the way that I teach.

I’m not perfect, I never will be perfect, and in many things I’m not even adequate. But I’m dedicated to never being complacent with that.

On Open Mindedness

We should always prepare to be wrong. In fact, to some extent we should hope for it. We shouldn’t look to be wrong about anything in particular, but we should accept that invariably, in some way, we are completely, undeniably, ego-crushingly, unequivocally, unambiguously wrong about SOMETHING, right now. We should seek it out, to some extent, an easy task if we are committed to studying things about which we are passionate.

Finding this chink in our armor represents an opportunity to see our knowledge fail us, and to correct ourselves to become better. We should always be ready to consider new ideas and how they impact us, and we should always be prepared to raise our heads, admit we were wrong, and do better henceforth.

The easiest thing in the world is to justify our current worldviews, to huddle in the warmth of our familiar notions and ideas, to concoct rationalizations for not accepting new data. It’s harmful. If we do this, we risk stagnating, stunting our personal growth, killing off countless opportunities for improvement and personal growth.

We should not automatically assume we’re wrong about everything. Nor should we adopt any new idea that comes along, with no critical though process in the way. We should always simply give contradicting ideas their fair time in our mental courthouse, before dismissing them out of hand.

On Talking Trash

I have often found that people are afraid of change and newness. It is threatening to one’s ego to be faced with an idea that challenges preconceived notions that may have been in place for years or even decades. As I stated above, we have some critical choices in these matters. We can either evaluate whatever the new information is, or we can choose to ignore it.

One way to justify ignoring something is to lower its status, to discredit it in ways that are not true or not relevant. Using these ad hominem attacks has a good amount of utility for the insecure. It lowers the challenging data’s status without having to risk evaluating it. It allows the challenging data to be the object of ridicule. No one would adopt something ridiculous. It raises therefore raises one’s own status such that the offending data is too low in importance to consider.

I have found that most who do this tend to do so in tightly-knit groups, with no dissenting voice. This phenomenon just makes it that much easier, as the group’s members take their respective potshots. Such echo chambers act as a feedback loop, such that the volume and intensity of attacks can continue without any interruption.

The sad part about this is that the considerable intellectual or emotional time it takes to attack new ideas could have been used to practice or get better, or hone the edge of the knowledge one already has. If you are talking trash, you’re not practicing and not getting better. You’re debasing yourself. You’re attacking others to feel better about yourself.

And you’re most definitely not improving.

As a side note, I’ve been guilty of this as well, on far too many topics to name. Lately though, I’ve tried to do a lot less of it, as it doesn’t help me, and most definitely hurts me. I guess I am sad to say that I have too much intimacy with this topic. I guess that’s why I can write with authority.