Learned Blankness

Great article! I didn't realize how I blank on some of those.

When I tutored math, new students acted as though the laws of exponents (or whatever we were learning) had fallen from the sky on stone tablets. They clung rigidly to the handed-down procedures. It didn’t occur to them to try to understand, or to improvise.

I'd like to self-centeredly bring up a similar anecdote, which forms part of my frustration how people give unnecessarily-complex explanations, typically based on their own poor understanding.

In chemistry class, when we were learning about radioactive decay and how it's measured in half-lives, we were given a (relatively) opaque formula, "as if from the sky on stone tablets". I think it was

mass_final = mass_initial * exp(-0.693 * t / t_halflife)

And students worked hard to memorize it, not seeing where it came from. So I pointed out, "You know, that equation's just saying you multiply by one-half, raised to the number of half-lives that passed."

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhh! It's so much simpler that way!" And yet a test question was, "What is the constant in the exponent for the radioactive decay formula?" Who cares?

Sandra runs helpless to her roommate when her computer breaks -- she isn’t “good with computers”. Her roommate, by contrast, clicks on one thing and then another, doing Google searches and puzzling it out.[4]

Wow, a footnote on this one and not even a link to the xkcd about it? ;-)

I'm reminded of a (probably untrue) story about officer training school in the British army: as part of a test, the officer candidates are asked what the correct way to dig a trench is. The correct answer is:

I say "Sergeant, dig me a trench!"

In other words, you saw a broken dishwasher, and you know that the way to fix a broken dishwasher is to find Steve Rayhawk and tell him that there's a dishwasher that needs fixing. Which you did, and it worked. ;)

Very observant post. I've noticed this 'learned blankness' in a lot of people when it comes to 'nerdy' areas like math and science, probably because I'm not as blank in these areas. (There are plenty of things I don't know very much about, like for example the North American legal system, but my usual thought is "wow I would really like to get a book/do a wikipedia search out on that!") Unfortunately it's not as easy to pinpoint the areas where I am blank.

But before giving it even ten seconds’ thought, I’d classified the problem as a “mechanical thing”.

As part of my 'mission to become a real grownup', I've started trying to solve small household problems like this on my own. Sometimes it leads to a lot of time-wasting, like the time I spent half an hour trying to fix the toilet when it turned out my roommate had just turned the water off because the sound kept her awake. I would have saved myself an hour if I'd made the problem not my responsability, but now I have a pattern-recognition schema in my head for toilet problems...the first thing I'll check for next time, after "is is plugged?" will be "is the water on?" I'm assuming that this is how most people become good in these areas...

Not that I disagree with you in general, but I can think of a few cases in which you may actually want to cultivate blankness toward a given subject. In particular, deep and difficult questions have been known to occasionally drive people mad - it's an occupational hazard for mathematicians in particular, and perhaps also for people in other fields. One might reasonably object that correlation does not imply causation in this case, but I have had a couple of experiences in which intense study of math and physics led me to some pretty dark psychological places, and I had to back off for awhile and think about more mundane matters while my mind reset. It's possible that, for some people, some areas of thought really are inaccessible, insomuch as they could irrevocably damage themselves in trying to get there.

I react to cookery in the same way many people react to computing.

Sometimes I try to use this to understand the reactions of people who have trouble with computers.

The trouble with explaining this analogy to people is people's instant reaction is to go "cooking isn't scary at all! Look at all these reasons why kitchens are fun and non-scary".

To me, the hard part in this procedure looks to be this step:

try to notice areas you care about, that you’ve been treating as blank defaults.

It seems likely to me that such areas are going to be ones that I habitually don't turn my real attention to, and that if they come briefly to mind it won't necessarily be obvious to me that I am treating them as blanks.

Of course, the other side of the coin is the Dunning--Kruger effect which causes us to overestimate our knowledge about things we're ignorant about.

While it's not good for building deep skills, reading (the right sort of) random blogs is a great way to defeat learned blankness. After reading a post or two about something, even if I don't retain much of it, I do retain enough of an outline to treat it as something that's available to reason about and research if it becomes relevant.

"People who can't or won't think for themselves" is how a friend of mine characterised his customers as a freelance Windows NT admin (a very good one - and good NT admins aren't cheap). "There's a lot of money in sewage."

Outsourcing thinking to anyone who can be convinced or coerced into doing it seems quite common to me. People will so often do things just because someone else demands it of them. I have commented before on how my ridiculously charming daughter [1] is remarkably creative in intellectual laziness, and how I have to be sure not to let her get away with it. She will damn well learn not to be lazy just because she can!

I blank on programming, which is not so good for a sysadmin to a development team. I don't write anything more than shell scripts and I have the algorithmic insight of someone who doesn't. I suppose I should learn more.

Too many people consider computers malevolent boxes of evil completely unamenable to any rational consideration, even in theory. Your "Sandra" example is many programmers I've worked with.

[1] and it works on people other than me, e.g. the man in the coffee shop at 5pm yesterday she asked to get her a babycino (frothy milk with chocolate on top). He switched the machine back on after he'd switched it off and cleaned it just because the cute little girl asked for a 50p drink.

I think a lot of learned blankness comes about because of fear of being wrong, or more correctly, fear of someone else blaming them for being wrong. In certain social strata, you aren't supposed to think about a problem, or let others know you're thinking about a problem, unless it is your job to think about it. If you think about a problem, and get it wrong, then you are irresponsible for not going to an expert with the problem.

So that's where learned blankness gets it's traction, in my opinion, and this is the reason why you'll find people spending an incredible amount of money, for example, going to Best Buy and having them install an operating system for you. (I'm sure this site could come up with numerous similar examples of this.)

But the alternative to this is inevitably being wrong time and again, but this needs to be understood as a part of learning, and as a part of the process of inquiry. We need to learn how to make mistakes, how to know when you're making a mistake, and how to learn from it. But you'll inevitably hear "Why didn't you call the X-man!"

I have observed similar behavior in others. Only I called it 'blackboxing', for lack of a better word. I think this might actually be a slightly better term than 'learned blankness', so I hereby submit it for consideration. It's borrowed from the software engineering idea of a black box abstraction.

People tend to create conceptual black boxes around certain processes, which they are remarkably reluctant to look within and explore, even when something does go wrong. This is what seems to have happened with the dishwasher incident. The dishwasher was treated as a black box. Its input was dirty dishes, its output was clean ones. When it malfunctioned, it was hard to see it as anything else. The black box was broken.

Of course, engineers and programmers often go out of their way to design highly opaque black boxes, so it's not surprising that we fall victim to this behavior. This is often said to be done in the name of simplicity (the 'user' is treated as an inept, lazy moron), but I think an additional, more surreptitious reason, is to keep profit margins high. Throwing out a broken dishwasher and buying a new one is far more profitable to a manufacturer than making it easy for the users to pick it apart and fix it themselves.

The open source movement is one of the few prominent exceptions to this that I know of.

Good post - upvoted!

[4] Thanks to Zack Davis for noting that the “good with computers” trait seems to be substantially about the willingness to play around and figure things out.

Quoting Homestuck:

grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]
...
TA: 2ee the menu up top?
TA: fiiddle around wiith that tiil you open the viiewport.
GA: I Did Fiddle With It
GA: To No Avail
TA: iif you cant fiigure 2hiit out by fuckiing around you dont belong near computer2.

(twinArmageddons has a "typing quirk" related to the number 2; if you didn't get it, '2' looks like a reversed 's'.)

As a professional programmer, I should note that there's a good kind of blankness - the state of no assumptions, which you should reset your mind to when attempting to figure out a novel problem. Many more things can go wrong in programming than in plumbing, and assuming that you know something about the root cause without sufficient evidence can lead you into a blind alley. Just today, I diagnosed a bug where make_pair(y, z) in user code began failing to compile. This was poorly written to begin with (it should always have been written as make_pair(y, z)), but the original 1998 and 2003 C++ Standards said that it should work anyways - and it did for years. Then the new 2011 C++ Standard changed the definition of make_pair() in such a way that, in general, make_pair(y, z) will fail to compile. (This is intentional - that code is "bad", and the make_pair() change has other consequences which are very good. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.) I verified that the Standard Library implementation had been changed in accordance with the 2011 Standard, and almost said "case closed" and sent my E-mail. I had seen this before, and I knew that this was an identical manifestation.

Right before hitting Send, I had second thoughts and took another look. All of my previous analysis was correct, but this case was special (and unlike the previous case I had seen). In this code, make_pair(y, z), y's type Y was different from X. (X was unsigned int and Y was int - very simple types, I'm just abstracting it further. Despite appearances they are unrelated as far as we're concerned here, so X and Y are probably better to think about.) The previous case I'd seen had identical types. With different types, successive drafts of the Standard have said different things:

• 1998/2003: This should compile and work.
• 2011 v1.0: This should compile and work, but other cases will eat your brains.
• 2011 v2.0: No brain eating! This shouldn't compile, and neither should those other cases.
• 2011 v2.1: The best of both worlds: this should compile and work, but those other cases shouldn't eat anyone's brains.

The final piece of the puzzle was that the compiler in question had implemented 2011 v2.0, but not yet v2.1. So the correct thing to do was to change the user's code, and open a compiler bug.

If I had been slightly more distracted/tired, less caffeinated, or (most perniciously of all) more supremely confident in my cached past analysis, I would have arrived at an incorrect conclusion. Instead of making a last-second save, if I had started from a blank slate, I would have been much more likely to notice X != Y and its interaction with the changing Standardese and compiler implementation.

This is one reason why I worry about overemphasis on "learning styles" in teaching. Yes, we shouldn't overgeneralize from our own brains to those of others, and different people learn differently. But it's too easy to say that because I am Not a Visual Person, Having Been Born Blind and Treated By Surgery, I therefore can't learn to excel at visual tasks.

This internal sense that I am "not a visual learner" caused me serious difficulty in training to do many tasks, until I learned to just compensate by practicing for a longer period of time!

The danger of learned blankness isn't that it's entirely inaccurate. A person really might be slower to pick up skills in one domain than in another. The danger, I think, is that we overestimate our own specialization and lock ourselves out of useful and fun skills. I CAN draw and shade a simple shape; it's not magic. I CAN dissect a small insect in the lab; it just takes longer.

Something I realized is that in some cases, learned blankness is due to overly generalized beliefs that were created in us when we were kids. For example - "I am not a doctor or physical therapist so I need to go to them to fix my body."

The best way that I guard

1. Write down a list of all that is supremely important in your life and make sure you have studied everything about those things. If you do this often enough, the first thing you do when faced with a problem is to read up about it and send off questions to leading people who work in that area. (Essentially the solution given at the end of the article - ie deep dive into the problem.)

2. Get rid of the term "Expert" from your vocabulary. Experts know a lot about their particular field but usually only when studied in laboratory settings or in contexts different from yours. Dont blindly hand over your life to someone just because he has applied the label "expert" to himself.

Some people will bring up the example of a surgeon being a better person to trust than your own research when going in for a surgery. But I would counter that you can research the different surgery methods and options from different surgeons and this could be very important. An example is whether to use titanium screws versus using biologically disintegrating screws for ACL reconstruction. Most surgeons only use one of the 2 methods so you would have to study the pros and cons and decide for yourself.

A friend of mine has had 2 ACL reconstructions, and it was only on the 2nd surgery that he even knew that there were 2 options because he went to a different surgeon who used titanium instead of the bio-degrading ones.

1. If theres a problem in your life, apply the five why's system. Ie ask at 5 different levels why this problem is occurring.

Are there any other methods that could be applied to this list?

-Vivek

Another part of learned blankness is fear of making a catastrophic mistake-- for example, I've heard that it's possible to wipe out what you were trying to save when you make a backup. I need to find out whether this is still true (if it ever was), and how hard it is to avoid, rather than turning the whole thing into a matter of panic.

Sometimes my critical contribution to helping another programmer solve a problem basically consists of reading the fascinating error message. (Well, the fact that I also programmed the library they are using to show the error message is arguably a critical contribution as well.)

I've always been interested in how stuff works and I've taken apart or built from scratch a lot of the stuff I've owned. I've built stuff as small as a molecule or as big as a hangglider without even considering asking for expert help - it's just so easy and enjoyable, I can think things through, do research and come to understand something new...

But I've never been interested in how people work. It seems to me it's impossible to understand things that are outside my experience and there's a lot I can never experience for myself, to understand. I've never know how to play or party - it's something I mostly have to pretend to do. People are fundamentally unsolvable to me. Friendship seems primarily a feedback loop, love a temporary form of insanity...

A lot of this learned blankness for me is deliberate. There are domains that I've found through trial and error (mostly error) that I really have no aptitude for. In those cases, it's much more effective for me to find someone that does have the aptitude or skill.

I would like to think that most of the time this came from a conscious decision, but I'm probably just not remembering all the times it didn't.

Edit: I think there's a difference between learned fear and learning that you lack the aptitude. I'm pretty sure I missed the day in elementary school where they taught people that technology is scary, and that just breathing on it wrong will kill it forever.

Edit - please disregard this post

I've often seen this with hooking up computers, TVs and/or audio equipment. Many people seem to treat it as incomprehensible, even though with computers (particularly) it's just cable to connector, no real thinking needed. For a/v equipment it's just "flows" out-to-in.

Specialization is fantastic, but there is real value to cross-training in other disciplines. It's hard to predict what insights in other fields might assist with your primary. Also, even if you use a specialist, it's impossible to evaluate them if you blank-out in the area. For example, auto-mechanics often fall into this category, as mentioned in the article. If a mechanic tells you he "needed to replace the flooge inhibitor", and that was causing the car to "super-slafire", how do you evaluate if he's being honest without spending a lot of money & time doing experiments?

I really like this post; I think it highlights an important problem. I just want to add one step to this: quite often it is very difficult to notice that you aren't thinking about something. I've started trying to overcome this by noticing problems that I am not DOING anything about, and asking myself why I am not doing anything about them. If the answer is "I'm lazy" (to the question of "why aren't I doing the laundry?", e.g.) I don't worry about it, but if the answer is "because I don't know how to solve it" I start paying more attention. The problems which you "don't know how" to solve are quite often the ones with learned blankness... the answer is more correctly quite often "because I haven't thought about it." But, as in most things, noticing an absence is more difficult than noticing a presence.

Speaking of nano risks, I would love to see a LessWrong-grade analysis of what we can conclude from the debates about the feasibility of molecular nanotech between Foresight/CRNano people on the one side and people like Richard Jones and Philip Moriarty on the other side, if anybody here is up to it.

I am fascinated by the "bad with computers" kind of learned helplessness.

It gives me a strong feeling there's some very deep cultural thing going on, but so far I've failed to work out what it is.

One theory I have is that it's some sort of arts/sciences split. but we also observe scientists who are bad with their computers.

Upvoted just for footnote 5, which I think is an essential and easily explained trick that people in general should be told about.

Ah, footnote [4]. How you have framed my life!

It's simply ASTOUNDING how people will pay you to do something as simple as Google a problem and then follow the steps.

xkcd's take on note 4.

# Setting this to off makes Wget not download /robots.txt.  Be sure to
# know *exactly* what /robots.txt is and how it is used before changing
# the default!
robots = off

Interesting and useful post, but I'm not sure I agree with the analogy to learned helplessness or using the word "learned" at all. The state you are describing seems to vary greatly between individuals (for contrast, I know many people who believe they can do or know almost anything correctly) and probably correlates to such things as intelligence, openness, risk-tolerance, etc. What makes you think this "blankness" is learned?

Thinking and learning new things is hard. Asking someone to do it for you is easy.

I suspect that even if people were aware that they could, e.g. google their computer problem and solve it, many (most?) would just have an "I can't be bothered to figure it out" attitude. And I'm not sure how many people are already in this position.

1. I find it hard to fully try to write fiction -- though a drink of alcohol helps. The trouble is that since I’m unskilled at fiction-writing, and since I find it painful to notice my un-skill, most of my mind prefers to either not write at all, or to write half-heartedly, picking at the page without really trying. Similarly, many pure math specialists avoid seriously trying their hand at philosophy, social science, or other “messy” areas.

I find this only happens at things I care about and want to be able to do. For me, an example is poetry. Trying to write poetry is painful and fearful. If I just pick at it, without being really serious, then no matter what the results, I can't be said to have truly failed at it.

Except, of course, that I have.

In yet another attempt to show how this is not irrational, here goes:

There are every year about 100,000 new math theorems produced. To learn each of these theorems would require learning them at a rate of about 1 every minute when sleeping is taken into account. This is excluding all of the theorems needed to understand those theorems. Further this is just math and doesn't included every other field of human endeavor as well as on the job knowledge.

It should be clear from the above that is physically impossible to have all the knowledge in the world, let alone the problem of being able to remember it all. There are no "heros" and it is impossible to have such "heros". This is more then about gains in specialization (which are great and the only reason we can have this discussion in the first place) but the bounds of learning.

Now, going back to my earlier response on specialization and gains from trade there arises the question of does it make sense to try and have answers to every problem?

There is a reason that specialization works well, people become better at doing what they are currently doing. So even assuming one were able to "know" everything they would still not be as good at doing any particular task as someone that had specialized in that task. I may know how to read a recipe and how to make bread but I am not going to be a master bread maker and make amazingly good bread unless I practice making bread for some amount of time.

So assume for a minute that you have specialized in mayan epigraphy and someone brings you an Egyptian hieroglyph, as they are both ancient writing systems so they must have some common skill sets, is it rational to say "I have no idea and I am going to drop working on finding the meaning of all of these other glyphs that I am working on deciphering to figure out what most likely any master level Egyptologist knows off of the top of their head " or to say "I have no idea, here is the number to my colleague that specializes in reading Egyptian hieroglyphs"? in the one you have filled in a blank in your knowledge, but at a cost to adding new knowledge to the world, while in the other the blank remains but you continue working on what you are paid to do. What appears to be advocated here is the first response which has a huge opportunity cost for extremely low reward.

I felt silly, because I, too, could have reasoned that out.

Probably just hindsight bias.

Do you think that this behavior (learned helplessness, learned blankness) might have non-obvious benefits? For example, could too much independence be aggressive - or conversely, could dependence be a way to bring about beneficial social relations?

1. Fred finds he has an intuition about how plausible nano risks are. It’s a blank for him; something he can act on or ignore, but not examine. He e.g. doesn’t So, he acts on it (or ignores it, if he has an alternative data source). It doesn’t occur to him that he could examine the causes of his intuition[x], or coul

You're missing the end of a sentence, there. And some other stuff in the following few paragraphs. Was this supposed to be posted yet?

Love that footnoted excerpt about young Feynman fixing radios by thinking.

A lot of the 'learned blankness' or black box problem (I prefer that) seems to me to be directly related to how afraid someone is of feeling (or worse, looking) stupid.

There are exceptions of course, but by and large the people that seem to hit that wall (or, at least have a higher than average number of those walls to hit) are people that were told over and over that they're dumb, or that pursuing 'X' is dumb.

And - they become that, or at least an unreasonable facsimile thereof. Within the realm of their expertise it's very obvious they're highly intelligent, but they either assume they are just as much an authority in unrelated realms without actually educating themselves in that realm, or they get out of their comfort zone and they stop - two divergent attempts to attempt to avoid looking dumb.

I'm convinced the average IQ is actually 300+ and we simply evoke it more and more as we're less and less afraid of feeling stupid.

Jonnan