44. Learning as Rental over Ownership 🔗

Stuff you learned and forgot feels like rent paid. You lived in it for a while but are now left with no equity in it. Most schooling only rents you some knowledge for a while.

You’re left with only enough knowledge capital to find and rent it again. Like knowing the address of apartments you’ve rented before. I don’t know much but I’ve rented a lot of stuff over the years. My address book is nearly full.

Well, it’s more than an address book. It’s a map. So there’s that.

Maybe this is why I’m meh on lifelong learning. A holistic philosophy of learning requires an attitude towards loss and degradation of knowledge too.

I admire people who get into stuff like spaced repetition to strive mightily against such effects, but I have a more wabi-sabi attitude towards it. Kintsugi knowledge over valiantly maintained mastery. tweet^[1] tweet^[2]

Almost everything is worth knowing for a while or in specific situations. Almost nothing is worth knowing forever or in all situations. Most knowledge is only rent-worthy. When it degrades (a deeper, more irreversible kind of loss than mere forgetting) you should generally let it

We often fetishize ignorance (stuff we’ve never yet known) by performing some sort of pious humility to exhibit our consciousness of it. But curiously, we have no cultural attitude towards stuff once known but now lost. Or at least stored in ways requiring restorative work.

Temporal partitition of known-unknown:

Once-known unknown: Stuff you used to know that’s now degraded

Could-be-known unknown: Stuff you know is out there that you could know, like apartments you could rent

Never-knowable unknowns: Stuff you know is beyond your learning reach

Thing about knowledge degradation is that it is arbitrary and has only a weak relationship to retention desires.

“It’s like riding a bike” effect. Ancient environment of evolutionary adaptation dictates that my somatic hardware retains bike-riding knowledge weirdly well. Shrug.

2x2: Knowledge you’d like to retain/lose vs knowledge that actual sticks vs degrades. Aptitude = Stuff you’d like like to retain and naturally does get retained, making maintenance cheap (it sticks with little/no reinforcement like bike-riding, which I actually do want to retain)

Curious that people find this to be a tragic line of thought. I find it liberating and am not really upset by it. In fact I kinda appreciate knowledge being naturally lossy. tweet^[3] tweet^[4]

“Use it or lose it” has a hugely important corollary: how much you have to use something to retain it varies enormously from “riding a bike” (afaict that’s once every decade after acquisition) to “must use every week and will be lost in months/years if not” like advanced math.

Your knowledge degradations form a unique fingerprint that create a signature style of how how you do new things. Like the gold seams on a kintsugi bowl uniquely identify its past of cracks and breaks. It still holds stuff, but in a unique way. Your brain is a kintsugi bowl.

Writing is a good example. Everybody retains/loses particular preferred/not-preferred words/idioms/usages that form a particular unique “voice” ... one that could be identified by an AI classifier and reproduced by gpt-2 type algorithms.

Feels like Homo sapiens is ready to evolve past uncritical fetishization of knowing for the sake of knowing (Homo... studentus?) to actual “sapiens” ("discerning, wise, sensible") by treating knowing as a commodity rent/buy decision for the most part.

There is certainly a kind of pleasure to learning and acquiring knowledge, whether to rent or own. But uncritically maximizing that pleasure is a kind of hedonism. We just don’t notice because society approves of it morally, and rewards it economically.

Erudition: What you know
Wisdom: What you know about what you know
Humbletalebry: What you don’t know
Prowess: What you can do
Nihilism: What you must do
Scholarship: What you know about who knows what
Craft: What you’ve forgotten
Artistry: What has irreversibly degraded

Religion: What you refuse to know
Tribalism: What you refuse to do
Bureaucratism: What others must know
Imperialism: What others must be able to do

Previous 2 tweets are an inventory of epistemic identities