# Understanding Stuff **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 12, 2006, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469 "2006-08-12T17:24:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Walter\_Windchill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Walter\_Windchill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walter_Windchill)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/21 "2006-08-15T20:48:29Z")
[QUOTE=dropzone] Just because philosophers act like they know what they’re talking about doesn’t mean they do. [/QUOTE] Along the same lines, just because you don’t know what somebody is talking about, doesn’t mean they don’t. ---
**Author:** ![Walter\_Windchill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Walter\_Windchill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walter_Windchill)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/22 "2006-08-15T20:55:41Z")
[QUOTE=coberst] Technology, I think, does not want understanding because understanding is inefficient and generally not required. … I suspect many people go their complete life and never have an intellectual experience that culminates in the “ecstasy of understanding”. … I think that our educational system is designed primarily for filling heads with knowledge and hasn’t time to waste on ‘understanding’. … Understanding an intellectual matter must come in the adult years if it is to ever come to many of us. [/QUOTE] I think one of the first rules for deep understanding of any topic – including the topic of understanding – is to not make broad assumptions of these sorts. For example, while I have no idea what you mean by technology “wanting” anything (technology is not a sentient being with motivations of its own), it is shortsighted to assume that technology is exclusively put to ends of efficiency. I think it’s absurdly inaccurate to assume that “most people” never enjoy understanding. I think your description of the educational system is the exact opposite of my experience with just about every professional educator I’ve known. I think many children are more likely to experience the euphoria of curiosity than grown ups. ---
**Author:** ![Walter\_Windchill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Walter\_Windchill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walter_Windchill)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/23 "2006-08-15T20:56:50Z")
[QUOTE=DrCube] K-12 has about ten things with a higher priority than actually getting students to learn anything. Football, gangs, discipline, safety, hats and gum… theres six right there. Learning is waaay down on that list, buddy. [/QUOTE] Cite? ---
**Author:** ![Walter\_Windchill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Walter\_Windchill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walter_Windchill)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/24 "2006-08-15T21:00:30Z")
[QUOTE=DrCube] I learned long ago to just stop thinking about thinking. Its like painting a guy painting a guy painting a guy… or dreaming about dreaming, or videotaping the TV with a live video feed. Just endless complexity, its no use thinking about it really. [/QUOTE] Well, “thinking about thinking,” or metacognition, is absolutely essential to high acheivement in just about any field. While your description might apply to purely theoretical discussions on the nature of knowing, etc., there is a great utility to learning how to learn, for example: to know how one learns best, to devise strategies for problem solving, to map one’s own cognitive processes, and any number of other things that might be loosely categorized as thinking about thinking. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/25 "2006-08-15T23:48:23Z")
[QUOTE=Walter Windchill] Cite? [/QUOTE] Well, like I said, it is only my experience. But I stand by it. When I was in school, the emphasis was on doing what you were told and staying out of trouble. Frankly, my school was one of the better ones in the state; I really did learn a lot (okay, it was only a little, but it was more than most of the kids I knew at other schools). But it was not the school’s highest priority. I judged it in school by where the money went. My school’s budget was eaten up by building new gyms and football fields, it was used for sports, pep rallies, crappy motivational speakers, and D.A.R.E. Yet we still watched educational films from the 1970s and had textbooks from the early 80s (this was in the late 90s, by the way). We were even required to pay for the books ourselves, even though the school obviously had the money to buy a brand new bouncy rubber running track. I never did homework and nobody cared. But lord help you if you wear a trenchcoat to school or forget the ID that is supposed to hang around your neck! The former earned me quite a bit of detention and the latter cost me around 15 bucks. I’ll never forget when I was a senior in a high school geology class and the teacher made us watch _The Flintstones_ with John Goodman and we had to write down as many references to rocks as we could. Bedrock, flintstone, rubble, pebbles, etc. Great fun! My wife is an assistant special ed. teacher, and while their standards are different, they still have them. But her school has yet to flunk a student, and these kids are in the fourth grade and can’t read. P.S. I don’t want to seem like I’m against sports. I love them actually. But I think only the barest minimum of a school’s budget should be spent on them. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2006, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/26 "2006-08-16T00:09:12Z")
[QUOTE=Walter Windchill] Well, “thinking about thinking,” or metacognition, is absolutely essential to high acheivement in just about any field. While your description might apply to purely theoretical discussions on the nature of knowing, etc., there is a great utility to learning how to learn, for example: to know how one learns best, to devise strategies for problem solving, to map one’s own cognitive processes, and any number of other things that might be loosely categorized as thinking about thinking. [/QUOTE] Yeah, I agree actually that thinking about thinking is important to some degree. I was sort of being snide because I, like others, was wondering when all these threads about thinking and understanding and etcetera were going to get anywhere. However, I feel that thinking about one’s own thought processes and methods is entirely subjective. In fact, I think that a good deal of philosophy is also subjective. It all boils down to my own motivations and my own definitions. I can’t say what it means to understand something, and neither can anybody else. But I know it when it happens, when that light bulb goes on and I feel like I understand whatever I was attempting to understand. It is just a feeling though. FRDE: I’m not aware of the looking dolls you are talking about. But its a common enough theme. In Douglas Hofstadter’s fine book _Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ he talks about this self-reference idea to death. It is a great book and where I got the idea for the video camera filming the TV. ---
**Author:** ![FRDE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e68b1a/32.png) [@FRDE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FRDE)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2006, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469/27 "2006-08-16T07:14:00Z")
[QUOTE=DrCube] Yeah, I agree actually that thinking about thinking is important to some degree. I was sort of being snide because I, like others, was wondering when all these threads about thinking and understanding and etcetera were going to get anywhere. However, I feel that thinking about one’s own thought processes and methods is entirely subjective. In fact, I think that a good deal of philosophy is also subjective. It all boils down to my own motivations and my own definitions. I can’t say what it means to understand something, and neither can anybody else. But I know it when it happens, when that light bulb goes on and I feel like I understand whatever I was attempting to understand. It is just a feeling though. FRDE: I’m not aware of the looking dolls you are talking about. But its a common enough theme. In Douglas Hofstadter’s fine book _Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ he talks about this self-reference idea to death. It is a great book and where I got the idea for the video camera filming the TV. [/QUOTE] I also see nothing wrong in examining ones thought processes and assumptions, but to try to build a pseudo science out of it, and pad the whole thing out with jargon really annoys me. One of my premises is that one should try to make things as easy to understand as possible, without getting so simplistic that one is misleading, because when people understand things, they make fewer mistakes. When people complicate things, I am deeply suspicious of their motives, which are, I reckon oligarchic - as in the medical and legal professions. The ‘looking dolls’ stuff comes from one of the Metaphysical Poets, probably Donne or Marvell (I can’t remember which), there is also ‘I die in your eyes’, it seems that around that time they called an orgasm ‘a little death’. I expect the ideas and phrases were pretty prevalent at the time. I have been toying with the idea of parodying the CT stuff, which is really just word play. Critical thinking, Disinterested criticism How about : Acute cognition or Chronic introspection or Inferential ethics The trick seems to be to take some words that have precise meanings that are slightly different from their general use, and build a prescriptive Tower of Babel. Mullah-ism by the back door. Charlatans. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/understanding-stuff/368469.md?page=1)