I frequently find myself in the following situation:
Friend: I’m confused about X Me: Well, I’m not confused about X, but I bet it’s because you have more information than me, and if I knew what you knew then I would be confused.
(E.g. my friend who know more chemistry than me might say “I’m confused about how soap works”, and while I have an explanation for why soap works, their confusion is at a deeper level, where if I gave them my explanation of how soap works, it wouldn’t actually clarify their confusion.)
This is different from the “usual” state of affairs, where you’re not confused but you know more than the other person.
I would love to have a succinct word or phrase for this kind of being not-confused!
I also frequently find myself in this situation. Maybe “shallow clarity”?
A bit related, “knowing where the ’sorry’s are” from this Buck post has stuck with me as a useful way of thinking about increasingly granular model-building.
Maybe a productive goal to have when I notice shallow clarity in myself is to look for the specific assumptions I’m making that the other person isn’t, and either a) try to grok the other person’s more granular understanding if that’s feasible, or
b) try to update the domain of validity of my simplified model / notice where its predictions break down, or
c) at least flag it as a simplification that’s maybe missing something important.
this is common in philosophy, where “learning” often results in more confusion. or in maths, where the proof for a trivial proposition is unreasonably deep, e.g. Jordan curve theorem.
I frequently find myself in the following situation:
Friend: I’m confused about X
Me: Well, I’m not confused about X, but I bet it’s because you have more information than me, and if I knew what you knew then I would be confused.
(E.g. my friend who know more chemistry than me might say “I’m confused about how soap works”, and while I have an explanation for why soap works, their confusion is at a deeper level, where if I gave them my explanation of how soap works, it wouldn’t actually clarify their confusion.)
This is different from the “usual” state of affairs, where you’re not confused but you know more than the other person.
I would love to have a succinct word or phrase for this kind of being not-confused!
“I find soaps disfusing, I’m straight up afused by soaps”
“You’re trying to become de-confused? I want to catch up to you, because I’m pre-confused!”
I also frequently find myself in this situation. Maybe “shallow clarity”?
A bit related, “knowing where the ’sorry’s are” from this Buck post has stuck with me as a useful way of thinking about increasingly granular model-building.
Maybe a productive goal to have when I notice shallow clarity in myself is to look for the specific assumptions I’m making that the other person isn’t, and either
a) try to grok the other person’s more granular understanding if that’s feasible, or
b) try to update the domain of validity of my simplified model / notice where its predictions break down, or
c) at least flag it as a simplification that’s maybe missing something important.
this is common in philosophy, where “learning” often results in more confusion. or in maths, where the proof for a trivial proposition is unreasonably deep, e.g. Jordan curve theorem.
+1 to “shallow clarity”.
The other side of this phenomenon is when you feel like you have no questions while you actually don’t have any understanding of topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect seems like a decent entry point to rabbit hole similar phenomenon