Understanding

To understand is to grasp reality by interpreting and deriving meaning through the purposes we interpret. This usually requires looking beyond whatever things look like to see how things really are.

All forms of logic, math, beauty, grouping, and social groups are part of human understanding. We tend to misunderstand far more than not understand, mostly because we usually can’t handle the uncertainty from not knowing.

Understanding is a form of power. Like any other power, the pursuit of understanding quickly becomes evil if it isn’t directed to a purpose that isn’t a form of power.

When we understand things to the point of usefulness, we’ve acquired wisdom. Strong wisdom will consider all possible causes and effects of a thing, so wisdom always has at least some morality involved with it.

Our perceptions are limited, so we take perceived facts by trusting something. We always structure our beliefs logically, but they’re not always rational. Rational thoughts, by contrast to logical ones, are tempered by intuition derived from feelings. Most of the foundational things we believe exist on the periphery of our understanding.

One of the most profound limits to our understanding is that we always lock onto whatever we understand to be true. Nobody can ever sincerely and honestly say, “I believe differently than I know”. We’re forever stuck with our bias about the truth, even when we expand our views to accommodate others’ beliefs.

Learning

We build our understanding through learning/education, which is nothing more than gathered observations:

1. Performing something and witnessing its results. This form gives the most information but is the most unsafe without creatively using technology.
2. Directly observing something, often by seeing or touching it. Often, media will reproduce that experience.
3. Observing second-hand through language. By reading or listening to other people who have experienced, we can imagine the experience for ourselves.

We then assemble our understanding in our mind using visual imagery and language. The result of this is a set of abstracted things we can quickly experience through our feelings as we sense them.

After we’ve integrated those experiences, we tend to call those things “our ideas”. They’re mostly others’ ideas adapted to our form of thinking, but at that point, we’ve integrated them so heavily that they’re practically a part of our identity.

Often, true understanding doesn’t come in what you know, but in knowing intuitively that something is wrong or worth ignoring. The only way to find it out is through very close observation.

Method

We can only focus on 1 thing at a time. Every so often we can hold things in our memory to combine ideas together, but we’re incapable of thinking 2 things at once without rapidly switching.

To gain more understanding of something we don’t know, we generally must maintain awareness that we don’t know alongside curiosity about it (which requires a certain type of fearlessness). This forced paradox expands itself into several tracks of inquiry to investigate ideas further:

• WHAT is the most basic question, and asks about status. It’s meant to distill the answer down to “bottom-line” information that strips away as many details as reasonably possible.
• WHO asks about individuals, which often alludes to relationships and group affiliations. These questions are always the means to more questions.
• WHERE and WHEN ask for location and time, respectively. Like WHAT, they shred away all details except the most relevant.
• HOW inquires more intimately with the matter. The questions are strictly logical, analytical dissections of cause-and-effect. The most useful answers for practical reasons come through HOW questions (often in the present).
• WHY is a difficult question to define because it’s a very open-ended large-scale domain:
  • Why is that? – broadly asking any form of basis
  • Why do they? – asking the motivation behind the known action
  • Why does it? – asking the cause behind the known effect
  • Why can/will it? – asking the logic behind a prediction
  • Why won’t it? – finding the unknown obstruction toward a purpose

“Why” questions, in particular, generate the most information because they request the broadest possible range of information. They also help bridge connections the easiest between things, since they most easily help us to detect patterns across domains.

When we face complex questions, we tend to answer a far more simple question in place of it. Unfortunately, we tend to also not notice that we made that switch, and we’ll commit a simple answer to memory about an inherently complicated idea.

Often, the best way to understand something is to write it down. It forces us to use the logic-based portions of our minds to order our thoughts.

Perspective

There are many ways to see something, and everyone who isn’t a complete narcissist or psychopath can imagine perspectives beyond their own. A learned person, in some way, avoids judging something strictly on their perceptions by leaning into how they believe others understand things.

We tend to be very accurate about what we’re paying attention to, but often fail at explaining why it is that way or how it would respond to any changes around it.

The best way to understand other perspectives isn’t from simply understanding what someone believes, or whether it’s right or wrong. To understand another viewpoint, you must understand why they came to that conclusion, and the implications of that set of ideas. In effect, thoroughly understanding a viewpoint means you can think with exactly the flow of logic they’re thinking before they tell you.

However, we can’t think of two perspectives at precisely the same time, and we tend to combine both those perspectives into a third perspective.

That third perspective is a remix of the first two but, over time, it links up with further beliefs that the first two value systems wouldn’t have developed. Eventually, further experiences will shape a third perspective into something mostly unrelated to the other two.

Thus, people with the greatest understanding are also often the most diverse. They keep extracting truth from the world until they can understand precisely how others think, feel, and behave, then have a broader range to choose how they want to self-identify.

We also must revisit the same expression multiple times to accurately capture it, often through self-reflection. For that reason, people with heavy understanding are often very ponderous and thoughtful.

Of course, when people don’t want to understand, they build relationships with each other over that ignorance. We tend to associate with others who share our level of passion for understanding far more than specific disciplines we share.

Depth

We experience degrees of understanding as we become familiar with it. It’s not always conscious, and often involves habitual methods, both in our mind and (often) with the physical world around us. When this set of habits applies to the physical world around us, they’re also known as “skills”.

There are three broad classes of things we can understand:

1. First, at the most shallow, we can understand other people. By drawing connections across shared feelings and experiences, we trust we understand others’ thinking, perceiving, and doing. Usually, it’s proportional to perceived authority, which is why we trust the opinions of scientists, analysts, doctors, and journalists.
2. Second, we can understand things. Those things are always perceptible, usually measurable, and often things that directly respond to our interaction. We’re usually only familiar with a part of that thing, since we can’t observe that thing with every possible interaction with every other thing. We tend to draw “context” about things:
   • Physical context – location-based attributes
   • Cultural context – human beliefs and perceptions
   • Historical context – period of time and events
   • Situational context – event-based things that are “not normal”
3. Finally, we can understand ideas. Ideas are constructed values in the mind and can be as concrete or abstract as we need:
   • General understanding routes through our feelings, and isn’t very specific but is moderately useful in many domains (e.g., philosophy).
   • Technical understanding requires conscious thought, and isn’t that applicable to anything else, though it’s far more useful than general understanding (e.g., technical specs). Thankfully, it can cross domains if we convert it to general understanding.
   • Outside certain unique personalities, we gain technical understanding through firsthand experience, then build out our general understanding via intuition or desire.

Further, we tend to climb a type of ladder of understanding that builds on itself cumulatively.

A. Awareness

• Knows a term, idea, or procedure exists.
• Skills are unconscious incompetence: we don’t know what we don’t know.

B. Grasp

• We intellectually understand how a thing exists, but don’t understand how it exists in reality.
• Skills are conscious incompetence: we don’t understand it, but are also aware that we don’t.

C. Feeling

• We have an emotional connection to that thing and grasp it beyond merely a concept to the point that we can feel its practical use.
• Skills are conscious adequacy: we understand it enough to feel broadly sufficient at it (i.e., past the “frustration paradox”).

D. Familiarity

• We understand the necessary values of that thing well enough that we can separate it into its components and understand which ones matter most for various purposes.
• Skills are interchangeable adequacy: we’ve broken it apart and can work on our weakest points.

E. Rebuilding

• We have so much intimate connection with that thing that we imagine and predict it relatively well, and can create new ideas by combining multiple sources together.
• Skills are consciously competent: we know how to do it if we focus.

F. Integration

• We have complete understanding of something, with all its facts and implications.
• Skills are unconscious competence: our muscle memory does it well without our conscious thought, and we often even identify with it.
• Once we’ve integrated understanding, we judge other ideas and methods from this basis of understanding.
• If we can stay in this domain, we continue mastery on the subject.

G. Simplification

• After enough time using it, we’ve thrown out most of the useless information and converted only the critical information into habits.
• Literally all the understanding is a reflexive skill, connected both as a mental and muscular experience.
• Unfortunately, at this level we won’t be able as much to explain or teach it, and it becomes much easier for our skills to fade.
• At its farthest, we often attribute a complete understanding at this level to deities and heavily identify with our performance with it.

Generally, the farther we understand things, the more complicated they become in our mind to capture the complexities inherent to it. If we stop using the information before reaching the final stage of habitual simplification, we slowly slide back down that ladder, but always retain small patterns that we can use for the rest of our lives.

The most abstracted form of wisdom represents as proverbs, which have the following characteristics:

• Short enough to be memorable
• Direct or blunt enough to evoke strong feelings
• Clear and certain about what is being indicated
• Patterned after general realities of life
• Poetically paced, or with a poetic choice of words

Specialization

Assembling our perceptions and experiences together presents us with a decision:

1. Heighten our knowledge to broaden all known possibilities.
2. Test our theories to reduce the likely possibilities.
3. Stop engaging because we’ve run out of patience, passion, or resources.

There’s not enough time to understand everything. Every answer gives a few more questions, so we only gather enough information to answer what we’re asking. Over time, the easiest questions for us to answer often become our specializations.

Great communication (and teaching) requires finding patterns that convey ideas simply, which is its unique specialization and usually more work than most people are willing to do.

Understanding scales exponentially. A person will know 1 thing now, 4 things tomorrow, 50 things the next day, 300 the day after that. This pattern comes from how each new node in a mental network can potentially connect to all the other existing things, and each connection is the beginning of a thought.

We generally attain the peak of our understanding on a subject when we can maintain the maximum number of possible perspectives on a subject that can potentially exist. However, we never really finish understanding something because we tend to forget many basic elements in the pursuit of our mastery.

There are three major ways we can gain skills:

1. We can conceptually understand the raw information (though we won’t necessarily be skilled with working with it)
2. We can train toward it (i.e., “nurture”)
3. Nature or culture can grant it automatically, which often works as a multiplier for the rest

Intellect

Whether our understanding is truth depends on the range of the experiences we’ve gathered and how much we’ve tested them. The thoroughness of that testing is often called “intelligence”. This comes through both our abilities to observe our environment alongside introspection.

Intelligence is our raw ability to work with things, but understanding is the ability to know what to do with the things we observe. Wisdom takes it a bit further about knowing when it’s a good idea to do those things.

In a sense, the virtue of honesty or integrity directly corresponds to wisdom because it indicates how much someone will work to understand. More intelligence means more opportunities for wisdom, though that person’s decisions dictate how far they actually go.

We often gain the most wisdom from things we disagree with and hate, since they’re so diametrically opposed to our way of life that we’re immediately purposed to disprove it or discover the truth.

Confidence

As we’re trying to understand things, we often discover what we don’t know and feel less certain about it. This is only natural since we’re unfamiliar with new things, but anything “new” only seems that way to us at the time.

Wise people know how little they understand, but aren’t afraid to look stupid in their search, so they’re still confident they can attain understanding and that it’s worth at least some sacrifice of their reputation to get it.

At a certain point, increasing our understanding will simplify things and create more clarity. Once we’ve grasped the full image of that thing as far as it can go (which happens eventually because everything but God/s is finite), we find certainty in what we understand.

As time passes, we lose the context for where we got the information. It blurs itself into a broad and (often) well-placed certainty. People with less understanding will often interpret that understanding as arrogance. Depending on the quality of what they understand, they may or may not be.

At the same time, confidence for wise people is granular. Someone may know they’re an expert in commercial interior plumbing, but will know how little they understand in other plumbing-related disciplines.

When someone tests experience against reality, they will discover truth. They know with absolute certainty they’ve found it, so they don’t need to reassess it, and it becomes a mental habit that slowly moves to the subconscious. People often describe tested experiences as “experience” or “enlightenment”, but it’s also known as “common sense” when most people in a group automatically believe it.

As we age, we either build new understanding to build more assertion or will let our past trauma scramble our understanding and erode any confidence we had.

Social Understanding

As we continue to mull over the things we understand and make conversations with others, we start discovering patterns that keep arising throughout existence. Those patterns represent certain universal characteristics of human experience.

Small, trite experiences that veer close to feeling like a paradox represent these shared sensations the most accurately:

• Epigrams (written statements) that express as axioms or proverbs
• Simple drawings or animations that visually depict what we imagine
• Verbal statements that employ body language to magnify a concept

Most creative works and leadership harness these shared experiences to influence others toward purposes, usually sprinkled throughout a larger body of work. When those purposes are grandiose, the individuals engaged in it attain a type of religious fervor driven by a collective understanding and unified purpose.

Of course, the idiosyncratic details of those values are partially lost in the process, but the shared effects of everyone’s belief (along with the conflicts they’re engaged in) obscure that fact.

We never entirely understand each other fully, though. The domain of others’ minds is always partly off-limits to our deepest capacity to know and experience.

Measuring

We tend to measure others’ understanding by their confidence, but it’s a double-edged sword:

1. Increasing understanding often creates less confidence as we gain awareness of the sophisticated components of the thing.
2. People can fake confidence, so they’ll exploit the image of confidence to gain power with what they’re not showing (sprezzatura).

Understanding is difficult to measure because that measurement can come through various results that vary wildly:

• How easily or simply they can put those ideas in words or explain things.
• How well someone can imagine easily believable stories.
• Capability of mentally rebuilding the form of something and dividing it into logical components.
• Understanding the connection of something to other things that may be seemingly unrelated at first.
• How well someone can feel the things around something when they don’t understand (i.e., “soft skills”).

However, civilized society requires that people be educated. For that reason, they create various precise ways to measure it that aren’t entirely reliable.

Drawbacks

Gaining understanding often rearranges our view of the world. There’s no consequence for changed understanding when we don’t have much power, but gaining power increases the risk of losing that power if we change. Large-scale leaders have so much power that the slightest change in understanding could shift their power enough that they’d lose their edge.

Understanding certain things can also become tremendously risky for successfully integrating into many social groups: one key bit of information can make a member more knowledgeable than the leader and create an uneven power dynamic.

More understanding takes work to maintain, proportionally to the intellect aspect of our personality. We tend to focus and filter other perspectives through whatever it is we already know because it’s the easiest way to link things. Every specialization will possess its opportunity cost of not being able to see things in the plain way that a child would be able to see things. Thankfully, this changes after we leave that specialization and start forgetting information.

Past trauma or fears of what things may imply will often make us sidestep having to understand certain things. With enough experience, some people find creative ways to avoid understanding something entirely!

Possessing understanding creates a severe blind spot because it makes us certain of specific things, which will slowly develop as presumed patterns of how reality works. If someone else has a differing viewpoint, even with a similar scope of logical rigor, it’s extremely tempting to dismiss the person without considering their ideas.

Rational people can be susceptible to dumb ideas proportional to how much they trust their intelligence.

Application

Understanding isn’t necessarily logical. It incorporates feelings to give us a degree of certainty that we’re correct. Then, we derive more understanding from believing we understand.

We tend to integrate what we understand slowly, so there’s always a lead time between when we perceive the information and when we’ve converted it into something useful in our minds.

The power that comes from understanding can be deadly. The way we use values literally reshapes entire countries, and we must stay vigilant of the people we may harm with extra information. Pay close attention to the personal lives of the people who wield the values they hold to.

Learning

To gain the greatest understanding, we must push to find new experiences. Living in a cloistered environment without new experiences that confront our values never gives us enough variety to fight bad ideas.

Question obvious things. The more mundane and obvious, the more likely everyone else overlooks an apparent fact. The same rule goes for taboo subjects.

The quality of our learning comes through the forms of questions we ask and how deeply we try to answer them. If we’re particularly intelligent, we should ask “why”, but everyone should be asking “how”.

An expert is someone who has failed (and learned) many times in a very specific domain.

There are far too many unknown things with elements we can’t know to reliably reach the end of understanding anything. For that reason, knowledge is only worth gaining if we can direct ourselves to a tangible purpose.

For any information we don’t discard, we’re either internalizing or memorizing it. Memorization has its time and place, but internalizing information lets us feel it, which transforms us much farther than we can consciously detect.

If we’re constantly learning (which is a product of living well), we must constantly rebuild our language to redefine what we understand more accurately. Otherwise, we’ll become set in our ways and won’t adapt to environmental changes.

Our learning must apply itself to a meaningful purpose beyond learning itself. Otherwise, we’re sharpening a skill we’re not using for anything useful and wasting our lives.

What you think isn’t as unique as how far you think. To fully understand the capacity for just about anything, take it to its farthest and most ridiculous logical conclusion. Most people are afraid of what they may discover.

We only understand something when we can articulate the opposing views to that idea so well that believers in that opposition will agree. The best thing we can do is frequently disagree with what we read and hear even when it feels like sound reasoning, just to see what happens when we do.

To fully understand something, we should be able to use language that defines something, then be able to define its opposite.

To be fully sure we’re not reacting to feelings, give any piece of information five minutes for it to percolate into our understanding.

Intelligence

The more we know, the more possible perspectives we see we may be able to have, and the more we realize we don’t know. The pinnacle of understanding is to see how little we ultimately know while also enjoying the journey.

Understanding is more useful than raw intelligence, since it’s the difference between power and focus. We can train understanding, but intelligence is mostly genetic. Intelligence is sometimes useful, but understanding is always useful, even if it’s not always wise to use it.

If an intellectual has been able to easily comprehend their environment, that person is often less wise because they never had to learn the patience necessary to understand the fullest aspect of the things they observe.

Since we must accept how little we know, more information makes wisdom harder to maintain. The only way to stay wise and intelligent is with many inner conflicts over what we’d conventionally perceive and believe.

Experience

We can’t simply learn by rote memorization or acquiring information. Instead, we must experience the information to know how to work with it.

We can only learn from our adverse experiences if we take responsibility to change.

Specialization

Someone’s understanding can easily transfer to other disciplines, which is why successful people in one field can so rapidly adapt to other unrelated fields.

The types of questions we ask define most of the things we grow to understand. Asking “what” will never get anyone as far as asking “how” or “why”. Curiosity is necessary to gain wisdom.

The only difference between understanding and skill is whether we know something consciously or subconsciously, which isn’t always clearly defined.

We must understand what to do before we start anything, since acting in the wrong direction will make things worse than doing nothing. With experience, we can become highly qualified at knowing what specific information we need.

In a sense, understanding is like philosophy or investing knowledge: useless by itself, but severely magnifies power if it’s applied to a specialty.

You can only understand something someone else says when you can say a statement back to them in your words in a way they can agree is accurate. This is very difficult to do, requires tremendous emotional intelligence, and most people will never do it.

Confidence

The wise and foolish are the most confident, both of them from believing they’ve discovered the end of things. The difference is in whether they have. Wise people typically consider culture and conflict, but fools often disregard them.

The elderly have lived so long in their habits, so they either possess some of the strongest understanding of all humanity or some of the worst. There’s very little room for them to be in the middle.

Confidence is a lousy indicator for quality work, which is why interviews rarely determine successful candidates for jobs. Instead, soft skills are far more reliable, but there’s no easy way to measure them, so great workers can only be chosen through a wise interviewer’s intuition (which requires that interviewer to have experience, which isn’t always a prerequisite for management).

While extreme beliefs aren’t generally accurate, having a wide variety of extreme beliefs that are highly contextual is essentially the quickest way to live the good life.

Culture

Small children often can understand, but don’t have words for what they understand. A considerable portion of their parents’ job to give them those words.

Common sense is the set of experiences that made their way into a group, but that doesn’t mean the group understands why those experiences are good. This means there’s always a push for new ideas against tradition within any social group where nobody really knows what’s going on.

If we trust others’ understanding, we must mind the culture that surrounds the people who understand something. Most experts spend so much time being safe in their specific domain that they’ve experienced many unlikely circumstances and are terrified of those things happening (e.g., a doctor who prescribes an unhealthy treatment to stave off a horrific but unlikely illness, a police officer who fires a gun on someone rapidly reaching for their phone).

We call things “intuitive”, but usually mean “familiar”.

Additional Reading

Mental Models