为什么值得费心去理解：Dan Luu 所说的“愿意显得愚蠢”

If I throw an unfamiliar word or concept at you in the first paragraph of this essay, will you bother to look it up? If the answer is yes, you can close the tab, unless you want to bookmark it in your “people saying things I already believe” folder, to inflict upon someone less advanced.

I'm pretty good at bothering to look up words I don't know. But what about when a blogger or AI model starts justifying their reasoning with little mathematical symbols, and it makes me uncomfortable, because I don't know what they mean, and am too proud to ask? Not so much.

Now that I'm old and busy, I find it harder to get around to learning-for-the-sake of learning. It’s much easier to get around to learning in the process of doing! Yet, opportunities frequently pass me by. I scroll past the unfamiliar symbol; the elk footprints go uninvestigated; “that's funny...” is left at that's funny, rather than, “aha!”.

Dan Luu calls this "willingness to look stupid". Slime Mold Time Mold call it the scientific virtue of stupidity. I call it bothering to understand. Slowing down, amid all the breakneck chaos, to figure out why it crashed, rather than just restarting it.

This is unlikely to pay off in the short term. But next time it crashes, or maybe not even then, but next time something vaguely like it does something vaguely like what it did, I'll have a foundation to build upon.

Knowledge compounds. You only have to make the wand once, then you can blow bubbles with it forever.

Make the wand.