Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning

My goal was to come up with a system for reading a book. I eventually identified that as the wrong goal, but came up with a pretty great system for doing the much better goal of “how do I answer a question?” But developing that was not the hardest or most time consuming part of my research over the last 3 months (plus additional time working on covid). I feel weird talking about it, but the truth is, a lot of that time was spent overcoming emotional issues around learning. 

For example, I think I’ve discussed before (but could not find a link on) how I kind of have two modes when reading: too credulous, looking for reasons a work could be true, and too antagonistic, looking for reasons to not only disagree, but dismiss entirely. 

I introspected on this, and eventually figured out that at a deep level I felt I needed to believe books, that I was being bad if I disagreed with them. So of course I developed tools to prove my disagreements, which led to the bifurcation- either I was giving in to the original impulse or its counter, without the option of responsiveness.

This same block on challenging authority was behind my urge to start from a book rather than a question. I not only believed I needed to trust in an authority (as deemed by the publishing-industrial-complex) to give me answers, I needed to let them set the questions. 

A natural question here is “why are you so sure this emotional work helped this specific task?”  My evidence is how the needs-to-be-retitled-epistemic-spot-check project has evolved- I started out having books thrown at me and reading them with the goal of forming a yes-no verdict. I’ve now progressed to starting with a question (such as “What can the 1973  Oil Crisis tell us about supply shocks?”) that serves a specific purpose and finding work that advances it. In that post I derived a model from disparate pieces of information I sought out to answer specific questions. No books, no teachers, just me. I also have pretty extensive notes of the work I was doing and how it tracked to specific improvements, although they’re intensely personal and I will not be sharing them.

It’s not totally solved yet. I really wanted to read a book on the oil crisis, for exactly the reasons they’re a bad solution to the problem. I wanted someone to give me the answer. But I can at least see the desire for what it is, recognize that it’s not a desire to learn, and react appropriately.

Another natural question is “why does this happen?” There’s two answers to that- why did I specifically form that belief, and why did those circumstances have the power to make me form that belief. I have some guesses for the former; my failed state middle school where I was dependent on the goodwill of teachers for my physical safety is a top contender, although the “best” schools arguably use a more subtle stick to inculcate this attitude even more strongly. 

For the latter, I have a very rough theory, dependent on the types of knowledge I described here. Very crudely, I believe trauma instills scientific-type knowledge that is factually false but locally adaptive. False beliefs need more protection to be maintained than true beliefs, so the belief both calcifies, making it unresponsive to new information, and lays a bunch of emotional landmines around itself to punish you for getting too close to it. This cascades into punishing you for learning at all, because you might learn something that corrects your false-but-useful model.

How did I escape these traps? I have some guesses for that, but I can only confidently identify the things I did immediately before breakthroughs. I’ve been building these skills for 10 years, so there’s a lot of background knowledge and skill feeding into that success I don’t have conscious access to. I think instructions for only the immediate predecessors of break throughs could be useless to outright harmful. So my next project is figuring out more about this process, and hopefully finding generalizable techniques for improvement. 

Part of finding techniques that work on people other than me is talking to other people. If you’re interested in ways of contributing to or just using the knowledge, here are some options (note: as of 2022 this offer is no longer active):

1. Already done this work? Tell me more. You can comment here, e-mail elizabeth@ this-domain.com, or use this anonymous form.
2. Want to hear ideas and try them out yourself, ideally reporting back to me? Sign up for this google group.
3. Want to devote several months of your life to working with me on this intensely? A number of things would have to go right for that work out, but if they all did, I think the potential is enormous. Email me at elizabeth @ this-domain

EDIT 2020-07-15: Greetings again, Hacker News readers. This piece is the penultimate post in a long saga. If it strikes a chord with you, I’d encourage you check it out from the beginning, and check in in a few days for climax and epilogue. You can also follow me via RSS, via email by clicking the Follow button at the bottom right of the page, or on Twitter.  Also while this post wasn’t on Patreon, many of mine are, and support is greatly appreciated. You can also Talk To Me For An Hour, although we’ll see how that stands up to the influx of new readers.

EDIT 2022-02-18: Greetings, readers of unknown origin who have been blowing up my traffic for the last five days. I cannot figure out where you are coming from and especially how traffic has been so steady for the last five days, when normally a high profile link will spike and fall. WordPress detects to referrer, Google can’t find any link (including ones I know are there) If one of you would enlighten me it would be very much appreciated.