The difference between knowing and understanding
A Little Learning
by Alexander Pope
A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts ;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise !
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky ;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last ;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way ;
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise !
The difference between knowing and understanding
Jordan Peterson -
We all do things without really understanding why. There are reasons for things but the rituals last long after the reasons are forgotten. e.g. Christmas trees
It is not possible to be free unless, in some sense, you had been a slave.
We don’t know a lot about reality - we have our articulated representations of the world and outside of that, there are things that we know absolutely nothing about.
And there is a buffer between them, and those are things we sort of know something about.
The difference between “pre-hedgehog” and “post-hedgehog” states.
In the pre-hedgehog state, it is like groping through the fog. You are making progress on a long march, but you cannot see all that well. At each juncture in the trail, you can only see a little bit ahead and must move at a deliberate, slow crawl. Then, with the Hedgehog concept, you break into a clearing, the fog lifts, and you can see for miles. From then on, each juncture requires less deliberation, and you can shift from crawl to walk, and from walk to run. In the post-hedgehog state, miles of trail move swiftly beneath your feet, forks in the road fly past as you quickly make decisions that you could not have seen so clearly in the fog.
When you get your hedgehog concept right, it has the quiet ping of truth, like a single, clear, perfectly struck note hanging in the air in the hushed silence of a full auditorium at the end of a quiet movement of a Mozart piano concerto. There is no need to say much of anything; the quiet truth speaks for itself.