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Understanding Understanding
A while back on Twitter, someone asked what people wished they had known before getting married. I thought about it for a while, and decided that it was the wrong question. It’s not what I wish I had known, but what I wish I had understood. I knew what was important. I’d seen examples, both positive and negative. I could tell you what was important, but for a long time I didn’t really understand it. And it turns out there’s a big difference between knowing and understanding. (Which is also something I knew but didn’t really understand.)
I know a lot, and a lot of what I know isn’t all that useful. (Unless you’re wanting a ringer for your Trivial Pursuit team, in which case I’m your man.) But the more I know, the more I realize not only just how much I don’t know, but how much I don’t understand. Knowing some fact is the “what,” and maybe the “when” and “where” as well. Understanding is the “why” and the “how.” People like to say that you don’t really understand something until you can explain it simply. There’s some truth in that, but it only goes so far. I can repeat a simple explanation without really understanding it, and sometimes the simple explanations get in the way of true understanding. Some subjects are really complex and there just aren’t good simple explanations. (Reason #93 not to get into serious political debates on Twitter.)
We live in an age of unprecedented knowledge. The computers we carry in our pockets connect us to thousands of libraries worth of information. We can get facts on any subject in a matter of seconds. Want to know how a Williams Tube worked as a random access digital storage device? Need the current standings for MLB? Ever wondered how many guns there are worldwide? Easily done. But if you want to understand how a thin metal plate in front of a cathode ray tube is memory, or why the St. Louis Cardinals are 4.5 games back in the NL Central, or what the impact of having 40 percent of all the worlds guns in the hands of American civilians is, that still takes time.
The revolution in knowledge hasn’t produced a revolution in understanding. And we need to understand that.
Published in Group Writing
This tells me you are a wise man.
Amen to that, Brother.
It’s amazing how we think we know and understand everything when we’re fifteen, and we gather more and more things we neither know nor understand as we get older. If you would like to contribute to our understanding of the world around us or within us, we have a whole month’s worth of dates open before us. Our theme for Group Writing in July is Understanding. Group writing was designed to get members who have not written as many posts to write and introduce themselves to this audience. It is also to expand our scope beyond the day-to-day and moment-to-moment of modern politics. Come join us?
Indeed.
How many times do you hear some well-meaning liberal say, “what we really need is education!”
It’s just like Spanky and “Our Gang” — whenever they encountered a problem (typically a lack of funds), they would “put on a show!”
Showing high schoolers how to put a condom on a banana does “teach” a lesson. Unfortunately, it’s not until they get pregnant or contract an STD that they “learn the lesson.”
This is the human condition, n’est-ce pas?
The school of hard knocks is the ultimate teacher — assuming the “student” is listening AND willing to understand.
You never said what you wished you understood before you got married. I want to know.
We live in an age of unprecedented information.
From T.S.Eliot: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge; where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
Always put your spouse’s needs ahead of your own, and marry someone who will do the same for you.
Fair point. It’s knowledge when people access the information.
Not necessarily.