I don’t know shit. People don’t either.

A few days ago I met Tim Urban, the author of Waitbutwhy! Though I’ve been following him for a long time, his talk on future AI through scientific advancement inspires me to rethink the scientific mindset. I want to elaborate on the two take away from its talk (1) I don’t know shit. (2) People don’t know shit. In this post, I elaborate on these two ideas in the Taiwanese educational context in this post, showing the bottleneck and potential solutions in Taiwanese classrooms.

Why do people think they know shit?

1. Conventional wisdom: Conventional wisdom is a widely accepted belief by communities. It’s a general rule of thumb of how things are or how people usually do it, so those who follow the outcome won’t be terribly bad for your survival. However, it passes down knowledge and practices that no longer fit into the current up-to-date world, because it’s slow on updating. For instance, one conventional wisdom can be “Completing a university degree will help increase your earning for better surviving this society.” In general, this might be applicable by comparing the average salary between the college degree and non-college degree groups, so all parents ask their kids to follow the convention, getting a college degree.
2. Societal Recognition: Humans all have social recognition as a motive, or at least we think we need it. There are many ways to gain social recognition (wealth, mating, career success…) to showcase we are thriving in this survival game. However, today, I only want to pinpoint one motive, “showing smartness” that ties back to why people think they know shit. We all want people to think we are intelligent and capable but beyond the survival motive, I want to elaborate on the general systematic problem from societal values to gain nuances comparing different social structures. For instance, I found this “showing smartness” culture much stronger in Taiwan than in the US, potentially because of the stronger social hierarchy. Young Taiwanese people aren’t taken seriously because older people in general have more weight when speaking, and so does the weight of their opinion. Young Taiwanese people are meant to listen and obey. To let people hearing out your opinion, you need to show them you are smart enough for their time and respect, so we all need to fight to “show smartness.” On the other hand, both US and Taiwan society treasure career success as a stronger value compared to European countries, and hence showing people how smart you are will help you win the trust and climb faster on the career ladder.

Hence, we follow conventional wisdom and show people that we know shit even when we don’t really know. To gain social recognition, we still attempt to show people that we know shit even when we know we don’t really know too.

The Danger of Thinking You Know Shit

Elaborating on Tim Urban’s post, The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce, it’s the murderer of innovation. In his Elon Musk example, conventional wisdom shows that it’s impossible to build a rocket at such a cheap price because no one has done it so many times. Good innovation comes from thinking through first principles. The first principle of thinking refers to breaking down a complex topic into fundamental principles that cannot be broken down more. It involves lots of questioning assumptions, beliefs, and established knowledge. In Elon’s case, it would be the physical principles of what’s possible, not what we have been doing over the years. If Elon believes that people have been working on it for so long and are still unable to improve it, so it’s not possible, he would not even try. Only when he debugged through first principles, it opens the real door to what’s actually possible.

Another danger is that this mentality kills curiosity. When people think they already know, why would they listen to others? Why would they want to learn? It also surpassed others’ curiosity too because it forces others around them to present themselves as smart.

Today, I met a woman, who graduated from Harvard, a professor, having a Ph.D. She asks lots of good questions with interesting ideas. However, the conversation doesn’t feel comfortable for me. I felt like I needed to prove that I was smart rather than engaging inquisitively. When she was talking, she would cite things like a research paper. She would say she met this famous person, that is also the co-author of some book, even though I don’t know 99% people she was citing. During the conversation, I gradually felt uncomfortable because it felt like a contest to prove my credibility too. But the urge to “show smartness” suppressed me from thinking and asking freely to get to know the person and learn from what they know, which is counterproductive to learning and being curious.

How do Taiwanese Schools Kill Curiosity?

Do you remember when we are in elementary school that we feel humiliated when we cannot answer a question from our teachers? You feel the silence of the classroom, 100 eyes staring at you, and your face became redder and redder. You feel you are so dumb. Don’t know = Dumb. Afterward, you don’t goddamn to say I don’t know or ask a question anymore. This mindset is reinforced by the Taiwanese educational assessment system, giving students numerical grades through mostly multiple-choice questions that have “correct answers,” diminishing the nuances of reasoning, imagination, and the possibility to ask more in-depth questions.

A similar mindset applies to teachers in the classroom too, since Don’t know = Dumb, the teacher pretends they know and gives you some sentences when they actually don’t when you ask some weird questions because they are also afraid that you think they are dumb if they cannot answer. Over time, it fosters a culture of “fear of wrongness”. We are afraid to be wrong in schools I don’t want to get low grades and look dumb. We are afraid to be wrong in universities because we are taught that our boss will not tolerate making mistakes. We don’t ask people questions anymore because we want to “save face.” We want to prove to them we are smart first. We want to be recognized in society, we want to be listened to, be respected, and feel safe. Over time, this society lost its ability to be curious, because curiosity involves asking questions that we assume we are supposed to know. Eventually, we are boxed in conventional wisdom because we cannot afford the outcome both psychologically and socially. I’m not saying this is only a problem in Taiwanese society, but I find it the strongest among all the countries that I’ve studied, worked, and lived in.

Nowadays I know this is all bullshit. I make 100 mistakes at work. It’s not possible to learn without trial and error. The entire scientific discovery of how humans learn about the world is fundamentally based on experiments, which basically try and see if things work. The scientific mindset underlies values of “I don’t know shit,” not fear or failure, mistakes, and flourishing through observations and curiosity rather than following what the Bible and church have taught us.

How might we cultivate curiosity in a classroom?

“A teacher is one who could propagate the doctrine, impart professional knowledge, and resolve doubts,” said a Tang dynasty scholar, Han Yu.

Nevertheless, this quote of conventional wisdom doesn’t hold true anymore. The traditional doctrine has been challenged by the dynamic values of modern society, professional knowledge delivery and question and answering process can be replaced by AI, performing it 10 times better than a limited human brain in 99% of the cases. I think it’s time to rethink the role of the teacher in the Taiwan educational system.

I think the goal of a teacher in the classroom is to propagate fundamentals to the scientific mindset of “I don’t know shit, and people don’t know either.” Students should be comfortable saying “I don’t know” in front of the entire class, and so do the teachers. The process of learning in the classroom would be a quest for truth, where teachers and students embark on a journey together. Teachers no longer represent the priest of spreading knowledge and doctrines, but rather look like tour guide that introduces the field, so the tourists, and students, can travel themselves and discover secret bases based on their interests, bringing their new findings to their teachers. The end goal of it is to shift away from the paradigm of “showing smartness” and gradually cultivate students’ curiosity to learn about the world without fearing being wrong and people’s judgment of their intellect. Only when the curiosity is cultivated, will we start to talk about self-learning to assist their development.

To achieve it, the traditional educational model needs to establish even power dynamics between teachers and students. For instance, shifting away from lecturing. Even though lecturing might be a more efficient way to distribute information because it’s centralized, it casts the spotlight on the teacher, implicating that teachers are the most powerful human in this room so they get the right to dominate the conversation. When teachers perceive the dominance of truth as their right and responsibility, they view questions as a challenge rather than a discussion. For instance, in Minerva's classroom, the teacher shares the same screen size as students who are on the main stage and never talks more than 5 minutes. The design ensures the egalitarian of the classroom, diminishing the hierarchy presets in the design of the classroom environments and the interaction in class.

Second, even in the traditional educational models, teachers might want to establish a facilitator mindset when interacting with students, focusing more on the learning journey we are all along to grow together. Mere language usage in the classroom can provide changes already. I remembered the most memorable moments between my conversations with my teachers, weren’t when they give me the knowledge I want, but the humble scientific mindset they evoked in me.

For instance, when I was taking the Science of Learning tutorial, a class that is fully facilitated and taught by the student body, our professor, who is one of the top researchers in the field began our class with “I don’t know that much about the science of learning, and I’m figure it out with you on the way too.” Also, I remembered once I told my computer science teacher a weird idea in my brain, he thought for a while, but rather than directly telling me, my idea didn’t make sense or wasn’t possible to implement, he said, “I don’t know, but maybe you can investigate this algorithm and teach me when you figure it out!”

Another example I learn from my friends who study in France told me, their professors don’t call them “students” but “future researchers,” providing them respect and confidence for their work and opinion just from this phrase. The mindset of seeking truth together rather than providing truth as the endpoint reminds students that teachers don’t know shit, and it’s okay that students don’t know shit too. We are all here to figure things out and humble ourselves in front of science. Acknowledgment of not knowing from teachers creates a safe space for students to explore their interests and hence exercise their curiosity. Curiosity potentially leads to guilty pleasure for learning things that students might know more than your teachers. With this mindset, we can shift Don’t know = Dumb to Don’t know = Learn, letting go of our desire for “showing smartness.”

Only when we remind ourselves that people don’t know shit either, can we unblock ourselves from conventional wisdom, creating a hotbed for all the new ideas, regardless it’s good or bad, formulating them into more creative and unconventional ideas and practices.

I imagine a future classroom where I can comfortably tell people that I’m dumb and people will say “Me too” and laugh together. I imagine a future society where I say I don’t know shit to someone without feeling insecure about my first impression. I want to learn and thrive in a safe playground and celebrate I don’t know shit and people don’t know shit either.

This is the 20th post from my 30-day writing challenges. I was inspired by Tung Nguyen, a friend who is a famous blogger. He overcame the fear of creation through mass-producing blogs and eventually found his own niche audiences.