Liberty

You don't understand a thing until you understand what problem it solves. Karl Popper famously rejected the asking of What questions. -> What is an atom? -> What is knowledge? What questions are questions that seek out statements or definitions, and Popper recognised that these can never end. What is an atom? Well, it's a thing that's made up of electrons and neutrons. What are those? Well, those are... and so on. This line of thinking prevents us from understanding atoms. So, instead of asking 'What is knowledge?', Popper asked: 'How is knowledge created?'. The focus rests on solutions to problems instead of statements or definitions. And in doing so, he discovered that knowledge is created via guessing a solution to a problem and criticising that guess. Thanks to that, we can now say that we know something about knowledge. Not *what it is*. Only, *how it's created*. Where I want to take this is language. The fundamental mistake in people's attempt to learn languages is that they spend all their time trying to understand what a foreign word *is*. An example of this in action is the use of Anki flashcards, where you have a French sentence on one side, and the English translation on the other. Then, you use spaced-repetition to cram that memory of what the French sentence *is* in English. Does it work? Not at all. Instead, your focus should be on understanding what problem that sentence solves. And this is difficult to understand, because you may think that you need to contrive some weird puzzles which the sentence can be used to solve. But rather, what I mean is this: You need an interesting thing to understand, where the thing that prevents you from understanding it is the language. Upon doing this successfully, you can in fact acquire a new foreign word or phrase *instantly*, no spaced repetition needed. The clearest recent example of this is that video where Javier Milei shouts 'Afuera!' as he rips down departments of Government from his whiteboard. Everyone who watched that instantly acquired a foreign word because it was obvious what he *meant* by that word. In other words, it was clear what feeling or emotion he was trying to convey in that word; the problem that word solved was clear. Ever since then, I've shouted 'Afuera!' when throwing out the rubbish, when asking someone to leave, when editing bad writing, and I still don't know what the English translation is. I never bothered to look it up, because I understand the problem that word solves.

🧙‍♂️ "The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue." -- Baruch Spinoza