Bothering to understand

First it makes you slow, then it makes you fast (maybe)

Posted by Curiositry on March 15th, 2026 Tagged 100DaysToOffload, Principles, Learning

If I throw an unfamiliar word or concept at you in the first paragraph of this essay, will you bother to look it up? If the answer is yes, you can close the tab, unless you want to bookmark it in your “people saying things I already believe” folder, to inflict upon someone less advanced.

I'm pretty good at bothering to look up words I don't know. But what about when a blogger or AI model starts justifying their reasoning with little mathematical symbols, and it makes me uncomfortable, because I don't know what they mean, and am too proud to ask? Not so much.

Now that I'm old and busy, I find it harder to get around to learning-for-the-sake of learning. It’s much easier to get around to learning in the process of doing! Yet, opportunities frequently pass me by. I scroll past the unfamiliar symbol; the elk footprints go uninvestigated; “that's funny...” is left at that's funny, rather than, “aha!”.

Dan Luu calls this "willingness to look stupid". Slime Mold Time Mold call it the scientific virtue of stupidity. I call it bothering to understand. Slowing down, amid all the breakneck chaos, to figure out why it crashed, rather than just restarting it.

This is unlikely to pay off in the short term. But next time it crashes, or maybe not even then, but next time something vaguely like it does something vaguely like what it did, I'll have a foundation to build upon.

Knowledge compounds. You only have to make the wand once, then you can blow bubbles with it forever.

Make the wand.

Techniques for putting this principle into practice

Principles are mainly useful when applied. Talking about them isn't the point.

In this case, two things tend to get in the way, depending on context: discomfort, and inconvenience.

The sooner I start bothering to understand, the less awkward. This applies over the course of a lifetime, in relationships with specific people, and within an interaction.
- It's less awkward to ask ignorant questions when you're young, than to always be an ignoramus
- It's less awkward to learn how to pronounce / remember someone's name the first time you hear it
- It's less awkward to clarify unfamiliar terms and concepts the moment they come up: if you have to go back and clarify them later, after pretending to understand them, it calls your bluff, which doesn't look good.

Just get over it, it doesn't get easier, but in the long run, it's the right thing to do, and higher status, to bother to understand, even if that means crossing a moat filled with alligators of (possibly imagined) social judgement

Inconvenience

Without the pressure of an in-person interaction where I would lose credibility or waste people's time by asking dumb questions, the main barriers become time, energy, and inconvenience.

The built-in, long-press-to-look-up word in dictionary on e-readers makes it convenient to learn unfamiliar vocabulary without breaking the flow of reading. The catch: unless you load a custom dictionary, if you have a tolerably large vocabulary, a significant percentage of unfamiliar words won't be in the default dictionary, especially if you read things heavy in neologisms and technical terms.
- KOReader takes this a step further with built-in Wikipedia lookup

I write down things to look up, if I'm in the middle of something that I don't want to interrupt. And rather than typing my paper notes into a text file, I often type them directly into the Firefox search bar, even if I'm working offline. Then, next time I'm using my browser, the tabs will be in my way, and I won't forget.
Doing things myself, whether self-hosting a website, fixing a computer, or building a rock wall, results in learning all kinds of things by necessity and coincidence, and it's much more natural than taking a course.
If I'm hanging out with an expert (and almost everyone is an expert at something) — say, a radiographer scanning me at the hospital — I try to ask as many inquisitive questions about the fundamentals as I can get away with, early on. (It's easy to think, that's a dumb question, I could just Google it. But chances are I won't Google it.) This way, I'm more likely to be able to have an interesting and educational conversation with them, and then an even better conversation with the next radiologist I talk to.

I try to get up and investigate first hand when I encounter things I don't understand, like a weird beetle or a mysterious object. I have a natural resistance to getting involved with the physical world, so I make a point of getting out of my comfortable seat and going over to the thing to learn more — to get down on all fours, prod, sniff, or peer, as the circumstance dictates — even if it feels undignified and child-like, and gets my knees grubby.

The Autodidacts

Exploring the universe from the inside out

Bothering to understand

First it makes you slow, then it makes you fast (maybe)

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