Knowledge Is Not Understanding - More to That

When you’re given a textbook, you’re effectively given a history of discoveries. What you have in there is a distillation of theories and findings that other humans have happened upon.

So any textbook you read has the forces of compression and incentives embedded into it. The removal of complexity and the generation of profit guide the distribution of knowledge, however subtly it may be.

What this means is that the way we absorb knowledge is dependent upon what others have deemed valuable. The scholars that put together these textbooks decide what pieces of information to include, and market forces determine which textbooks make it to each school. What the student is left with is the result of this piecemealing and marketing that h... See more

The pursuit of knowledge is heralded as a virtue, but the attainment of understanding is far more important.

So this begs the question: What, then, is understanding?

To explain what I mean here, we have to first delve into the difference between knowledge and understanding. On its surface, it may seem like a game of semantics, but if you explore this further, you’ll see that the nuances make all the difference.

The first question to address is: How do we attain knowledge?

Well, true understanding can only be attained through personal experience. It’s when you viscerally feel the implications of your decisions and actions, and see how they ripple through other human beings. It’s when you realize that the profundity of what you read may not translate properly into the messy sphere of reality.

In this form, knowledge is not understanding. It’s merely an abstracted version of someone else’s lived experience; symbols on a page that attempt to summarize the nuances of each discovery.

No matter how much wisdom you gain from the pages of your favorite author, if you haven’t experienced the visceral events that led to that wisdom yourself, then it’s just knowledge. Sure, you can leverage the hard-earned wisdom of others to help you, but understanding only happens when you earn that wisdom in the tumultuous arena of real life.