The stairs to Knowledge

As a Teenager, you know everything! You also think that you cannot die and that everything must be tested. This is a brilliant time. It's the time to party until late and solve world problems over endless units of alcohol. Many years ago a friend explained me the idea that knowledge comes in steps. 

As a kid, I was quite brash with shallow knowledge. He told me this story to explain where I was in the Knowledge Stairs. It was a clever way to let myself analyze what level I was on, without straight out telling me that others might see me a bit “braggy”.

We all have bias

Last week, I attended a Meetup at Bitraf to learn strategies for negotiating deals. It's surprising how much bias we bring with us and the list presented by Magnus, was surprisingly long. We have various bias's for Anchoring, Confirmation, Hindsight, Negativity, Optimism, Overconfidence, Self-serving, In-group, Projection as well as Survivorship bias. All of these are important to understand, but the last one is interesting. Survivorship bias is learning from those that survived or were successful. It is obviously more important to learn from those that died trying?

I've always felt that I learn more from failure than success? The older you get, the more you understand that it's much more important to learn what NOT to do. Luck and timing are always important factors in success and they're hard to control. It's much easier to just avoid making mistakes, so that you're ready when the time comes.

In addition to the list of Bias, there was a similar list of effects: The Availability heuristic, the Bandwagon Effect, the False consensus effect, the Halo effect, the Recency effect, the Sunken cost fallacy, Gamblers fallacy and more. Since we are creatures of habit, these will all affect our ability to negotiate.

The Knowledge stairs

And then there was the one that reminded me of the stairs Anders told me about years ago: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's “a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities”. This bias explains people who are on the first step of their stairs to knowledge. These are the four steps:

1. On the first step of the stairs to knowledge you are “Unknowingly incompetent”. You've read a bit and do not know how shallow your knowledge is. At this point it's very easy for others to spot how little you know, but you don't know that.
2. On the Second step, you've realized that you don't know everything. You are "Knowingly incompetent" and at this stage, you're likely thirsty for more.
3. On the Third step, you've learned a lot. You've become “Knowingly competent”. You know your stuff, but still need to focus. You also know what you don't know.
4. On the Fourth and last stair, you've become “Unknowingly competent”. You know so much about a topic that you no longer need to look it up and you have built an intuitive understanding of it.

What we never understand as a teenagers, is how much there is to know. The more you learn, the more you understand that you cannot possibly learn everything. At this point, you start to respect others that have knowledge in areas that are of interest to you. I think this way of explaining knowledge is worth sharing, so feel free to recycle/reuse the graphic below if you found this interesting.