The main cause of this problem seems institutional: the people who instruct us are also the people who evaluate us and assign us grades which determine which schools we get into and such. From an individual perspective, other than some minor missed optimizations (like not admitting ignorance to tutors who don’t grade you, out of habit), it looks like a conflict between instrumental and epistemic rationality.
I’m not sure the conflict is exactly between epistemic and instrumental rationality. That would be when believing falsely is instrumentally rational. In this case, one action (concealing ignorance) is both good for one instrumental subgoal (status/positive evaluation) and bad for another (epistemic rationality). The epistemic problem does not lead to benefit; doing something beneficial leads to it.
Here’s it phrased another way: In a case of actual conflict, the benefit comes from the absence of true knowledge or the presence of false knowledge, so if one magically learned the truth with nothing else changing, this would negate the instrumental benefit. In the case of concealing ignorance, if one magically learned the information without the tutor knowing of the earlier ignorance this would be even better instrumentally. The ignorance is not necessary for the instrumental benefit, only the tutor’s awareness of it.
The main cause of this problem seems institutional: the people who instruct us are also the people who evaluate us and assign us grades which determine which schools we get into and such. From an individual perspective, other than some minor missed optimizations (like not admitting ignorance to tutors who don’t grade you, out of habit), it looks like a conflict between instrumental and epistemic rationality.
I’m not sure the conflict is exactly between epistemic and instrumental rationality. That would be when believing falsely is instrumentally rational. In this case, one action (concealing ignorance) is both good for one instrumental subgoal (status/positive evaluation) and bad for another (epistemic rationality). The epistemic problem does not lead to benefit; doing something beneficial leads to it.
Here’s it phrased another way: In a case of actual conflict, the benefit comes from the absence of true knowledge or the presence of false knowledge, so if one magically learned the truth with nothing else changing, this would negate the instrumental benefit. In the case of concealing ignorance, if one magically learned the information without the tutor knowing of the earlier ignorance this would be even better instrumentally. The ignorance is not necessary for the instrumental benefit, only the tutor’s awareness of it.