The translation you linked actually gives “A person prone to being ashamed cannot learn,” which is even more on the nose. Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this issue? I have a pretty severe case of it, especially because I tend to take a lot (a lot) longer than other people to do pretty much every kind of work I’ve ever tried, independently of how much intelligence I needed to apply to it. Aside from seeking medical advice for that problem (which hasn’t helped much) the obvious thing to do was try to exploit my comparative advantage in intelligence, so at least I’d be focusing on the most valuable kind of work I was capable of. Trouble is, when you do smart-people stuff, you soon find yourself surrounded by, and often in competition with, other smart people, and being too slow to keep up looks an awful lot like being too dumb or lazy (except that people get confused to the extent that they notice I’m not actually dumb or lazy). It’s hard enough trying to get over the fear of “learning in public” without having to explain that, due to an ill-defined, poorly understood disability that seems to afflict hardly anyone but me, I’m going to continue being surprisingly unproductive no matter how how patient anyone who tries to teach me is willing to be.
I actually tried, for several years, to be less outspoken and convey less confidence in my written voice. My impression is that the attempt didn’t work for me, and caused me some emotional and intellectual damage in the meanwhile. I think verbally; if I try to verbalize less, I think less.
That’s interesting. Lately I’ve been noticing a lot how most people on the internet write in a manner that conveys much more self-confidence than I feel when I write, even when they write about things they probably shouldn’t feel so confident about. I think my writing style noticeably conveys my lack self-confidence, but that might just be the illusion of transparency getting the better of me. Anyway, I’ve also noticed over the years that my internal monologue mostly consists of me talking out of my ass quite boldly about topics of which I am ignorant. I don’t seem to have any difficulty squelching that voice when it comes time to share my thoughts with others, for better or worse.
While I don’t have a full answer for you, there are some ideas that might be worth trying out.
Maybe there is a way to do smart-people stuff at your own pace, like learning from books/youtube videos instead of in a public setting. Books and videos have infinite patience. People all have different paces for everything, and if you notice that yours is lower than your peers it might be worth carefully trying not keeping up for a while. This can be dangerous though, so be cautious with this.
Personally I’ve always been frustrated with my pace of learning, and this feeling has always vanished when I look back and see how far I’ve come. Some (very good) lecturers explained this to me both in terms of a maze (“At first you don’t know which path to take so you have to spend a lot of time making dead turns, and then when you’re done it looks like you didn’t cover that much distance. But really you did.”) and in terms of exponential growth (“At the end of a learning curve you look at your rate of progress, which is the derivative of your knowledge with respect to time, and say [I could have gotten here way faster, look at how high the derivative is now and how low my total knowledge level is]. But that’s not how exponentials work, since learning also increases the rate of learning.”). This has really helped me think of asking ‘stupid’ questions as an investment, and if I look back at the things I didn’t know half a year ago I tend to be quite proud of my growth.
The translation you linked actually gives “A person prone to being ashamed cannot learn,” which is even more on the nose. Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this issue? I have a pretty severe case of it, especially because I tend to take a lot (a lot) longer than other people to do pretty much every kind of work I’ve ever tried, independently of how much intelligence I needed to apply to it. Aside from seeking medical advice for that problem (which hasn’t helped much) the obvious thing to do was try to exploit my comparative advantage in intelligence, so at least I’d be focusing on the most valuable kind of work I was capable of. Trouble is, when you do smart-people stuff, you soon find yourself surrounded by, and often in competition with, other smart people, and being too slow to keep up looks an awful lot like being too dumb or lazy (except that people get confused to the extent that they notice I’m not actually dumb or lazy). It’s hard enough trying to get over the fear of “learning in public” without having to explain that, due to an ill-defined, poorly understood disability that seems to afflict hardly anyone but me, I’m going to continue being surprisingly unproductive no matter how how patient anyone who tries to teach me is willing to be.
That’s interesting. Lately I’ve been noticing a lot how most people on the internet write in a manner that conveys much more self-confidence than I feel when I write, even when they write about things they probably shouldn’t feel so confident about. I think my writing style noticeably conveys my lack self-confidence, but that might just be the illusion of transparency getting the better of me. Anyway, I’ve also noticed over the years that my internal monologue mostly consists of me talking out of my ass quite boldly about topics of which I am ignorant. I don’t seem to have any difficulty squelching that voice when it comes time to share my thoughts with others, for better or worse.
Epistemic status: uncertain.
While I don’t have a full answer for you, there are some ideas that might be worth trying out.
Maybe there is a way to do smart-people stuff at your own pace, like learning from books/youtube videos instead of in a public setting. Books and videos have infinite patience. People all have different paces for everything, and if you notice that yours is lower than your peers it might be worth carefully trying not keeping up for a while. This can be dangerous though, so be cautious with this.
Personally I’ve always been frustrated with my pace of learning, and this feeling has always vanished when I look back and see how far I’ve come. Some (very good) lecturers explained this to me both in terms of a maze (“At first you don’t know which path to take so you have to spend a lot of time making dead turns, and then when you’re done it looks like you didn’t cover that much distance. But really you did.”) and in terms of exponential growth (“At the end of a learning curve you look at your rate of progress, which is the derivative of your knowledge with respect to time, and say [I could have gotten here way faster, look at how high the derivative is now and how low my total knowledge level is]. But that’s not how exponentials work, since learning also increases the rate of learning.”). This has really helped me think of asking ‘stupid’ questions as an investment, and if I look back at the things I didn’t know half a year ago I tend to be quite proud of my growth.