It’d be nice to have an objective measure of how deeply you understand any given idea. That seems like a hard problem though. For example, in the comments to this post Wei says “I thought I had taken the idea of uploads seriously, but apparently not and neither had anyone else”. I’ve also had many times when I thought I’d grasped an idea well enough to explain it to others, but then years later suddenly found a deeper way to understand the same idea. For some ideas, like “correlation isn’t causation”, I’ve lost count of how many levels there are.
It’d be nice to have an objective measure of how deeply you understand any given idea. That seems like a hard problem though. For example, in the comments to this post Wei says “I thought I had taken the idea of uploads seriously, but apparently not and neither had anyone else”. I’ve also had many times when I thought I’d grasped an idea well enough to explain it to others, but then years later suddenly found a deeper way to understand the same idea. For some ideas, like “correlation isn’t causation”, I’ve lost count of how many levels there are.