Robin, it’s easy to see that of the two goals of maximizing either happiness or one’s own ability to perceive reality correctly,
Anyone can easily imagine wanting to maximize perceiving reality correctly IN ORDER TO maximize one’s happiness.
But one can’t imagine wanting to maximize one’s happiness IN ORDER TO maximize perceiving reality correctly.
The latter statement makes no sense, or if you force some sense upon it by scenario-making, it still makes a very limited kind of sense.
It seems to me that this proves that maximizing happiness is a higher goal than perceiving reality correctly.
Not one of my own, Aristotle’s.
On the propositon that ‘knowing that you are confused is essential for learning’ there is a structural equation model, tested empirically on 200+ subjects, that concludes that the ability of knowing-that-you-don’t-understand is an essential prerequisite for learning, in the sense that people who have that ability learn much better than those who do not. Three other individual difference variables are also involved, but only come into play after the person realizes that they don’t understand something. Its called ‘Learning from instructional text: Test of an individual differences model’ and is in the Journal of Educational Psychology (1998), 90, 476-491.
Another well-known study was of students learning a computer language from a computer tutoring program, in which all their keystrokes during learning were captured for analysis, and the biggest correlation with successful learning was the number of times they pushed a button labeled ‘I don’t understand.’ (John Anderson’s of Carnegie-Mellon)
Another famous result was from the notorious California State Legislature-mandated study of self-esteem: in high school seniors, i it was found that students with the highest self-esteem when they graduated—they thought they already knew everything—were those with the lowest self esteem the next year—they couldn’t keep a job because—they thought they already knew everything.