The Art of Unlearning

“It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain

Most people think about learning as adding knowledge and skills. When you learn French, you learn that the word, avoir means “to have.” You now have a new fact in your mind that didn’t exist before.

Adding knowledge like this, I’d like to argue, is actually the less important case. The most useful learning isn’t usually a strict addition of new knowledge, but first unlearning something false or unhelpful.