Push Through the Learning Pit
I loved Scott Alexander’s post “Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman.” The first thing I got out of it was thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “master morality” and “slave morality” in a new way: I’ll call master morality “excellence” and slave morality “righteousness.” Think of excellence as the virtues that the Ancient Greeks and Romans would have emphasized: strength, intelligence, skill, beauty, truth. Think of righteousness as the virtues distinctly emphasized by Judaism, Christianity and (I think) Islam, especially, humility, love and compassion. Unlike at least the usual interpretations of Nietzche, I am a big fan of righteousness. I am also a big fan of excellence. My view is that, at the elite level, our culture become unbalanced, emphasizing righteousness and downplaying excellence. It is time emphasize excellence more to bring things back into balance. Very imperfectly put, it is important both to want to help others and to have the skills to do so effectively.
One of the great secrets to gaining skill is to be tough enough to push through the “learning pit”: the period of distress or confusion when you have realized how difficult something is, before you finally get good at it. Let’s think about the learning pit in terms of Frank De Phillips, William Berliner and James Cribbin’s Four Stages of Competence:
Unconscious Incompetence (You don’t know what you don’t know.)
Conscious Incompetence (You know what you don’t know. Painful.)
Conscious Competence (You know it, but it still takes effort to use the new knowledge and skill.)
Unconscious Competence (The skill starts to seem relatively effortless.)
Confusion can be a sign of learning. If you make it from (1) unconscious incompetence to (2) conscious incompetence and you don’t retreat in horror and realizing what you don’t know, you can go on to (3) conscious competence, and then at length to (3) unconscious competence. The alternative is to avoid ever doing anything hard, which will limit your life in big ways.
Just below is a short video with that message: Entering the Challenge Zone with Pema Chödrön.
Jenny Anderson writes the blog “How to Be Brave.” Along with Rebecca Winthrop, she has a new book: The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. She wrote a teaser for her book in the Wall Street Journal (February 6, 2025): “Don’t Try to Rescue Your Kid From the ‘Learning Pit’”, source of the picture at the top of this post. Here are some of my favorite quotations (bullets added to distinguish different quoted passages):
The high ground, before the ditch, is the excitement and spark of a new idea. Immediately after comes the false belief that you understand it. Then comes the descent into realizing you don’t really understand it: falling into the pit. Over time, very gradually, you figure it out; you climb out of the pit.
Letting kids struggle is not the norm in the U.S. In 1999, the Department of Education released a detailed study comparing how teachers teach eighth-grade math in different countries. In Japan, teachers spent 44% of their time giving students material they don’t know and challenging them to figure it out; in the U.S., teachers took this approach 1% of the time. In Japan, a student would sometimes stand at the board for over half an hour trying to figure out how to solve a problem—no one was concerned or embarrassed. American teachers offered help before students tried the problems, to prevent them from struggling.
But soon after my unnecessarily panicked email, my daughter’s mood started to improve. Her scores started ticking up. At a regularly scheduled parent-teacher meeting, her teacher said she was clocking 60% on math problems that were a full academic year ahead. She was getting better at dealing with frustration and setbacks. She was gaining confidence—not just in math and English but in asking for help. She was climbing out of the pit.
… a kid who struggles—and sometimes fails—will end up better prepared for life’s challenges than one who breezes through their work without breaking a sweat. Independence in learning is critical to success in an era where generative AI will require us not just to know things but to know what we want to do with our knowledge.
In my own intellectual journey, I have made a habit of turning toward what is hard rather than away. That habit has served me well. This is in accordance with a more general principle in life, said well by Ryan Holiday:
“One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way, forgoing difficulty whenever possible. The other way is the Stoic way—to see hardship as an opportunity, as a test not an obstacle, a chance to use all that stands in your path as fuel to make you brighter and better.”
— Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic, "Nothing Can Stop You From This"