It’s Hard for Doctors to Unlearn Things. That’s Costly for All of Us.
The New York Times
Procedures live on even after they’ve been proved ineffective. It can lead to harms and wasted resources. This piece unpacks what it means to unlearn stuck ways of operating amongst professionals used to being the 'smartest ones in the room.'
This crowdsourced list of ways to unlearn things is a great (and diverse) starting point to find everyday strategies to intentionally adjust your biases and counteract social media's 'filter bubble.'
Apple (and its visionary Steve Jobs) used very intentional language to introduce their revolutionary new iPhone in 2007—bridging familiar and unfamiliar concepts by using a kind of 'horseless carriage' concept that led to powerful unlearnings about the limits of mobile tech.
Unlearning deeply embedded mental models is tough—but it can be done. Check out this video for a great example of how deeply ingrained mental models can be. You’re not going to get exponential results with a “bike” (mental model) that’s a little better and a little faster. You're going to have to learn how to ride a backwards bicycle. The good news is that it can be done, and it doesn't necessarily take eight months. It takes rewiring your automatic responses, which means going through the awkward and frustrating phase where you don’t feel like you're good at what you’re doing. In this stage, even 'knowing' what you need to do differently is not enough. As the narrator says, knowledge is not equal to understanding.
The authors lay out four stages people pass through when learning any new skill. People are:1. Unconsciously unskilled 2. Consciously unskilled 3. Consciously skilled 4. Unconsciously skilled. It is the first and fourth stages where unlearning is vital. Our 'unconscious unskilled-ness' and also our 'unconscous skilled-ness' are both times when we are operating on autopilot, with data-sorting and decision-making happening out of our conscious view. This is where our biases and set ways of thinking are invisible to us.
Our bias towards action can be counter-productive if we are operating inside an outdated way of thinking.In a recently-published study in Nature, researchers found that humans almost always added components to solve problems instead of subtracting them. This might explain why humans often tend to add more activity to solve problems rather than subtract ineffective actions or ways of thinking.
Our bias towards action can be counter-productive if we are operating inside an outdated way of thinking.In a recently-published study in Nature, researchers found that humans almost always added components to solve problems instead of subtracting them. This might explain why humans often tend to add more activity to solve problems rather than subtract ineffective actions or ways of thinking.
We know things. But we don't always know how we know. In this whirlwind tour of surprising statistics, expert statisticians help us see how our personal experiences, education, and media consumption all result in our flawed understandings of the world—that we take to be truths.
In Doha, Qatar, at a TED conference sponsored largely by the Queen of Qatar, I saw this great talk delivered by expert statistician (and storyteller) Hans Rosling. He started with a provocative question—what is the relationship between fertility rates and religions? It was clear that nearly everyone in the audience thought they knew the answer. But did they?
The 2007 announcement by Steve Jobs of the original iPhone is a great example of a horseless carriage.He began by talking about how Apple was announcing three new products: a touch-screen music player, a mobile phone and an Internet communicator. Then he showed how this wasn’t three products but one.By doing this, he ensured that people understood the iPhone wasn’t just a phone but had all three of these capabilities.
Before you begin a journey to "unlearn racism" you must first learn about it's history and development as a concept and a tool of political oppression. This article explores these histories while also examining the mindsets and motivations why individuals and groups would take on this task.
Dollarstreet is a project of the myth-busting data site Gapminder. The site makes wealth disparity clearer by posing a set of uniform questions (and photo prompts) for households around the world, rich and poor. Explore the site to unlearn some of your assumptions about what poverty (and wealth) look like in different contexts.