Learning as Self-Hacking

Anyone with a functioning hand and arm can learn to play a song perfectly at the piano. This song is the song consisting of just one note. By pressing the key and then releasing it, you have played this song, perfectly. When learning a composition at the piano, it can seem impossible to play without mistakes. A complex song is really built out of many simple songs, or notes. The key to true mastery is to master the elements and then the combinations of the elements, and so on, until you have a finished masterpiece.

An important lesson in mastering the game of chess is learning to play objectively. Objective play is dispassionate play - if your position is inferior, you should have no difficulty in assessing how and why this is the case. It should not affect you emotionally - such as feelings of disappointment or discouragement - any more than a superior position should affect you emotionally - such as feelings of excitement or exultation. The problem of non-objectivity arises from confusing the game itself (chess-as-such) with performance at the chessboard. Ideal performance over the board arises from a thorough understanding of the game and a thorough understanding of the game arises from objective play (dispassionate play).

These principles apply to learning-as-such. A perfect day is made of perfect hours, which are made of perfect minutes, and so on. "Perfect", in this context, is a relative term - perfect with respect to some aim or end (such as learning). The key to success in general is objectivity - your flaws (inferior positions) should not affect you emotionally, any more than your strengths should. When you objectively assess yourself, you will be able to eliminate your flaws and reinforce your strengths. While you will always be affected by life-as-such, you will be best prepared in how you respond to it only when you have the ability to assess life's problems objectively.

These principles - learning from elements and objectivity in learning - seem so obvious as to barely deserve explanation. After all, who tries to write a word before they have learned to write letters? But the application of these principles to real learning has non-obvious implications and learning these implications requires non-trivial effort. After learning all the elements of chess strategy and playing these elements out for years, it required several revolutions in my own strategic thinking before I felt I had really begun to grasp what chess strategy is really about. The same thing is true for playing at the piano. I am no professional pianist but I can confidently say that I understand the overall process underlying how a professional pianist does what he or she does. This required several revolutions in my play at the piano long after I had mastered the elements of playing.

Rather than attempting to give an inventory of learning principles - there are many more than just these two, and just as important - the lesson I want to draw here is that learning is a kind of "self-hacking". I mean "hacking" in the sense of a computer hacker who is trying to get a piece of equipment to do what he wants it to do. The hacker is different from the engineer because the hacker can only see the equipment he is operating on as a "black box" - he cannot see what is inside of it, as the engineer can ("white box"). While I know my own thoughts, I do not exhaustively know the basis of my thoughts - my thinking and behavior is, in sum, a black box even to me. Learning is not self-engineering, it is self-hacking. In self-hacking, I approach my own behavior and thinking as a tangled rat's nest of wires that have no discernible purpose to me. But I don't care about understanding the rat's nest, all I care about is getting the results (outputs) I am looking for - improving my chess game, improving my performance at the piano, and so on.

Hacking myself means doing whatever it takes to get the results I want. As an example of a "hack", I will place a very important note on top of my identification badge when I go to bed so that when I go to pick up my badge in the morning (which I am unlikely to forget), I will also see the note and remember the important thing I needed to do, as well. This is a "hack" because it is based on the assumption that my behavior will be non-ideal - that I will forget not only the important thing I needed to do, but also the note I wrote to remind myself of the important thing I needed to do. I am working around cascading failures in my own behavior and thinking to kludge together a desired outcome.

The most difficult aspect of hacking has to do with one's blind spots. Blind spots do not arise from any failure in one's analytical ability (intelligence) but, rather, from character problems - immaturity. In order to hack my forgetfulness, I first have to have the courage - maturity - to acknowledge the objective reality of just how forgetful I am and just how large the consequences of forgetfulness can be. It is as though I have to hack my hacks - in the process of trying to get my behavior patterns to conform to my requirements, I have to hack the very process of hacking itself. This condition arises from the fact that even while learning - overcoming my imperfections in whatever dimension - I am still beset by imperfections.