Five Sources of Junk Learning

What is junk learning?

As per the article by Michael Simmons in medium, junk learning is the learning that impedes our progress by giving us intellectual justification to continue on a regressive thoughts and actions.It is learning something that do not add value to the learner. It provides an illusion of learning, an illusion of a time well spent but it is really harmful to the learner. Just as a junk food sates your hunger but is ultimately unhealthy, junk learning sates your intellectual hunger but ultimately hurts the learner.

Let me give an example. It is an extreme case of Junk Learning. I remember the incident that happened one day in 2001 when I was driving down to Hosur with my manager Rajumohan. He popped a question, what would you prefer, achievement or money? I remember replying that I will prefer achievement over money. You can read the full post here.

The article also says what happened after I realized my mistake, what happened when I dumped my junk learning and saw the light as it were...

I just lost 8 years, that is all.

What hit me was junk learning. I imbibed the wrong lesson that for me money doesn't matter, only achievement did. Due to this junk learning, I moved from project to project, doing great work, but never really having the courage (or feeling the need) to ask for a raise I deserved. Money did not matter to me remember?

Why was it junk learning? Because the question was wrong. 'Achievement or Money' creates a false binary. They are not the same. Achievement is related to how diligently you do your work, money is the measure of the value of the output you produce. If you are an achievement oriented person, you will produce high value output, but you won't know the value of your output.

Did I tell it right? Did you understand what I meant. Achievement and money are not mutually exclusive. I should have answered 'I would prefer 'Achievement and money'. Had I done that I would not have taken many wrong decisions that I took over my career. I would not have left 20000 shares of a company on the table (worth almost 60,00,000 INR as per today's share prices) and left for a paltry salary of 8,00,000 per year. I would not have left a job that was giving me almost 100 Pound Sterling a day in UK, in addition to my salary in India, to another job that was giving me almost the same Indian Salary, without those Pound Sterling.

You see what I mean? Junk learning cost me a lot. I trace all my wrong decisions in my career to that one discussion  'achievement or money' that I had with Rajumohan in 2002.

That is how pernicious junk learning is.

So, what are the sources of junk learning? How can be overcome its negative effect?

Author mentions five sources of junk learning and ways to overcome them. The first source of junk learning is the learning that depreciates in value as time progresses. The learning depreciation means that one has to keep learning continuously just to stay in the same place. One mental model that help to overcome this is to acquire learning that appreciates in value over time or at the least learn stuff that do not depreciate over time.

I intuitively know this. That is the reason that I ask everyone to learn business concepts and accounting flows rather than an application version. The former do not lose value, in fact the more you work on this, the more your value will increase. Learning an application version like R12 is like depreciating learning. The learning is useless as soon as the version changes.

Second source of junk learning is overconfidence that comes out of scant learning. This is called Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that till one point, the more you learn, the more you know that the less you know. The awareness of your ignorance will lower your confidence till it touches the lowest level before rising. Little knowledge will make you to commit mistakes. The way to handle this is being a cynic and regularly question your assumptions.

The third source of junk learning is confirmation bias. We tend to learn new stuff that confirms our current understanding. This is not the correct approach. We must learn by trying to prove ourselves wrong. Learning happens through assimilation and accommodation. In assimilation, we use our existing knowledge to learn new things. Accommodation happens when we understand the futility of our existing knowledge to handle a new situation. Here our current knowledge is either wrong, or is useless to handle the new situation or worst, hinders our learning new things. Confirmation bias encourages assimilation but discourages accommodation. We accept ideas that confirm to our existing knowledge and ignore those that counter our point of view.

We call it binary way of thinking. This is rampant in the current state of political polarization in India where we are not ready to listen to counter view points.

We stunt our progress by avoiding discomfiting evidence. Why do we do that? A study shows that we perceive intellectual threat like a physical threat. We need to overcome confirmation bias by stress testing our fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality and learn to handle the strong emotions that come up when we do that.

Fourth source of junk learning is trusting the wrong people and wrong ideas. This because of the Halo effect. We assume that if a person is good in one area, he must be good in others as well. The example given is of George W Bush. In the days immediately after 9/11, his approval rating of the way he handled the aftermath of the crisis skyrocketed. In addition his approval rating for handling the economy also improved. It was difficult for people to approve his work in one area while accepting that he was not good in an unrelated area. It was a mix of Halo Effect and confirmation bias in action. The way to handle Halo Effect is to maintain a healthy dose of scepticism.

Halo effect explains why children think their dad is a superhero. 

The fifth and final source of junk knowledge is over-specialisation. It limits our ability to learn across disciplines. The concept of learning transfer deals with how we transfer our learning from one domain to another. Positive transfer occurs when a concept used in one area applies to another unrelated area. This is akin to how McDonald's used the Toyota concepts of Production Line and JIT in Burger business. Negative transfer occurs when learning in one are hinders the learning in another area. For example those who learn Spanish find it difficult to learn English because the latter has gender-less nouns.

Over-specialisation causes negative transfer. The way to handle this is by learning supplemental areas that are transferable. These include learning how to learn and learning how to regulate and monitor ones limited resources like limited short term memory and slow learning rates. Author comes up with the idea of mental models to aid learning transfer.

Mental models are ways that aid the transfer of knowledge. Specialization limits the mental models that you can access in a certain situation. This article in Farnam Street Blog documents 108 Mental Models including Systems Thinking, Occam's Razor, Multiplying by zero, Greesham's Law, Bell Curve etc. The more the mental models you know, the better decisions you will make.