Do We Really Learn From Mistakes? - Importance of Meta-Learning and Understanding Mechanisms

Introduction

I assume it’s not so hard to imagine that if we grabbed a hot pan handle without a potholder and if it’s very hot, we are most likely to be able to be careful about it and avoid the same thing from happening from the point onward.
In this instance, we could say we learn from mistakes.

But would you say that’s still the case for the girl who keeps on dating the bad-boys back to back even after she complained many times? What about leaving tasks until the last moment again and again? One day, you finally started exercising and felt so good and filled with energy and thought “I should do this every day”, but then how many times have you actually followed thorough that the next day?

And we even almost feel like we’re crazy from time to time when we know we should do those things but the same thing keeps happening after our best efforts.

I’ve learned fundamental lessons on personal development through my software engineering and management career, and my personal development journey. Those are mainly from following 4 standpoints:

1. General Learning Strategy Standpoint
2. Neuroscientific Standpoint
3. Mental Health (Psychiatric/Physiologic) Standpoint
4. Life Style (Physiologic) Standpoint

I’m going to talk about them one by one on this blog. On this post, I’m going to talk about the first point, which is about as title goes Importance of Meta-Learning and Understanding Mechanisms.

Table of contents

Humans Are Not Very Rational in Nature

Sometimes We Play Detective, Victim, AND Murderer at the Same Time

I am a software engineer. It’s not too much to say we use more than 80% or 90% of programming time on debugging. Debugging is a process of problem-solving with iterative trials and errors, this process looks give or take like this:

1. Recreate the problem
2. Analyze it
3. Research the problem and identify the culprits
4. Research and try solutions

A lot of times, we solve problems without having much difficulty. However, we get stuck in a deep, seemingly endless rabbit hall from time to time and it seems almost impossible to solve. What happens is a solution we implemented quite confidently turns out to be not the solution, and sometimes we literally cannot wrap our head around what is going on because it seems like it should be working, assessing the situation with our knowledge/experience.

What ends up happening when I get into this pattern is more than just a few times, I am the one who created the mess in the first place!

And I know it’s not just my unique experience. As a matter of fact, we even have this meme.

Cognitive Flexibility: Having a Healthy Amount of Self-Doubt

So the point I want to elicit from the debugging story is we want to have a healthy amount of self-doubt and try to consider alternative viewpoints when we’re trying to solve problems.

Since debugging is a process of problem-solving, the lesson from this playing detective, victim, AND murderer things basically should go for general problem-solving.
We might be playing murderer without noticing it when we’re trying to solve problems. We oftentimes end up facing the reality where something that’s holding ourselves back turns out to be none other than ourselves.

Looking at this idea from the scientific standpoint, the similar concept is something called “Cognitive Flexibility”.

Take a look at a couple of quotes about this concept from neuroscience studies.

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts or to think about multiple concepts simultaneously. ¹

cognitive flexibility supports flexible shifting between tasks or mental sets of information, inhibitory control allows suppression of irrelevant information and responses, and working memory updating enables updating and maintenance of incoming information over short periods of time. ²

So we could say that cognitive flexibility supports critical thinking by enabling individuals to approach problems from multiple angles, explore diverse solutions, and consider alternative viewpoints.

How to Co-Exist With Our Inevitable Irrationality?

Then the question becomes how do we actually incorporate this idea into our problem-solving or personal development and stop repeating the same mistakes?
This simple concept is actually easier said than done. We all know that when we are in a very moment and playing murderer, it’s darn hard to realize it and get out of it. Seems bleak, what can we do?

So the first thing we can do is to be really aware and accept that we as human beings have a huge number of irrational cognitive biases and we are basically not as rational as we think we are in nature. Just being aware of this idea helps us take a step back from time to time when things are going south.

The second thing to understand is that personal development is a life-long journey, meaning that it’s not that easy, learning superficial techniques every once in a while might not work as charm. I’m planning to talk about this point on another post in detail, but in short, our irrationality is for survival. It’s not a bug, it’s our built-in feature. If your habit or things you want to improve are getting out of your control, then it might be becoming maladaptive, but still it’s probably not malfunction.

The reason why it seems that we are almost kind of doomed to make the same mistake over and over and every now and then it feels hopeless to change is those maladaptations are so ingrained in our brain, they are shortcuircutted behaviors. Ultimately, our brains are so lazy that they like shortcuircutting information and try to reduce the overall volume of information that they need to process (by the way because of this shortcuircutting, we can connect dots and fill in gaps with things we already know). And since they became so ingrained patterns that it takes time and proper repetition to unlearn it.

So what we need to face is that personal growth is a life-long journey. Now I will digress a little, but I believe that people with this mindset will improve their well-being. What scientists basically said in this study ³ is better cognitive flexibility leads to better well-being in later life.

And the third thing we need to remember is that not only does it take time and proper repetition to unlearn our ingrained patterns, it also takes time to find right resources of information that fit your needs for your unique personal growth. It holds a serendipitous aspect in a way. This may sound a bit cruel, but ultimately you also need luck on top of everything else above.

I’m going to talk about this point on another post as well, but luck is out of your control, so don’t let a negative consequence let you down. All we can do is to control our actions. The action we can take to encounter right resources is to learn things of your interest regularly, which leads us to my main point of this post, “meta-learning”

Meta-Learning

Meta-Learning Is a Proactive Action Towards New Discovery With a Healthy Amount of Self-Doubt

Meta-learning is “learning to learn” by definition. Here, I’d want to interpret and extend it a little more broadly and define it as

1. a proactive action to learn what you’re learning from a higher meta-level perspective
2. with a heathy amount of self-doubt to find something that is lacking in you and mental strength to gladly admit it and incorporate it accordingly

So let’s have a look at the thought process difference between meta-learning and non-meta-learning thinking:

Let’s say we want to break free from a bad habit.

The typical action in non-meta-Learning thinking be like go to Google then type the keyword “how to stop bad habits”, then find out that something along the lines of following techniques seem to work:

• Habit replacement: Substitute the bad habit with a healthier alternative.
• Positive reinforcement: Reward yourself for successes, no matter how small.
• Delayed gratification: Practice waiting before giving in to the urge.
• Keep a habit journal: Track your progress and identify patterns.

Then we try to implement them. If you have a massive willpower or are lucky, you successfully continue it the next day. If not, you give up or even forget. And as days go, the more of them drop out. Then some of them will be off to a journey of searching for perfect techniques, and some of y’all find yourself meditating deep in the mountain of Himalayas.

So I’m not going to say this process itself is that bad. Overall, it seems like a very natural process for a lot of people to go through of course including myself. (And if we actually take action and try to implement them into our life, that alone is a very impressive first step and we might want to praise ourselves.)

The questions that I want to add here instead of dropping out are such as “What is a habit by the way?”, “How does a habit form?“. They seem to be more fundamental questions. Once you understand it on a deeper level, you’ll find yourself having more logical explanation why those techniques are recommended, and being able to tailor them to fit your need or realize more fundamental issues that you could not see before deepening understanding.

(By the way I’m going to talk about how a habit forms in the next post from the neuroscientific standpoint)

Important Nuance: Selection and Concentration

What I’m trying to say here is not that we need to learn everything on the fundamental level. Many things are abstracted on a very highly level in this day and age. You don’t have to understand how laundry machines work when you just want to wash your clothes. As we try to understand things on a deeper level, apparently the more time it takes. So it’s not realistic to try to learn everything on that level. The modern world is very fast paced and our life is not that long.

What I want to say here is we need selection and concentration, as Peter Drucker says in his book The Effective Executive:

If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

I believe this strategy captures a fundamental truth of the world we’re living.

If the target is not very important to you, then you don’t have to go deeper. But if it’s something important to you, take your time and learn on a deeper level. It sure will pay you back.

Understanding Mechanisms

In the example above, I brought up the questions “What is a habit?”, “How does a habit form?“. These questions seem to prompt us to understand the mechanism of the subject, which is what I want to talk about next.

Surface Learning vs. Deep Learning

So, understanding the underlying mechanism of the subject is one of the most typical and effective forms of meta-learning.

This may sound like a very worn-out example, but I assume y”all have experienced cramming for an exam.
When we’re cramming, we should probably be not caring about the details and need to memorize a lot of things simply because we don’t have time. And what we all inevitably experience after you cram is:

• very easy to forget
• hard to apply knowledge to new situations or problems

This is because we learned those information by rote, focusing on memorizing them without understanding the underlying concepts, relating new and pre-existing knowledge, or linking it to real life.
It’s called “Surface Learning”. And the counterpart of surface learning is called “Deep Learning” (It’s a different concept than deep learning in machine learning).

For example, they discussed about surface and deep learning in this paper and said like this:

The deep approach describes active involvement stemming from interest in the content which leads to an elaboration of the learning material in seeking personal understanding. In contrast, the surface approach suggests anxiety or extrinsic motivation driving routine memorisation intended to reproduce aspects of the subject matter. ⁴

Also, in this study, they said:

The deep learning approach involves comprehending the learning material, while the surface learning approach involves memorizing for the sake of passing exams. Deep learning not only enhances students’ knowledge, but also facilitates the practical application of that knowledge in real-life situations. ⁵

So it seems like it’s safe to say understanding mechanisms which is deep learning, leads us to better application of knowledge to our situations and better assessment of results.

You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Know

One of the fundamental lessons I learned about problem-solving and personal development is, You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Know.

Let me share a story.
A few week ago, we had our garbage disposal in the kitchen stuck. We kind of freaked out because it was a second time within just a year timeframe, we just had a plumber to fix it about a year ago.
So we called a local plumber to have them fix it, a plumber guy came and started inspecting it, then just 2 minutes later he told us it was just because a small spoon got stuck there. He was so generous that he didn’t charge us for that very minute fix.

If we don’t know the basics of how piping and garbage disposal works, we can’t even identify and fix this minute issue.
If we once understand the mechanism of things, we should have a fair chance that we can identify the issues, and tailor our knowledge to fit your situation.

When we repeat the same mistake over and over again even after our best effort, it might be because we are learning things on a surface level. We might be missing some underlying concept and just applying superficial techniques.

It sort of sounds like the Maslow’s golden hammer phenomenon, which is a cognitive bias that Abraham Maslow pointed out in 1966, where as the famouse quote goes

If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.

If you fall into this pattern, you try that golden hammer on irrelevant problems, then eventually realize that it’s not really working, and then you need to keep trying new solutions and stubbing in the dark until you finally get lucky and find a right solution for your needs.

We want flexibility in our knowledge. We need deep understanding to prescribe proper medicine that fits our own needs.

Now we have better understanding about common pitfalls of repetitive mistakes, cognitive flexibility, inevitable truth of personal growth journey, meta-learning, surface/deep learning. I hope this post has been helpful and you can soon learn what you don’t know at this moment, and your situation gets better.