Unlearning 101

Unlearning Clutter

I'm no neat freak but as I get older (and now that I have kids) I must admit that I dislike clutter. Nevertheless, as Adam Singer reminds us in this blog posting, we might want to unlearn our "clutter cleaning" ways.

Unlearning the Stimulus Packaging

With the U.S. House now having passed President Obama's $827 billion economic stimulus packaging, it is worth recalling the words of the famous Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek:

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

Some Old Words of Wisdom on the Need to Unlearn

"The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of have been, into the corners of our minds." -- John Maynard Keynes 

Unlearning the Benefits of Thinking

Can we think too much for own good sometimes? The answer, according to this new study, is yes. Worse, if you are not careful, manipulative salespeople can use this tendancy against you.

According to the study, the more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation becomes. Therefore, a smart salesperson sensing your gut is telling you "no," might instead encourage you to deliberate on the pros and cons. Of course, this might seem like common sense but if you arrive at a decision opposite of your initial reaction, you will probably come to regret it.

Unlearning Add-Ons

According to this new study, the addition of an "add-on" can sometimes backfire and make a consumer less likely to buy the product. For example, in the case of a new MP3 player, if the company offers the customer an opportunity to purchase an additional 20GB of memory it might cause them to think that the standard 40GB isn't sufficient -- and thus that the product is somehow defective.

Unlearning Post-It Notes

I just came across this quote from this insightful article:  "A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out cool new things for computers to do," Karger says. "What's more interesting to me is figuring out how to get the computer out of the way." It's a good example of unlearning.

Unlearning Spaghetti, Mustard and All Foods

Malcolm Gladwell gives a fascinating talk on why we now have 36 different types of spaghetti sauce. It wasn't always this way, but the food industry has unlearned thanks to a man named Howard Moscowitz:

Unlearning Failure

Adam Singer has a great post on why organizations will need to unlearn their approach to failure. Here's a quote that strikes at the essence of the idea:

"Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats.”
-Howard Aiken, creator of the IBM/Harvard Mark 1 Computer

Unlearning Visibility

Researchers at Duke University continue to make improvements to their "invisibility cloak." If this sounds like something straight out of Harry Potter, well, it kind of is. Nevertheless, the technology could have some real world applications in the field of solar energy and biological imaging.

Unlearning Protection

One of the main tenets of unlearning is that "we don't know what we don't know." This sounds obvious but as this article, which explains how an attempt to remove feral cats from an island in Australia in order to protect a species of birds backfired dangerously, demonstrates -- it is extremely difficult to "know what we don't know."