You needed to be taught how to use a can opener

Or, why you should be dubious of pretty much all of self improvement advice

I’m fascinated by this picture.

If it’s your first time seeing it, you probably don’t see anything beyond random black and white splotches on the page.

If I told you that it was a picture of a cow, then perhaps the image might come to you. But if I showed you this supplementary picture, then the first image would almost certainly snap in to place. Those random ink blotches would suddenly become crystal clear.

It’s a nifty little illusion; but I’m more fascinated by the cognitive process taking place underneath the hood:

1. A piece of data (D1) is hard to make sense of

2. A relatively simple piece of data (D2) is provided as a supplement to the first

3. D1 transforms from incomprehensible to obvious — in the space of an instant. Moreover, it becomes extremely difficult to go back to a state of ignorance.

In other words, you can’t unsee the cow.

The phenomenon works in reverse as well

Here’s a video of a teenager failing to use a can opener:

Implicit in the video is this idea that he should already know how to use a can opener. He is 16 years old after all; how could he not know how to use a can opener? You don’t know?!

But let me ask you this: if I only showed you that first splotchy image of the cow, without ever giving you the supplementary image, how long would it take for you to figure it out for yourself? How long would it take for your perceptions to finally snap into place?

The 16 year old is in the same position. It would literally take two seconds for somebody to show him how to use the can opener correctly. But if he doesn’t actually receive that information, then opening a can might as well be the same as operating a NASA rocket.

The other people in the video presumably have forgotten that they needed to be taught how to use a can opener at some earlier point in their lives.

I think there’s two main takeaways.

Lesson one: You can’t always rely on experts to tell you the truth

I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial way. Obviously we need to rely on people with domain expertise.

I’m simply pointing out that it’s very hard to “copy and paste” the success and experiences of other people into your own life, because most of the time you’re getting the advice from them retrospectively. They can already “see the cow” so to speak. In fact, they’ve been seeing the cow for so long they can no longer unsee it.

In technical jargon, I’m talking about the curse of knowledge — which I believe is a combination of unconscious competence mixed with hindsight bias.

Unconscious competence allows one to be extremely good at something without having to review their knowledge from first principles — and therefore, they’ve forgotten what those principles are in the first place. Or at least, they can no longer explicitly state these principles.

For example, I am fluent in English. (Readers may disagree). I can tell you that the description “three large black cows” makes more grammatical sense than “black three large cows.” But my competence is unconscious; I’ve never explicitly taken the time to figure out what order the descriptors go in, and why the first example makes sense while the second doesn’t.

Meanwhile, hindsight bias is a psychological phenomenon where we can no longer accurately remember how we felt about a given situation or outcome before it happened. For example, it feels inevitable that the 2008 market crash was going to happen — I mean, the financial system was obviously over-leveraged. But at the time it was incomprehensible.

This is also why I’m becoming increasingly dubious of podcasts and books of successful people trying to “decode” their success. These people already know how to use the can opener, so to speak — they can use it while hanging upside down and blindfolded.

Which brings us to the second lesson:

Lesson Two: Just admit you don’t know how to use a can opener, dude

We’re all these meme sometimes, substituting the top line with whatever it is you’re oblivious about.

We’re all “struggling with the can opener” in some aspect of our lives, despite being relatively functional everywhere else. We’re not dumb. We just seemed to have missed that particular day of school where everyone else was taught the lesson.

I think on some vague societal level, we can appreciate that some cohorts have appreciable gaps in their abilities, even if it’s a relatively simple task for everybody else. Watch a typical 75 year old use an iPad (or a millennial try to fix the transmission of their car) and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

But I think we all have those can opener moments, idiosyncratic to ourselves. Personally, I cannot for the life of me remember what the difference between a deductible and a co-pay is, though I’ve looked it up literally dozens of times. In fact, the most I understand about insurance is that it’s like a Netflix subscription but for healthcare.

This is a universal phenomenon, but a lot of us try to keep up a façade because “You should have learned this by now.” It’s a shame thing, more than anything. But it shouldn’t be; we’re just looking at the ink blotches, without that simple piece of information to show us that it’s a cow.

With that said, I believe the unique superpower in the modern world is to simply mimic Chris Pratt meme and simply admit “I have no idea about <Simple Topic X>.” Except, you know, don’t be afraid to ask. Outside of the Internet, most people are pretty helpful, and the disarming level of honesty allows others to comfortably admit that they have no idea what’s going on either. And a lot of the time, our problems can be clarified by a simple two second demonstration.

Line the wheels against the top of the can, clamp the handles down, turn over the crank a few times — and bam, you’ve opened the can.