Much of what passes for knowing something is knowing what to call it.
A children’s science textbook asks: what makes a wind-up toy move? The answer is that “energy makes it move.” And for the boy on the bicycle? Energy. For everything: energy.
Richard Feynman, asked to review textbooks like this one, proposed a test. Suppose the answer were “Wakalixes makes it move.” The sentence is structurally identical. It is equally true and equally empty. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word.
That raises a question most of us would rather not ask of our own education: how much of what we know is like “energy” here, a word that feels like an explanation and predicts nothing?
What the word hides
Feynman learned the distinction from his father, who would point at a bird and name it, then add that you could know its name in every language and, in Feynman’s words, “you still know nothing about the bird.” The name tells you about people’s naming customs. It doesn’t tell you what the bird will do, why it is colored that way, or why it is here rather than somewhere else.
“Energy” fails in the same way. The child who has the word can answer the textbook’s question for the toy, the bicycle and everything else, which is exactly the problem: an answer that fits every case explains none of them. Feynman’s alternative was to open the mechanism first: “Take apart the toy; see how it works.” The child should see the spring, the gears, the ratchet, the stored tension and the path by which it is released. Now the toy can surprise her. She can predict that a tighter wind gives a longer run, change a part and see whether she was right. The word “energy” can come later, as a name for something she has watched happen. If the word arrives before the mechanism, “nothing whatever is learned.”
Why schools keep handing out the word
If the label is so empty, why does it dominate? Feynman saw the answer while teaching in Brazil, where his physics students could recite everything and did not know what any of it meant.
Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. — Richard Feynman
An exam can check whether the student produces “energy” in the right blank. It can’t easily check whether she would know what to do with a broken toy. So the system rewards the thing it can see, and the students learn to supply it. The deeper trouble is that memorization and understanding are not on a spectrum — they are different activities that can substitute for each other. A person can memorize enormous amounts without understanding anything, and the substitution works so well that neither they nor their examiners can easily tell the difference.
The substitution is also protected socially. In Feynman’s account, nobody in the class would admit confusion:
It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what’s going on, and they’d put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it’s not confusing at all. — Richard Feynman
Once everyone is pretending, the cost of saying “I don’t get it” rises high enough that nobody breaks the spell.
When names are earned
None of this makes names the enemy. A physicist who says “energy” is using the same word as the textbook, but for her it is shorthand for thousands of worked cases that have compressed into a rule; the label is what the rule gets called. Grokking describes how that compression happens. The child and the physicist say the same word, and only one of them could rebuild the toy from it. Fuller’s inverse warning also holds: a child who balances on one foot knows something about physics she has no word for, so lacking the name doesn’t mean lacking the understanding.
The test is therefore not whether you can name something but whether the name changes what you can predict, which is close to what learning as behavior change asks of any lesson.
That test is uncomfortable once you turn it inward.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
You think you know why the toy moves because you can say “energy.” You think you know why markets crash because you can say “systemic risk,” why you lash out because you can say “anger issues,” why you are unhappy because you can say “attachment style.” Each label feels like comprehension. Some of them may be real compressions, and some are Wakalixes. The only way to find out is to ask what the word lets you predict, and to notice how rarely you ask.
References:
- Richard Feynman: The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something, FS.blog
- Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character