“I must be missing something”

Sometimes I encounter ideas, artistic works or online forms that I don’t understand. My usual thought in this place is, “I must be missing something” or “I’m too stupid to get this”. This thought is unpleasant. I quite dislike feeling stupid. But I submit to you, dear reader, that

1. this is a healthy and useful thought to have, and
2. you’re more likely to have this thought if you’re more engaged, though
3. you should take steps to avoid it crushing your soul.

This manifested today as I was trying to navigate through my university’s very new ethics application portal (I submitted through the old system, but I needed to make edite, I’m in the process of transferring all my info to the new system). I have been going back and forth with the very patient portal admin for about a week now. Has my project been uploaded on the portal? Yes, it’s been transferred. But how do I add this new info? This project form looks like it’s locked. It’s not locked. It’s just that your supervisor is the project owner. Ok, how do I fix that? You don’t – you submit a variation subform, go through some weird counterintuitive processes to press the ‘submit’ button, wait for ethics to get back and unlock the next step, then add documents that way. Ok, and where is the button for document upload?

Navigating this process has made me feel stupid. I am a smart person born in the same year as the internet – I can handle an online freaking form! Apparently not here.

I feel the same way sometimes watching theatre. I feel like the writing is cerebral, or deeply metaphorical, and I’m too stupid to understand the playwright’s vision. For mysterious or enigmatic works, I feel like the performance contains all the information I need to understand, but I can’t seem to draw it all together. I feel that if I was a smarter, this would make sense.

I also feel this when reading academic articles outside my field. I am relatively well-read and science-literate, but sometimes I encounter a conceptual framework I can’t wrap my head around. More often (and more importantly), I sometimes read articles in or near my field that I can’t square with my existing knowledge – how does argument X fit with theory Y and findings A, B and C? I’m sure the problem is with me; if I was smarter, I would understand.

Here’s how I manage this thought when it arises.

1. “I must be missing something” is a healthy and useful thought to have.

This demonstrates to me that I’m engaged and thinking critically. Assuming lack of knowledge on my part gives me something to do – I can read more, ask questions among my peers, or go find out the answer some other way (in the case of the ethics application, I emailed the very patient tech support person one more time).

The alternative thought that I am told many other people have is, “The creator/author must be stupid/bad at explaining”. This might be true, but it doesn’t leave me with any actionable steps. “I need to try harder to understand this” is a prompt to do enough digging. Dismissing something out of hand means potentially missing crucial information. I try to avoid shooting myself in the foot like that.

I say “enough digging” because it’s possible overdo it. Digging too much usually goes badly for one of two reasons. One, I don’t have the expertise to understand this, so digging until I understand would take waaaay too long (I don’t have the time to drop my studies and do a week-long course on neurotransmitters). In this instance, it would be better to cut my losses and get help. Two, sometimes the author really is stupid or bad at explaining – I’ll get to this in part 3.

2. You’re more likely to have this thought if you’re more engaged.

This is total conjecture, but I think I’m more likely to have this thought because I read a lot, learn a lot, and experience a lot.

I’ve encountered lots of complicated topics where the key barrier to understanding was my own lack of knowledge. Going to university, studying in interesting fields, talking to smart people, and seeing weird art all helped with this. My repeated encounters with experts and expertise have made me likely to believe that if I don’t understand, it’s probably on me.

This makes me think that if you’re exposed to complex ideas all the time, you’re likelier to anticipate that a hard-to-understand idea is complicated, not nonsense (ignoring factors like context).

I’m also kinda smart. I have had a lot of experiences where I initially didn’t get something, applied myself, and eventually understood. Some of those instances are even outside of video games.

I also think gender plays a role. To me (as a female person), “I must be missing something” has the same flavour as contradicting a male coworker in a meeting then finishing my statement with “if that makes sense”. But that’s a whole other essay.

3. Take steps to avoid it crushing your soul.

I read in a blog post (whose author and title I now forget, oops) that a writer who is good at explaining will make you feel like you can understand anything, but a writer who is bad at explaining will leave you feeling stupid for not understanding. This is key.

Communicators who make you feel stupid may have legitimate reasons – perhaps the topic is outside your field, you’re not familiar with the jargon, it’s devilishly complicated, it uses systems of understanding in which you are illiterate (for example, most economic models are outside my realm of comprehension), etc.

However, it’s possible they’re shit at explaining. Perhaps they’re unclear on the key mechanics, they’ve failed to understand their reader’s level of knowledge, they have a fuzzy grip on the English language, their use of metaphor is lacking, they explain concepts in a counterintuitive order, they’re so deep in their field that they forget to explain each/every necessary concept, etc.

In the case of my ethics portal, I assumed I was failing to navigate it because the portal adhered to unintuitive but logical rules that I needed to learn. As it turned out, the repeated emails from my tech slowly illuminated a system that made no fucking sense and required weird arcane knowledge to navigate. I was never getting through solo.

What to do

I don’t have any universally applicable advice on how to identify whether incomprehensible things are complex (and thus work-out-able) or arcane (and thus not worth your time), but here’s how I go about it.

• Context. Quick and dirty stuff – is it published in a reputable journal or written in Comic Sans on a page with a URL ending in .blogspot.com? Is the author someone recognise and respect? Does it seem sensible?
• Try to figure out the things that look like they might make sense. Press buttons that look like they do the thing you want to do. Look up any key terms that sound unfamiliar – see if you can string together the basic concepts from the abstract. Use Google and Wikipedia.
• Ask. My PhD has been a string of questions directed at the students 1-2 years ahead of me. What is phenomenological research? Which ABS publication reports on sexual harassment? Does anyone actually read the annual progress reports we have to write?
• Collect people with the expertise you need. Make friends. If you’re me, accidentally start dating an economist, get them to teach you first-year micro, then train them to tell you whenever they come across an interesting economics paper.
• Know your stopping points. For me, I know I’ve strayed too far when I see the word “Foucauldian” or encounter an equation with more than four terms.
• Pay attention to your emotions. When I get the feeling of hopelessness, dread, drudgery, or boredom while reading topics outside my field, I know it’s close to stopping time. Feeling like things are impossible is a good cue for me that I need to employ a different tactic.