January 2020When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out.Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking tosome startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or readinga book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some newcountry where I don't know how things work.It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" iscertainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized somethingencouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally,the less of a noob you are globally.For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel lessof a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything worksdifferently. And yet you'll know more if you move.So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actualignorance.But if the feeling of being a noob is good for us, why do we dislikeit? What evolutionary purpose could such an aversion serve?I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like anoob: being stupid, and doing something novel. Our dislike of feelinglike a noob is our brain telling us "Come on, come on, figure thisout." Which was the right thing to be thinking for most of humanhistory. The life of hunter-gatherers was complex, but it didn'tchange as much as life does now. They didn't suddenly have to figureout what to do about cryptocurrency. So it made sense to be biasedtoward competence at existing problems over the discovery of newones. It made sense for humans to dislike the feeling of being anoob, just as, in a world where food was scarce, it made sense forthem to dislike the feeling of being hungry.Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, ourdislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislikeof feeling like a noob does too.Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule youfor it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.