This is an idea from Daniel Dennett's book Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking.

The idea here is that a little kid could say something like the above and not really know what this meant. This does not mean they are lying, but their concept of what a doctor is (or even a daddy) is not well formed. As they grow up and find out more about life they will have a greater understanding of what those words mean, but initially it is quite an isolated belief for them.

I think an interesting thing about this idea is that beliefs have a support structure or set of connections around them. Some may start like this - quite isolated, but connected over time. While other beliefs may be tethered to some of our existing beliefs.

This is a useful idea to keep in mind when learning new concepts. I have often found getting things that I have studied into my everyday life to be very difficult. Courses which I had done well in (Natural Language Processing on Coursera for example) are very difficult to fit into real use. In the case of the NLP course I worked through all of the code notebooks again with as little reference to the supporting material as possible - make my mind dig for the ideas. Although I found this very useful it is a time consuming approach. And even with this double time commitment I am still not sure that I could reproduce all of the results in this course.

Maybe this is an argument to learn less, but learn it better. 'Internalise' is a word that used to be in more frequent usage about concepts learned in work. I think that idea is very important.

During the Industrial Revolution in Britian people became obsessed with 'useful knowledge'. There were Encyclopedias and Almanacs and garden shed inventors trying to get things to work in the world. We would probably be a lot better off if we paid more attention to how we are going to use the things we learn.