"Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning"
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Self-improvement, Dijkstra implies, is not a straight climb up a ladder of added skills. Its real difficulty lies in subtraction: the deliberate removal of habits that once felt like intelligence. For a computer scientist who spent his career policing thought for hidden errors, that framing is surgical. “Perfecting” isn’t romantic here; it’s closer to debugging. The most dangerous code is the code that almost works, and the most dangerous belief is the one that produced a few wins and therefore never gets questioned.
The quote’s bite is in its attack on accumulation-as-progress, a cultural reflex that treats knowledge like a hard drive: keep downloading, never delete. Dijkstra is pointing at a quieter bottleneck: legacy mental models. In his world, the tools we rely on (intuition, common sense, pattern-matching) can become liabilities when problems scale or when systems grow complex enough that “seems right” becomes a trap. Unlearning is the willingness to invalidate your own shortcuts, to admit that what got you here may sabotage what you’re building next.
There’s also an ethical subtext. Dijkstra famously resisted sloppy programming practices and managerial hype. “Unlearning” is a refusal to let convenience masquerade as competence. It’s a call for intellectual hygiene: stripping away fashionable frameworks, cargo-cult methods, and ego-protecting certainties until what remains can withstand scrutiny. In that sense, perfection is less a trophy than a discipline of continuous self-correction.
The quote’s bite is in its attack on accumulation-as-progress, a cultural reflex that treats knowledge like a hard drive: keep downloading, never delete. Dijkstra is pointing at a quieter bottleneck: legacy mental models. In his world, the tools we rely on (intuition, common sense, pattern-matching) can become liabilities when problems scale or when systems grow complex enough that “seems right” becomes a trap. Unlearning is the willingness to invalidate your own shortcuts, to admit that what got you here may sabotage what you’re building next.
There’s also an ethical subtext. Dijkstra famously resisted sloppy programming practices and managerial hype. “Unlearning” is a refusal to let convenience masquerade as competence. It’s a call for intellectual hygiene: stripping away fashionable frameworks, cargo-cult methods, and ego-protecting certainties until what remains can withstand scrutiny. In that sense, perfection is less a trophy than a discipline of continuous self-correction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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