[xaedes]

There is this concept of the "Four stages of competence":

- unconscious incompetence

- conscious incompetence

- conscious competence

- unconscious competence

At first you are unable to do something, but you don't even know it. Then you learn about your incompetence and begin to work on it. Eventually due to conscious effort you achieve conscious competence. Doing it long enough you don't need to spend conscious effort to be competent - you just do it, and you do it well.

I think this unconscious competence is very similar to Wu Wei.

[Mattasher]

This tracks roughly with the 4 categories of unknown and know, as in the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns". To me the most interesting is the "unknown knowns", those ephemeral things you know but don't consciously think about that knowledge until it's pointed out, like the ability of native language speakers to stack adjectives in just the right order (e.g. "big old yellow ball"). For most people this is one of our unconscious competences, though I'm not sure it ever passed through a period of conscious effort to get there.