How to Organize Knowledge and Be Right More of the Time
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How to Organize Knowledge and Be Right More of the Time
Knowledge in the mind is not quite like a library, which is organized alphabetically by title in an arbitrary fashion. It's more like a map. There's a beginning, an end, and a path that can only lead in certain logically consistent directions. It is much more coherently structured than a library tends to be. A library will be chunked into groups by subject or genre.
Even a single nonfiction book itself tends to contain only a chunk of information. Look—here's a book about birds. It's chunked together with other books about birds or other broader things related to animals and ornithology.
With a map, there's much more of an obvious hierarchy for the information it contains. If you want to plot a course somewhere or retrace your steps after already having arrived somewhere, there are clear limits to where you can and can't go, how you can and can't use the information to get somewhere or derive where you have been.
To answer questions like, "How do I know this is true?" or "Why do I think that way?," all you have to do is find where on the map that information is located. Some information necessarily comes before other information. You have to know A is true before you can know B, C, D, and all the way to Z and beyond are also true. One thing necessarily leads to another. There are no disconnected chunks floating around in a void away from all others.
The way we traverse this map of knowledge is through premises and reasoning. In order to accept Conclusion B, you have to first accept Premise A. And how do you know that Premise A is true? Well, there's another set of premises behind that. You’ve reasoned your way from them to arrive at A. And there were still others before that.
The very beginning of the map is the very first thing you could possibly consider true without first having to have already accepted that something else was true. From that, you can reason your way to everything else, and the map can continue expanding for as long as you live.
Even knowledge that you consider obvious or self-evident falls somewhere on the map, even claims you might make about yourself. If you say, "I am a nice person," you have to have first defined what "nice" means. Then, you have to have some way of finding evidence that you are part of that categorical character trait. There must be some test for what differentiates niceness from non-niceness. The same applies to any basic personal descriptors like "I'm tall," "I'm smart," "I'm black," or "I’m American.” All these ideas have their anti-categories, and you cannot fall into both simultaneously. There are always processes you must have gone through to know with certainty which ones you are in.
Overlooking the Obvious
But aren’t these kinds of claims obvious?
What calling something obvious often means is just that you don’t want to think too hard about it. You don’t want to retrace your steps on the map and figure out how you got there. You’re just there, okay? And now you’re tired and need a nap, so you can’t be bothered with all these useless questions about how you know such obvious things. An obvious truth is just something you’ve accepted as true, which makes it an unquestioned premise within you. The examination stops there until you are willing to question it and fill in the missing pathways on your map. Then you will realize that there has to be a way you arrived at that “obvious” premise, which connects it to the rest of the map and transforms it into a conclusion.
This reasoning process happens so invisibly and instantaneously that almost no one consciously realizes that they’re doing anything the majority of the time. From their perspective, the fully formed ideas just materialize in their head. They trust that they are correct because they just feel like they are. Why would you be thinking something incorrect? Clearly, only correct ideas would bother to be spurned spontaneously within you.
Does the earth revolve around the sun? Or is it the other way around? Which one is the obvious truth—the unexamined premise? And which one can be reasoned to be true as a demonstrably valid conclusion once you are willing to think about where it belongs on the map?
The “obvious” premise, in this case, is actually wrong. It’s a trick of perspective. From our point of view, it looks like the sun is revolving around the earth, but if you reason from the most basic postulates of physics, you actually reach the exact opposite conclusion about how solar systems work.
The premises at the very start of the map that can’t be traced back any further are what we call postulates or axioms. A postulate is a premise that is irreducibly simple—so simple you can’t possibly make it any simpler. You can’t find a way to reason to it. You just have to observe it and accept it as pending true, depending on how well it works to form the rest of the map for you.
From a good set of postulates, you can reason to every other elaborate conclusion. An object in motion remains in motion until it is acted on by an outside force. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, just transformed. These are some of the postulates of physics, which, once we’ve accepted as true, we can observe countless things to see whether they are indeed consistently applied. Armed with postulates like these, suddenly, we can reason our way to understanding, in principle, the entire physical universe that previously seemed incomprehensibly vast and complicated.
However, it’s very dangerous to accept something as true just because it seems obvious or everyone else already thinks so. As soon as you accept something as true, you stop thinking about it. You stop questioning, “Wait, how do I know that’s true? Where did that conclusion come from? Where the heck on the map am I right now?”
In science, you have to repeat and test your ideas under controlled conditions. You can’t just look at something and say, “Well, that’s how it appears to work. I’m sold on the idea.” You must have a controlled environment where you try to isolate one variable, if possible, and just change that one thing and see how it affects the outcome over and over again. If every instance of matter interacting with matter we’ve ever observed seems to follow this rule in always the exact same way, we can start to accept that this might be an irreducible premise that all matter, for whatever reason, from the largest stars in the universe to the smallest atoms, is a product of.
Why? Who the heck knows? But it seems irreducibly true that this thing is always happening.
Defining Concepts Absolutely and Objectively
Your shirt is purple. What does that mean? You have to have a concept of purple, a shirt, and something being yours before you can say that your shirt is purple. Would a colorblind person agree that your shirt is purple? You both have your own observations of the same object, your shirt. But you have completely different interpretations of it. You observe it as purple. He observes it as some shade of gray. What color would a dog see the shirt as? Who’s right? What color is your shirt?
We need an objective definition of purple to answer that question. All those observations depend on subjective interpretation. Even if everyone agreed on the conclusion, it would still just be mass subjective agreement, not objective measurement of the truth.
How heavy is a kilogram? Is it subjective for everyone? It’s subjective if you’re talking about an infant’s interpretation of how difficult it is to lift a kilogram compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s interpretation of the same task. It’s relative if you’re comparing it to other things that are lighter or heavier than a kilogram. A kilogram is relatively heavy compared to a peanut but light compared to an elephant.
Objectively and absolutely, a kilogram has a defined weight by its mass under a defined gravitational force. If it’s any other weight than that, it’s no longer a kilogram, no matter how anyone feels about it or what they are comparing it to.
And just because you can have a subjective preference for something, that does not make its truth subjective. It’s objectively true or false. How you feel about it being objectively true or false is what’s subjective. And just because you have a subjective dispreference for something doesn't make its truth non-objective. Things don’t stop being true just because you might feel like they shouldn’t be true.
Subjectivity is your personal experience of something. You experience your shirt as purple.
Objectivity disregards personal experience. The shirt can be defined as containing the color purple by the wavelengths of light it reflects, regardless of anyone looking it at and having such as experience.
Relative means comparing something to something else.
Absolute means disregarding comparison.
Something being heavier than something else is an objective but relative statement. Weight is an objective measurement of mass and force. It doesn’t depend upon your experience of it. That you have a hard time lifting something heavy is a subjective experience. You experience subjective difficulty lifting it because of its objective weight.
An absolute is something that applies to everything. The rule that defines all matter attracting all other matter, which we call gravity, is absolute. But if you compare the gravity on earth to the gravity on the moon, it’s now a relative comparison. The earth has relatively stronger gravity than the moon.
What’s absolute is the principle that describes how it works in all contexts. That rules applies just the same on earth as it does on the moon. The reason that the gravity on the earth is relatively stronger than the gravity on the moon is that the earth is more massive. The absolute rule says that the more massive something is, the more gravity it has. Now because we have an absolute rule, we can make relative comparisons between different applications of it.
How to Spot When Other People Are Wrong
When you see that people frequently don’t make any sense, are wrong about most things, or are hypocrites about their strongest vocalized beliefs, you can be sure that they fail to apply absolute and objective standards to their thinking. Usually, they just have a bunch of disconnected premises floating around in their minds that don’t really make sense and aren’t really logically connected to each other or anything else. In the process of living, they accept something as true, in isolation and arbitrarily.
Then, sometime later, they accept another thing as true. Then another. And so on. If you question them too much about why they believe what they believe, they are likely to get offended and irritated. They’ve never had to reason backward from the things that they’ve accepted as true. They’ve never taken an overhead look at the map they are using to navigate the world of thought and action.
If you start to point out to someone that, actually, a few of their beliefs contradict each other, they won’t be likely to say, “Oh, you’re right. I must be wrong about some of those things I’ve formed my entire identity around.” They’ll accuse you of attacking them because that’s how they interpret critical analysis—as an attack. Even with intelligent people who are generally comfortable with thinking about their own thoughts, asking one too many questions and going one level deeper than what they’re comfortable with might suddenly cause a violent reaction in them. The simpler the question, the greater the level of offense it has the potential to cause because it requires backtracking further and further toward the very beginning of the intellectual map and, therefore, undoing a greater number of accepted and “obvious” truths.
You might even be accused of playing dumb, of pretending not to know something obvious that everyone already knows. If an intelligent person who knows a lot of stuff starts asking really simple questions, others think of it as a way of poking fun, playing a game, or wasting time. Why would an intelligent person be asking such obvious questions? They don’t understand that that’s what a truly intelligent person does. They ask about the obvious things that no one else bothers to. The sun revolving around the earth is an obvious truth. Only the most intelligent people in history bothered to question it, and they used the simplest ideas possible to prove they were right.
With practice, you learn how to organize the thoughts in your head better. Your map becomes much more complete and consistent. Everything goes where it’s supposed to be, and it becomes faster and easier to come up with explanations for every complex idea in your head.
Most people have a limited range within which they're comfortable thinking about their own thoughts, their own logic, their own reasoning, and their own beliefs. Anything outside of that gets very uncomfortable very quickly. That’s why most people are so eager to defend their culture, even if they would agree that some parts of it are kind of counterproductive, don’t make sense, are antiquated, or are objectively immoral or harmful. They still will defend it to death as being essential to their ability to function in the world. Culture spares them the need to think for themselves about life’s simplest and most important truths. With it, you never have to question why you do things or think the way you do. Thank you, culture, for taking the burden off our shoulders.
You can’t know everything. But you can know a lot, especially when you have thousands of years to study it and pass on what you’ve learned to future generations. And because knowledge is a collaborative intergenerational effort, it’s not possible for one person to be lying about how this all works. It’s not the work of one mind. And because there is now so much information that can be known, you don’t always have time to analyze it and understand it one piece at a time as you organically connect it to your expanding map of information. You need shortcuts and heuristics that serve at least general guides to point you in the right direction about the potentially wrong and dangerous things that everyone around you will always be trying to convince you of.
The Shortcut to Knowing You Are Right
Even before I had an explicit understanding of what makes things reasonable or true, I still had an intuitive sense of when things other people believed (and especially things they tried very hard to convince me of) just didn’t make sense. If I saw inconsistency in other peoples’ actions or the rules that guided their behavior, I knew not to listen to them. It started just with noticing what was wrong with other people before figuring out how to determine for myself to determine what was right.
Consistency is one of the irreducible simplicities of truth. It’s a postulate we rarely think about: The idea that the truth should be consistent with itself. If you notice inconsistencies in other people’s beliefs and actions, you know that at least part of what they believe and do must be incorrect.
How do we know that the truth must be consistent? Well, I’ll give you a hint. It can be understood with one word. It’s a word you say all the time, but you probably don’t stop to think about its importance: “Is.” I-S. A conjugation of “to be” (or, by corollary, “not to be”). That word represents consistency.
The claim that your shirt is purple requires first a concept of a shirt, a concept of the color purple, and a concept of something being yours. But there’s a more crucial part of this equation. What is the bridge between all these concepts? The word “is.” The claim is that the quality of purpleness is consistent with the object called your shirt. We can argue all day long about what color your shirt actually is, or if you’re even wearing a shirt at all, or what a shirt is, or the number of angels that can tango on the tip of a pencil. If people are acting hypocritically, if they have beliefs that contradict each other, if they say one thing and then do another, you know that there is something untrue about what they believe. The truth must be consistent with itself. Not necessarily all of it will be wrong, but at least part of it must be if it’s inconsistent.
The truth is non-contradictory. That’s a postulate you have to accept before you can think about literally anything else. Any coherent thought you can possibly have rests first upon it. You can’t find an exception to that rule. Try to make a coherent statement that does rest upon the premise of consistency.
You can say a bunch of made-up gibberish words or even real words in a random non-grammatical order. But you cannot form a coherent sentence without invoking the concept of consistency. Even trying to negate it by saying something like, “There is no consistency,” is a statement that requires consistency. That’s an irreducible premise. Whatever exists is what exists. All other questions and arguments are about determining what exactly exists. But whatever that thing is, it will be consistent with itself.
Understanding this, it becomes a lot easier to increase the rate at which you are right about the things you think and to have the confidence that you are right even when most others disagree with you. You develop a standard for checking the thoughts that enter your head for internal consistency. You don’t open your mouth until you’ve gone through a fairly lengthy process of ensuring that they fit together on the map in your head.
It’s still possible to be wrong, of course. You just minimize the chance of it happening. You optimize the process of being right about things. And you don’t argue ideas prematurely. You don’t have to side with every thought that goes through your head. You can entertain it for a time and then let it go when you see it does not function. You don’t immediately jump to incorporating as part of your identity and defending it from attack just because it somehow showed up in your head. You think about everything before you say it, but you learn to do it very quickly.
It’s like becoming fluent in a new language to the point that you’re not pausing before every sentence to translate it back to your native language. You just automatically run it through a series of checks to see if it’s consistent and accurate. If it’s inconsistent and/or inaccurate, you don’t say it.
It will always be possible that you’ve overlooked something, but by being willing to discuss it publicly, you invite other people to challenge you on its consistency and accuracy. You give people with their own perspective and expertise the opportunity to say, “There’s something you’re not considering here.” No matter how smart you are and how rigorous you are about analyzing your own thoughts, people can always make you more aware of things you didn’t know before.
And that’s how you start being righter and righter more and more of the time. You reduce your margin of error continually as you live longer, and you get so fast and fluent at analyzing new thoughts in your head that it starts to seem like magic to those who can’t see the invisible and lightning-fast process at work in you.