Critical Approach

Critical Approach

Finally the actual post

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” -Richard Feynman

In this age of infinite knowledge all viewpoints are becoming widespread and commoditized. There are legitimate arguments for anything from fluoride in the water to flat earth. In this treadmill of noise, how do we really take a step back and deduce a well-reasoned position that addresses the big questions posed in the field and weighs them on merits? Many if not all generational ideas like evolution or genetics were once thought of as fringe ideas of crazy people. We exist in paradigms and the uncertainty that lurks outside those defined paradigms of our world are scary. The idea of a flat earth feels as crazy now as the idea of space travel did many years ago. The point isn’t that we are right or wrong about anything, but that we exist on a constant continuum of truth. Any idea can percolate because every position holds a kernel of wisdom. Places of the earth are flat. Some people do live on flat earth. Maybe this is a bit facetious, but all ideas are fallible and all ideas are wrong. People who dogmatically accept the truth of an idea are just as wrong as those who put their heads in the sand in a very strange but real way. In a world where the cost to create content has gone to zero the ability to remain thoughtfully critical without exploding is of paramount importance. We need to accept a model of the world, so we can investigate the world more deeply though that model with the appreciation that that model is both wrong and our best chance of advancing knowledge.

Galileo was accused of heresy for suggesting that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. Galileo was wrong about this scientifically, but in some deeper sense the Church's position was the right one to take. Our lived experiences put us at the center of our universe and to reject this belief about ourselves was too fundamental in the belief web to seriously address. The church had no choice; they had to banish him. Otherwise the world they knew. The one they controlled. The one they positioned themselves in the center of would certainly collapse. This event is an example of the complex calculus that goes into what someone believes as this is not just a truth judgement, but a function of how this new idea fits into the lives of those who listen, and if they are willing to bear the consequences that comes with accepting the premises. These emotional aspects in decision making and changing our beliefs are inherent in human nature. How can we figure out a good framework for thinking that reduces bias in thought and increases the truth likelihood of the result. The answer to this has roots that date back to the time of Galileo in the Renaissance and has been popularized by many. We will focus on tactics, ideas, and examples throughout history to craft the best mental models to approaching all situations critically and open mindedly.

In Tim Urban's newest book, he juxtaposes the ideas of an idea ladder and spectrum. The spectrum is what you say while the ladder is how you say it. Democrats and republicans are on the opposite sides of the spectrum, but this says nothing of their placement on the ladder. Tim's framework for the ladder spans the range between thinking like a scientist and thinking like a zealot, which boils down to the idea of valuing truth seeking versus being right. The argument here is one of a long vs short term incentive misalignment. Choosing to seek truth now will get you closer to the answer in the future when compared to the blind belief in your ideology, which makes you right in the present moment. The issue with truth seeking is tied to the idea of the fallibility of human knowledge. Fallibility and presence make defaulting to being a zealot much easier than truth seeking. Because zealots can always be right in the moment, and we only have the capacity to live in the present, the zealot can never be wrong. They can resist the truth until their death leading to the mantra of "progress in a field happens one death at a time." As a brave truth seeker, one can only hope to be incrementally less wrong over time and never have full confidence in being right. A truth seeker should have complete confidence in the fact that they are always wrong in some way, the fallibility of their own knowledge.

Urban likens the low rungs on the ladder to Disney World because you feel magical being there, but it’s all an inch thick and a completely warped view of the real world. Disney movies always end happy. The bad guys get what’s coming to them because they are bad, and the good guys win because they are good. When you adopt this mindset, you cast your world view as the good side and everyone else as bad. You expect and deeply believe that you deserve to be right and powerful in this world. This is compared to the world of the scientist, who is venturing her best guess into the world then ruthlessly testing it. One side starts out knowing they’re right while the other just wants to prove themselves wrong.

This deep superiority complex is what creates static and dynamic societies. Static societies as outlined by David Deutsch propagate by their spreading of anti-rational memes that inhibit progress while dynamic societies thrive on intellectual diversity and progress. Deutsch and Urban both get to the same place with regard to the concept of static vs dynamic societies, but Deutsch advances the conversation by invoking his concept of active optimism. As opposed to blind optimism or even blind pessimism, active optimism takes a positive view regarding the future and mandates we as humans be the drivers of that positive future. He first takes a dynamic view of the world and then mandates creativity as the only solution to these problems. Static societies think the future is more like the past and tries to optimize and extrapolate while a dynamic society seeing the current state of the world tries to bend and shape it to its will. In easter Island vs the early settlers of Brittan, Deutsch provides a good comparison in the thinking of static and dynamic societies. The people of Easter Island when they faced trouble turned more and more towards religion spending more time cutting down trees and building statues to their gods. Thinking that would provide them food and prosperity. The Island naturally has a strong climate and would be more friendly to life than the island of Great Brittan, so why did life succeed in the more unlikely place. Easter Island saw problems and used the same explanation. They appealed to the gods and as their situation worsened; they thought they needed to pray harder. The people of England saw the horrible frigid barren winters and devised different forms of shelter and agriculture along with food preservation to continue to develop as a society. Static societies shut down discussion and knowledge growth; they thrive on the status quo and resist the creation of knowledge. Dynamic societies create rational memes that lead to the creation of new knowledge. One seeks to inhibit critical faculties that make humans so special, the other engage them.

Daniel Kahnamen invokes the idea of turning our mental faculties on and off in different situations through the mental model of system 1 and system 2. System 1 is our default static state of assuming the world is what it is. This is the preferred state because accepting things is much easier than trying to think them through. System 2 is effortful, engaging, and certainly not the default position. Living in a static society is mentally much easier, but we can miss the gorilla right in front of our faces. Viewing the world in a static unchanging end of history way or a dynamic whitespace primed for idea generation and creation has a massive effect on the trajectory of someone’s life. Some view the world as a solved problem while others believe it constantly hides secrets for the curious ones to uncover.

Core to Zero to One is the idea of secrets. Peter Thiel asks, “What secrets do you know about the world that nobody else does?” There is a wealth of secrets that are unseen to the public and are waiting to be discovered. Ted Kaczynski was a genius by most measures, but he thought there were no hard problems left and nothing to be discovered. This drove him to a point of madness and nihilism when his incredible talents could have been utilized to enhance not tear down society. He did not believe there was anything that could be improved believing that “technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering.” This line of thinking is poison and emblematic of static societies. We’re taught to learn incrementally, taught to tests, that there is a right answer. Not only would we find the right answer if we were smart enough, but some authoritative figure, a teacher or scientist, already knows that answer. This thinking is working within a deterministic system. We are not taught to be explorers and learn more than needed because there is no direct benefit to doing so within our current education system. This creates the idea of a bounded universe of important knowledge with nothing left to be discovered outside of it. There is always a new frontier, when you push hard enough. A tenant of the frontier is taking unorthodox ideas seriously and not believing everything has been discovered. Crazy ideas being rejected then later accepted as common wisdom is not the exception, but the rule in history. Gregor Mendel was committed to an insane asylum for his beliefs on genetics and it took years after his death as an unknown monk for society to come to the realization that the crazy man with the peas may have been on to something. Secrets are a guide to finding new areas of high leverage in society that requires novel insights. The benefit of this is that there is a lot more space and a lot less competition on the ever-expanding frontier. The challenge is the frontier is a rough and unforgiving place on unknown risks and uncertain rewards.

What the critical approach draws from the idea of secrets is that the only way to get to the frontier is to approach intrenched ideas as merely conjectural and try to poke holes in fundamental areas of society. Secrets are found by explorers not optimizers. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Talent hits targets others cant reach, but genius hits targets others cant see.” Usain Bolt’s immense talent made him the fastest man in the world, and mere talent would say the best way for someone to increase their speed would be an intense fitness regimen and a better diet. This approach is patiently wrong and views travel as a static concept. Using secrets and a conjectural mindset it becomes obvious the way to increase speed for the average person is not to implement this training method, but to ride a horse or drive a car. This is core to a secret; it reframes a problem at a higher level of emergence to get to the root issues not the proximate causes. Belief is vital as secrets by their nature of illuded man for 200,000 years, so they are non-obvious and sound crazy (because they are). The critical mindset constantly questions the world we live in and is essential to uncovering these high leverage secrets. If you believe something hard is impossible, you’ll never even try to achieve it.

Much of this critical approach is derived from Karl Popper’s work and views on the subject. Popper believed that there were no authoritative sources of knowledge. Our knowledge is never final, but simply conjectural consisting of guesses that get more refined over time. This critical rationalism underlies much of the progress in the great expanse of human history. Critical rationalism posits that our knowledge is not final, but conjectural and consisting of guesses. Hypotheses, rather than accepted “truths,” and critical discussion is the only way to get closer to the truth. Bold conjectures and free criticism are vital and need to be based on science with innovation being encouraged and boldness admired. The essence of this world view is articulating clearly your views then giving someone a sledgehammer and asking them to destroy it as best they can. Over time, the weaker ideas get destroyed and replaced; the remaining views become closer to the truth because they have been exposed to more tests against reality. Good ideas need the pressure of conjecture because pressure creates diamonds. Popper does not view ideas as babies, but as tools in the belt of life to be sharpen, refined, and replaced to produce the greatest opportunity for survival and growth. His style is one of bold conjectures and fierce refutations in an intellectually honest way to drive toward the truth. This critical approach catalyzed the renaissance. The ideas are as old as recorded knowledge itself. Those underlying beliefs are predicated on work done in ancient Greece by Xenophanes and Heraclitus, who lived in the 6th century BCE, among many others.

The basis of critical rationalism rests on some of the beliefs from Xenophanes and Heraclitus. In this time, there were 2 schools of knowledge one that sought to preserve and one that sought to create. Heraclitus saw the world not as something stagnant, but as a system in flux. One demanding constant adjustment. Core to his belief was change relying on identity over time. Change is a leaf that over time turns brown. Not a green leaf that is swapped for a brown leaf. This is because change is a process not a result and overlooking the process misses the entire point of change. True progressive change is an evolution from within not an intrusion from the outside. The leaf needs to take in all the experiences of its existence to become brown. Growth has no shortcuts. Change is a constant process of growth from within with input from the outside. In the end, you digest some experiences and reject others all the while becoming the sumproduct of your experiences. Xenophanes asserts the conjectural nature of our knowledge, “Through seeking we may learn and know things better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor shall he know it, neither of the gods nor yet of all the things of which I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: For all is but a woven web of guesses.” Objective truth is both asserted as real and near impossible to achieve as fallible beings. There is little chance we would recognize final and objective truth even if it hit us in the face, so we need to realize that our truth is a “woven web of guesses.” Therefore, we must continue to test and refine our best explanations not treating knowledge as something sacred, but rather constantly testing our ideas with the hardest challenges to either affirm them or find a blind spot and catalyze a replacement of them. These two Greek men almost 3 millennia ago asserted that we live in an ever changing world and we must test existing explanations and create new ones to push our knowledge forward. This was as true in 500 BC as it is now and through the great expanse of history. When we look at the times of relative technological process, these times are fundamentally rooted in these beliefs.

The critical approach requires a high-minded objective approach to the world that puts truth seeking above being right and requires the acknowledgement that our knowledge rests on fallible wisdom not set in stone maxims. The world is a dynamic ever-changing place that necessitates fresh eyes and constant questioning. Core to the critical approach is the fact that the world is built on change and we should assume the future will not be like the past due to the overhaul of fundamental assumptions. A signal of objective knowledge is having similar structures across time, and possibly universes, associated with positive outcomes. When we look to the successful people of an age, we see the same message with different prose. Having laid out the base theory for this worldview and pieced together vital parts across concepts through history let’s dive into examples and counterexamples from people throughout history employing or rejecting this idea to see if those implementing these ideas met any success with them. The critical scholar would say these are cherry picked, but I am making an argument here.

To echo himself earlier, the great Richard Feynman would say, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” Core to his worldview was doubt and uncertainty. This in many ways his personal articulation of the critical approach. Core to the approach is being ok with living in uncertainty and understanding the fallibility of knowledge. Feynman was a man who transcended the deepest paradigms of society. He was a prominent physicist who helped with the development of the atom bomb. He was known as one of the best lecturers and first principal thinkers of all time, and moonlight as a bongo player in South America. Feynman was a well-rounded genius. The critical approach was fundamental to how he approached any problem and acquired knowledge. This allowed him to transcend fields and be a person who stood above his time. Feynman left ample room for uncertainty in his conclusions despite his rigorous methods in this implementation of the critical approach.

Bill Baker a president at Bells Labs believed that science rested on inquiry and not certainty. The goal is not to know the answer to but ask why you might be wrong. The key was asking the right questions. One of the key people in electricity and magnetism, Michael Faraday, took this to the next level. He would attend lectures and instead of just taking notes and taking the lecturer at his word, he would go home and recreate the experiments. He would own the process to first see if it worked then understand how it worked. This gave him a deep understanding of the interconnectedness in systems which was critical in his work. He did not accept what he was told was true. He questioned and recreated everything for himself.

In his biography of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson echo’s the sentiment, “You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous.” Much in the way Faraday did, Einstein took no knowledge for granted and it was this critical approach that led them to see things that people had missed for centuries. Einstein as a mere patent clerk questioned the work of maybe the smartest man who had ever lived up until that time. Because he was willing to investigate and question the deepest and most widely held beliefs, he vaulted himself to the role of leading citizen scientist in the minds of many.

To an extreme, Jeff Bezos has said he assumes every sentence he’s reading is wrong until he is able to understand and prove it for himself. These formidable individuals who lead incredibly innovative organizations or make world altering discoveries first and foremost rested their core beliefs on a foundation of critical examination and inquiry. Progress happens when you allow yourself to fundamentally question your reality in an open-minded way.

J. C. R. Licklider was a trailblazing member of the movement that would unseat the behaviorist and usher in a more holistic understand of psychology. He worked at Harvard and founded the psychology program at MIT. 20 years into his career, he would leave academics to pursue the upstart field of computation. He created the idea of human computer symbiosis and spearheaded the movement that founded the ARPANET, which then became the internet. Basically, this person, who invented a very prominent field, decided to quit his job and invent the internet. His style of understanding fit into two types of disagreements, Class 1 and Class 2. A class 1 disagreement was an emotionally driven unproductive exercise in frustration, much like the lower rungs of the ladder. The only talking in these disagreements are talking past each other. Class 2 disagreements he defined as understanding the other side of the argument as well as you understood your own. The person did not have to believe the argument; her feelings were irrelevant in the situation. The goal was to understand each other’s mental models for the world at such a deep level that you had agreed roughly on the facts, ideas, and assumptions of the matter. Then both sides would work to walk through their line of thought from the premises to the conclusions. The other side would suspend their disbelief to take an open-minded walk through this person’s mind. This is the peak high-minded approach at work; Lick is not merely listening to appease or even understand, but going a level deeper by fully owning the opposing world view. Then taking the step by step approach of working together toward the best answer. This idea of understanding the other side of the argument and immersing yourself in it is not specific to Lick’s framework.

A key feature of this view is criticizing your existing views to either destroy or strengthen them; the outcome should not matter. Charlie Munger has said, “I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.” While Ray Dalio has noted, he seeks out the smartest people who disagrees with him, so he can try to understand their reasoning and their side of the argument. Here these men are highlighting how vital and core to their process understanding the other side of the argument is. A seemly growing part of society seeks to shut down debate and remain close minded to anything that could hurt their argument, but these men seek to climb the ladder as high as possible. They are not only willing and open to listening to others, but actively seeking disconfirming evidence. This is the peak state of the critical approach. Understanding the mental and psychological investment in your position pre-disposes you to reflexively reject opposing views; these men crave the other side of the story because they know it will help them be right over the long term. Disconfirming evidence is the ultimate short/long term incentive misalignment trade off because to be more right in the longer term you need to assume you’re wrong in the immediate term.

In this world of immense data and AI models, the critical approach is becoming less important because we have so many tools for analysis and digestion that human reasoning is becoming much less important. We can collect detailed data and understanding it like never before. For instance, cities with high instances of kidney cancer are rural small populations mostly Republican in the Midwest and South. This is likely because their diet and lifestyle as well as environmental factors and possibly political beliefs lead to this prevalence of kidney disease. When we look at the areas with the lowest instance of kidney disease, we can likely credit it to among other things their diet and lifestyle as well as environmental factors and political beliefs. The areas with the lowest instances of kidney disease are rural small populations mostly Republican in the Midwest and South… ops. This example comes from Thinking Fast and slow as referenced earlier and it shows how we can use data and reasoning to justify almost anything. With data collection and processing being ever more commoditized, the critical approach becomes much more not less important. It becomes much easier to cherry pick examples and fool ourselves. As we become bombarded by the treadmill of information, digesting and seeking to understand becomes much harder. This approach of conjectures and refutations has become markedly more important.

The clearest objection to the rational approach comes from the post modern and high modernist thinkers. High modernist thinkers like Le Corbusier did not need the critical approach because they had such a deep and correct understanding of the world that doubt was just a waste of time. Le Corbusier, in his building of the capital city of Brasilia, deconstructed everything to its core unit of activity. The kitchen just for cooking not for eating and socializing. He split cars and sidewalks from areas where people lived. He split the essence of living from a few high-level functions and believed his way was the right true way missing all nuance and thinking his beliefs were complete and scientific. This city initially struggled because it was not really built to create a complex functioning society, but the idea of what a society should be. A shadow city formed in Brasilia creating an emergent and organic ecosystem that Le Corbusier tried so hard to prevent, but this gave the city the life it needed to exist.

In his construction of New York, Robert Moses used his high modernist ideology to fix the traffic problem and thusly made it much worse. He knew that cars were the future and wanted to adapt the city to being car friendly, but the more bridges and roads he built the more, not less, crowded the roads got. The issue is the investment into roads was coming at the expense of public infrastructure. So, while the roads were getting better their utilization and demand was actually going up because the alternatives were regressing. Moses never changed his tune on public infrastructure always opting for roads and bridges. He stamped his seal on New York and inspired many other cities to center around cars when it was both cheap to build and the land was accessible to create better public infrastructure. Reformer after reformer used facts and reason to reach Moses, but this was unneeded because he was so confident in his world view. He didn’t even need to entertain these ideas. The best way to alleviate car traffic was provide another option for people to get into New York City without cars, but the problem was worsened when the opposite was constantly done.

Post modernist believe all ideas are just stories and narratives with no deep or objective truth. Post modernist combine conjecture with nihilism. The output is a world view that believes very specific things. A worldview that sees anyone else’s world view as a narrative and rejects it as a false narrative, but accepts their way of thinking as the justified true belief way of the world. They see the world as merely stories and deny the possibility of progress often using some sleight of hand to assert their views as being right, with opposing ones not only wrong but evil, despite all views being merely conjectural. This as referenced in Urban’s book, was a method pioneered by the Goldwater campaign and later adopted by the far left. The result has been a more divided country sure they are right and positive the other side is evil. This is leading to a larger gap by the day.

Is the critical approach always the best one to employ? Jeff Bezos has a decision matrix that outlines how and what you should think and when. Decisions are split into quadrants based on how reversable and important they are. An unimportant and highly reversable decision is likely a bad time for the critical approach because you need to make a decision fast and that decision doesn’t matter. There is a decision-making framework popularized by the NFL called the coin toss that is likely the optimal method in this scenario. An example for this is whether you should put on your right or left sock first; just put on the sock. When the decision is important, but reversable the critical approach is not needed to such a deep extent because it’s better to just make the decision and try to a few options then collect data and see what that says. An example would be the color of a website instead of thinking for hours just AB test 10 colors and see which one prompted the most engagement. The answer to these questions is to follow your gut and adjust with data. When something is irreversible but unimportant, it’s easy to get hung up on it and employing mental faculties here to some deep level might make a little sense, but just be mindful of the return on time. Repainting a house is pretty irreversible and unimportant, so just pick a color that won’t fade too bad and won’t poison the eyes of pedestrians everywhere and that should be sufficient. Make sure you don’t detest it past the point of reconciliation and that the quality is above average, but do not expend too much mental effort. Lastly, an important and irreversible decision is when the full implementation of the critical approach needs to be enacted. Things like choice of spouse, job, or personal philosophy. Like Kahneman had said earlier, humans are lazy and thinking is hard, so don’t burden yourself with a deeply involved approach for the inconsequential decisions. Create deep well-reasoned mental frameworks and exist within them for most of your life. Adjust and analyze them constantly to see when new data or ideas show anomalies that fundamentally breakdown core beliefs, but don’t sweat the small stuff.

Ultimately, we choose how we go through life and the critical approach has been employed by many to do great things. Most importantly, life is finite and precious. Living this way may be more mentally taxing and you will never be quite right about anything, but your model of reality over the great expanse of your life will be more well calibrated than most who will drone about their day accepting what they see as the truth of the matter. Were born we live and we die. There is never a right or wrong way to live your life. No correct personal philosophy or combination of many philosophies. At the end of the day life is just about trying our best. Simply conjectures and refutations.