Everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I argue that the patterns we notice in study and life cannot be used as the basis for improving things. The inspection of a bird's wings does not lead to human flight. The admiration of a wise man's character traits cannot tell you how to achieve inner peace.
And the government's preoccupation with desired outcomes cannot be used to direct funding and other examples, it's likely going to challenge some deep seated beliefs you have about how things work. But I'll be supporting my argument with known properties and mechanisms related to information, uncertainty, risk and complexity. Well, let's get started. Life is very much about looking for patterns, right?
Those parts of a situation are phenomenon that speak to something fundamental to do so is to understand something more profoundly expand human knowledge. But what is a pattern exactly? Well, a pattern is a set of unmoving parts that stay still amidst the immense complexity and swirling of everyday life and a phenomenon in the natural world. That's one way to think about it. So maybe you don't really think of patterns in that way.
But let me explain, imagine seeing water slosh around in a bathtub while most of us would see random and chaotic behavior of the water. There are parts of that movement that repeat, right? The crests and the troughs of the water as it moves up and down occur again and again, that's a pattern. Uh Imagine looking at a mountain range, the jutting rocks and crevices, uh they appear all randomly dispersed.
But there are also aspects shared between all mountains, right, regular intelligible forms that keep popping up that make a mountain, a mountain characteristics that define the thing. So to seek out those defining characteristics of life in the natural world is the story of humanity itself. But we don't do this just to learn.
We also want to cast those patterns forward, use the discovered patterns to improve our lives to make bigger and better things, casting patterns forward is the narrative behind progress throughout history, historians, writers, philosophers, engineers and scientists, they've taken what they've learned and used the knowledge to create new works of art, new philosophies, new inventions, new theories like ripples in a bathtub or growth, markings on a mountain.
Our brightest minds have picked up on the parts of reality that seem to reoccur and that speak to something profound human progress is a story of noticing patterns and casting them forward or is it are the patterns we notice in life and natural systems? Things we can cast forward. Can we take patterns we see and use them to make a better version of the things studied.
This is what I want to talk about in this episode, in our personal and professional lives, we're told that the more we understand about our environment, the better we'll be able to create things that improve the quality of our lives. But this rests on a fundamental assumption that the patterns we see around us can show us the path forward that the patterns we notice contain the information needed to take the next step. The how behind the pattern?
This is very much the academic narrative where schooling supposedly teaches us things that can be used in the real world for innovation. It's very much the political narrative that suggests governments can take the knowledge and recommendations from experts and cast those forward into policies and improve our lives. And it's very much the narrative of every day of our everyday lives, right?
Where the patterns we notice often form the basis of not only our world views but also our actions, but is this narrative correct? What if it isn't correct? What if a closer look at how information works reveals such casting forward is impossible that there was something fundamentally wrong with a story that human progress owes its march forward to the learnings that occur at each step.
What if there were aspects of nature and information that preclude the notion we can make something better just because we learn more about it that regardless of what you know about a situation, understanding, it cannot serve as a foundation to create new things. What happens when the pattern is not the path? Let's go see. So I'm going to argue that the reason patterns cannot be cast forward is due to a fundamental aspect of complex things.
Something called multiple realizable, kind of a mouthful, multiple realizable. What does that mean? If something is multiply realizable, it means that there are multiple ways to achieve it. It makes sense. If you take the temperature of a block of metal, there is not one way to achieve the temperature, the same temperature can be achieved by friction, radiation absorption from the surrounding environment. Temperature is multiply realizable. The same goes for something like wetness, right?
There's no one way or or or or there's no way to trace the path from individual water molecules to wetness. We can talk all day about intermolecular interactions and forces. But to move our story from those local interaction rules of the of the individual molecules to the behavior we actually see at a larger scale wetness isn't possible. Yes, we can take averages, we can we can do tricks like coarse graining and renormalization if you know what those things are.
But this does not expose the logical chain of causality from inputs to outputs wetness as a property is multiply realizable to go beyond materials into real world situations is of course just a matter of increased dimensionality, increased complexity, everyday situations have attributes to them and those attributes bear out via patterns. Since a pattern is just a regularity that appears only through regularity. Can we define things amidst the vagaries of our environment? Right.
This is quite intuitive, take any non-trivial task that you've worked on, whether it's writing an article or a book or finding a solution to negotiation, job searching, whatever these situations all have properties to them, right? Books have chapters and power graphs, negotiations have uh interests and options and commitments, jobs have expectations and deliverables to see these patterns is to define the thing itself. This is simply human pattern recognition.
We we we group and categorize categorize sorry based on what we observe. And this allows us to communicate situations to others to suggest there is one way to arrive at good writing would be ridiculous, right? There are countless styles and approaches people use to bring their thoughts to paper. The same goes for any real world situation.
Now, you know, negotiations are organic messy involve listening, instructing and compromising jobs benefit not from some robotic adherence to process and culture, but from diverse experience, serendipitous discoveries and creative contribution. Arriving at the thing you deliver, the thing you create does not move by a path from beginning to end.
Whether it precipitates out from a highly varied interacting environment to be good at any of these activities is not about knowing how it's about having the, the, the constitution to jump in and pay attention to signals, something I'll talk a little bit more about later. Just keep that in mind signals. So the patterns that define a thing or situation are multiply realizable for anything, you know. But the, but the simplest of systems, there is no one way to achieve them.
The higher the complexity, the more multiply realizable the pattern. While metal blocks and wet water already show us the notion of path, you know, is is pretty ridiculous. Life itself has near infinite dimensionality and are thus quote unquote, infinitely multiply realizable for all intents and purposes to, you know, so to to achieve things in life is not and I would say cannot be about finding path.
Despite what every business book classroom lecture or so-called causal analysis might tell us talk a little bit more about that. Later. It is multiple realizable that precludes the chance there is a path to achieve the pattern. The corollary is that this means patterns cannot be cast forward, they cannot act as instructions on how to take the next step.
Since it wasn't a step that produced the pattern in the first place to be clear, it would be statistically impossible to reproduce the interactions that led to the pattern. We are noticing they would never happen the same way. Twice the pattern emerges from a statistical ensemble of impossibly intricate interactions.
Patterns don't have a history that can be replayed whether their stories are lost forever, a transient spark that gave life to the pattern but is no longer part of its makeup, right? So to notice a pattern is to see something that has no evidence of how it got there. Of course, this doesn't stop scientists uh you know, from adding narratives to how something supposedly arose. But the how that is given is not some end to end connected chain of events.
Rather, it's at best a litany of other properties that work alongside the pattern of interest, how those other properties work alongside is not fact, it's speculation. And if we're being intellectually honest, barely an informed one at that multiple realizable is what makes information travel in one direction in any system of appreciable complexity.
We can see the end result of what we want, we can see birds fly and calm individuals speak wisdom, the information is available but going the other way other way where we reverse engineer those patterns to see how it came about is not available in anything but the simplest of systems. The how is lost forever. When we make a discovery, we are seeing something that has already emerged to believe. One can cast a pattern forward is to believe one has access to information. They do not.
The pattern is not the path. OK. So I'm gonna give some examples here as usual to try to kind of break this apart. Some of you are probably already getting kind of uncomfortable because, you know, when we think about all of science and all the philosophy and the complete, you know, the academic narrative about why we go to school, it seems to kind of fly a face into all of this. As usual. At the end, I will, you know, not leave you isolated and desperate for answers.
I will uh provide you with some kind of go forward solutions to what all this means and why it doesn't, you know, throw a face in necessarily everything. But it is, it is critical. It is, it is quite profound I think. And uh and so I'm gonna try to back my argument up here with, with with some examples and we'll wrap it up at the end. So let's do some examples. Now, airplanes. OK. So let's say we are observing bird flight.
Now we notice patterns in the wing of the bird, the shape and length of the wing, the angle it makes with the air, the more we study the patterns inherent to the bird, the more we learn about things that fly? But is this the same as saying we learn how flight is achieved? Does observing the patterns inherent in bird flight instruct us how to create an airplane? I argue it does not.
Now this is hard to wrap one's head around since it seems obvious that observing bird flight would help someone build an airplane. I mean, after all it's well known that the Wright Brothers spent a good deal of time observing birds and applied wing warping designs. Uh That, that look very much like the shape of a bird's wing.
But this narrative that says the inspiration was also the path is always going to be told, ask anyone who achieved anything and they will create a narrative around how it came to be. I talked about this in the episode called uh we, we can't create the way we consume. If you haven't listened to that, go check it out to create is ad hoc and messy and doesn't make for a good story.
In fact, the process is downright nonsensical because of the way we explore the possibility space also discussed in the last episode. And scientific articles are actually a really good example. The so-called scientific process is largely fiction, but there's no other way to communicate how things get figured out. We cannot create the way we consume. Uh you know, the scientific process.
I'm not saying the whole thing is BS, I'm just saying that the way we, you know, come up with a hypothesis and then we test it. We got this nice linear chain that, that, that, that gets written in the scientific journals. It's, it's just a far cry from how it happened, but it's how we, how people consume information. And so there's always going to be a story of how something was arrived at. So we're going to hear that all the time, regardless. It's how we tell stories.
But this doesn't mean it's how it happened. Right? I argue that studying a bird cannot tell you how to achieve flight. And it's not how human flight was achieved. Birds undoubtedly inspired us to fly. But the close inspection of their bodies and behavior did not only through massive tinkering and exploration, did something capable of flying precipitate after all flight is far more than just a set of wings shaped like an airfoil, right? A bird's body has a certain weight distribution.
It has hollow bones and the hollow bones aren't even for making the bird lighter. As some people think they're actually to allow the birds lungs to extend into the bones. Uh bird bones need to be pneumatization for flight to happen. It, it allows the bird to take in oxygen uh while, while both inhaling and exhaling and things like this. Birds have a mix of feather types, right?
Some of which support flight, others of which don't uh as a bird flaps its wings uh down, certain feathers are going to move together to help with lift, right? So you're, you're flapping the wing down the wings come together. Now you can push the air and then when the bird moves its wings up, certain feathers will actually move apart to allow the air to pass through and on and on. There's all that. There's this confluence of factors that must come together to actually make flight possible.
So we can study more and more about the attributes of birds. But none of this can tell us the confluence of interacting factors that lead to flight, flight. Like anything of real world value is achieved by synthesis and emergence, we cannot know the course it took to get there. In fact, whatever bastardized version of a bird we create as a plane, right? I it's not some set of bird discoveries pieced together to engineer flight, even though that's how you're gonna read about it in the textbook.
Rather, it, it was largely happenstances that arrived at a design that worked all the hows that get told in our stories of invention come after the thing is discovered. But of course, as the educational scientific narrative goes, we tend to believe the details gathered through this study beca uh came before the creation of the thing itself. Rest assured they did not. The next step taken is granted to us because we're willing to embrace variation and iteration from a biological standpoint.
Massive iteration is the huge amount of genetic diversity that makes countless versions of bird, right? And, and, and the iteration is the millions of years worth of evolution that selectively filters for the uh the the designs that work best. So in short, throw enough crappy designs off the cliff and the only birds who pass on their genes are the ones who don't smash into rocks, right?
It's it's an oversimplification, but the point stands, there was no instruction set for flight, there was trial and error, massive sampling of the possibility space, right? Uh Until a solution emerged, things don't get structured forward. They can only show us their properties after it works. OK. Let's do another example. Uh Nutrition, OK. Comes up a lot too. In nutrition, the narrative is always the same.
Someone did a study that compared healthy to unhealthy individuals and noticed something that might suggest what makes one healthy. Maybe it's the preponderance of a mineral in their bloodstream, right? So they take note of the of a common pattern. Like healthy people have lots of mineral x. Uh it's the same as any other pattern recognition this time using, you know, statistics to try and confirm the existence of such a pattern.
If the difference is statistically significant, then the preponderance of the mineral will be, you know, quote unquote confirmed. But nutrition like any other study, it doesn't stop at noticing the difference. The interpretation is that consuming this mineral is a healthy thing to do. This mineral will appear in certain foods and to include such foods in one's diet will be considered a smart decision.
But this is casting the pattern for this is assuming that the preponderance of a mineral in healthy people means adding that mineral to your diet will make you healthy. It's the same narrative of thinking. We notice a pattern and use it to achieve or even supercharge an effect for ourselves. Like bird flight, the entire health care industry, whether it's medicine or nutrition, it's based on this premise, notice what occurs in the outcome and assume it must be also part of the input.
Now, this doesn't mean there isn't a lot of work behind the assumption, statistical and meta analysis will attempt to tease out the causal connection. But this isn't quite what most people think it is the correlation discovered, which is highly speculative in its own. Right is telling us that if we increase the consumption of the mineral, we will get the outcome. But what is the outcome we want? Is it the abundance of the mineral? Well, no, it's actually health.
But what is health, how is it defined to begin with? Say it was long life, we have no idea what, why that mineral was present. And to assume it played a role in the longevity of an individual is exceedingly naive. How do we know that the mineral isn't merely a byproduct of a highly complex process that leads to health to be clear. It might be true that the presence of the mineral is indeed a marker of health. Even if it were some byproduct, it would still be a signal.
But the subsequent intervention of choosing to ingest the mineral to improve one's health is where things fall apart. While the mineral may play a role, we have no idea what role it plays and it might play no role at all. Even though it's always present in healthy individuals, most assume statistical analysis can answer these kinds of questions, right.
But other than for the simplest of systems, this is not the case, statistical analysis can show the difference between populations and will attempt to show the effect of an intervention like adding more of mineral x to one's diet. But the so-called, you know, quote unquote causality that is reported is is simplistic correlations that operate in far fewer dimensions of the phenomenon being studied. It is a story told with statistics, not some fact laid bear.
The replication crisis in science is hardly surprising, but that's a topic for another episode. We can, I will definitely be doing an episode on that statistics and how people believe those too easily. But and it's, it's not to cast the whole thing into the fire, but they're highly problematic and complex domains and, and often misapplied. But the point is like any other pattern, the story of what is needed.
Uh you know, for health comes after the discovery scurvy wasn't prevented because people studied fruit and determined to contain something healthy. Individuals had an abundance of scurvy was prevented because those who ate certain fruits didn't suffer the symptoms. It's tempting to think that well, now we know about vitamin C so we can cast health forward, but this isn't how it works. Wisdom only travels in one direction.
The same thing applies to philosophy specifically in the application of a given ideology or outlook to our lives. Take stoicism as an example. Stoicism has a lot of great wisdom baked into it. Right. Read about what people were thinking over 2000 years ago. You'll find they understood many of the same patterns we face today and understood them profoundly. The patterns stoicism picked up on were arrived at through various people trying to survive the trials of life.
But like many philosophies, a core component is the practical application of the ideas rather than just understanding something about life. Why not apply it to our own life. Think about the stoic take on uh on anger stoics recognize that much of our consternation in life comes from our preoccupation with things we cannot control, we can all relate to this, right? Like how often do we worry about something? And it just amounts to nothing.
What is the point of being paranoid or stressed about all these situations if we don't have control over it? Anyway, hindsight tells us that our preoccupation about things outside of control was very much a waste of time or it does it. The problem with this idea is that it assumes that what we see in hindsight is all that was needed to produce the outcome just because we cannot see the role paranoia worry and stress play doesn't mean that they didn't play a role in producing the desired outcome.
The emotions we feel exist for a reason. Emotions are high level signals, our mind uses to guide our responses to situations. There are signals used to solve complex problems in our environment. Sounds familiar, right? Emotions are not unfortunate byproducts of an otherwise common process. They are critical ingredients to arriving at outcomes that matter. How do we know? Well, evolution would not have equipped us with emotions.
If it didn't assist in producing outcomes, we need, again, we're not saying we know how they play a role. We're not even saying what role they play. But from an evolutionary standpoint, they must play a role. And so philosophy is interesting in that it notices fundamental truths about life and I am a big proponent of paying attention to those patterns.
Obviously, II I also believe that paying attention to those patterns can dramatically improve one's life should also be pretty obvious, but only if we're thinking about the directionality of information correctly noting the calm after the storm does not preclude the need for the storm.
If you want to execute on your life's philosophy, you need to understand that patterns are not to be used as recipes but but, but but signals as to when you're on the right track, what we see in hindsight is not the instruction set for getting there. Let's do another example, you know, and that, that, that might have the most impact on everyday lives, which is the government. So if we think beyond our personal and professional lives, we enter in the realm of, of social responsibility.
We don't just want what's best for ourselves. We'd like to think we can improve the world at large in some way. Right after all, I'm very fortunate to have the opportunity to uh to, to run a business, to write my own thoughts freely, create things like podcasts and embark on life as I see fit most importantly, I'm healthy. I want this kind of opportunity for everyone.
If, if I see a, you know, a homeless person on the street or masses of people getting evicted or some social injustice, you know, I'd like to speak up and, and think that I can maybe do something or contribute in some way. We all have different degrees to which this is true. But I think everyone naturally wants the world to be a better place even if we have different ideas of what better means, right?
And so beyond our own abilities to affect change, we hope there are systems in place that help people generally because there's only so much we can do social programs that assist in alleviating homelessness, uh a health care system that makes medicine or therapy widely available. Uh I don't know, an outreach program that gets people back on their feet as an outcome. I think we can all agree that these are good things and, and, and things that society should have.
But if we start asking what the government should do to help produce these outcomes. We can easily end up falling into the trap of mistaking the pattern for the path. For example, if you want to alleviate homelessness, it seems obvious we should have funding directed towards setting up shelters. But is this correct? How does the pattern of not being homeless arise? Perhaps the shelter is a starting point perhaps, but perhaps it's also a crutch, right.
That's, that's too easy to lean on just like bird flight to not be homeless is to have a number of things converging there, self reliance, their own ability to create value add to the economy and in general, improve your station in life, there will undoubtedly be cases where shelters do help, especially for those in immediate need. But the notion that a shelter is the opposite of homelessness is obviously far too simplistic.
Now that might seem like a someone contrive example since obviously, there's more the government does than just, you know, direct funding at shelters. But here's the point, there's nothing in the pattern of homelessness or its opposite that can tell you where funding should be directed. The successful outcomes of individuals is not a result of some well-defined path, which is what you would need to direct funding. Recall the property of multiple real liability.
What matters is not how someone got there. In fact, it can't matter because we cannot know the path narratives and life story is notwithstanding, all we can know is that the outcome itself, having a roof over one's head is a signal that indicates a better station in life. It's a good outcome. So this has massive implications for the role government players, right. In order to pass bills and direct funding, there must be some narrative attached to where those funds are going and why.
But most of that narrative will be a story that suggests the pattern is the path one must assume they understand how outcomes are realized in order to create programs and systems that make things better. This is a problem. Another example in government is uh is when they inject money and attempt to stimulate the economy, right?
We've all heard of this and and recognize this, obviously, the government notices a pattern that more money in the economy makes for a healthier system overall with more jobs, better inflation rates, et cetera. And it's true, these are all markers of a healthy economy. So it seems obvious that if we want to achieve a healthier economy, we should just add more of the signal, right, inject money into the system.
But more money in the economy is supposed to be a result of genuine cycle of supply and demand. Companies have something to offer and a a significant portion of the population wants it. If demand rises naturally, companies bring more goods and services to meet the demand and prices adjust all these signals they propagate throughout the market. And of course, investors act accordingly.
The problem with injecting money artificially is the same issue we saw with the nutrition example, it confuses the pattern for the path injecting money. Doesn't consider how a surplus of cash is generated in the first place. Injection of cash sends false signals into the system making it appear as though there is more demand than there is. And this is not to say that maybe cash should never be injected ever. But there is great risk in confusing the pattern for the path education.
Something I talk about uh a a fair amount, perhaps the most blatant infraction of confusing the pattern for the path is the academic narrative. Specifically, the one attached to advanced education university is there to provide a foundation to enter the world, the real world, right? It's it's a vetting program for businesses to use to filter applicants. But the entire academic premise is based on the idea that the pattern is the path, right?
Everything we read about in textbooks are are patterns that have been noticed by historians, writers, you know, philosophers, engineers, scientists, everything taught is a set of concepts or principles that have withstood the test of time. The the American experiment as a model of the Republic, France's fight for liberation and the French revolution. You know the abolition of of of, of slavery in Britain and the US, the opium War in China.
The first women voters in New Zealand, you know, Hamlet by Shakespeare for release by Beethoven stoicism. NIH Marxism, rationalism. Uh you know, the the invention of motion pictures, the invention of the airplane, like we talked about the compass, the printing press, the telephone, the light bulb, you know, Einstein's General Relativity. Darwin's origin of species on and on.
All these topics have deep work attached to them, telling us the story of their core properties, what makes them important points in time. But school doesn't stop there. School suggests that by studying these works, we will not only know more about them, we will have what it takes to extend them to cast their patterns forward. But every work of writing art philosophy, you mentioned scientific theory didn't have a path, it was realized.
Despite massive epistemic uncertainty, the outcomes of all these examples were and are multiply realizable. There's nothing in them that can be cast forward. We can improve on existing constructs, but we cannot make the next discovery or leap forward based on the narrative attached to how these things came to be. Final example, businesses make this mistake all the time, you know, in their quest to become efficient machines that generate revenue. They, they look at what did and didn't work right.
They run A B tests and, and market trend analysis to see what actions supposedly led to what outcomes. But these patterns while telling of what markets are up to do, not tell us how to construct the solution going forward. They cannot tell us how to operate within the market to see the patterns in the market is not to understand the journey that produced those patterns. Market patterns are multiply realizable. The pattern is not the path.
OK. So if we cannot cast forward the patterns we discover, then what does this mean? I mean, should we stop studying airplanes? Should we give up on investigating nutrition and medicine? Should philosophy be cast aside? You know, what about the government? Should we strip society of politics and bureaucracy? Should we eliminate advanced education? Should businesses just stop looking at market trends and building their models perhaps?
But remember, humans have been making progress all along, right? Despite our narratives, we do move forward. Uh we, we improve airplanes. We we, we come up with new medicines, we write about new philosophies, we get some people off the streets, right? We invent quantum computers and we enter new markets. But the the the argument here isn't to stop looking at the pattern. Now, as I stated previously, we should be looking at patterns and learning about the properties of things we deem important.
The argument is about how those patterns should be used instead of intervening under a naive premise that we know how to fix or improve things because we can see the outcome we want, we should instead use patterns as high level guides to signal when we're on the right track. So in engineering, this means embracing trial and error instead of, you know, so-called best practices and rigid rules. Good engineers don't use strict logic and nerdy adherence to engineering principles.
Despite the image promoted by schools, hiring managers in Hollywood, good engineers are messy. They, they, they experiment frequently, they build naively and they let great solutions emerge, they study things to know their attributes, right? But, but they don't assume what exists in industry now is what should be cast forward as the next step. Don't get me wrong. A lot of engineers, engineers do think like this but the good ones or even the great ones don't, I would argue what's more risky.
OK. Ask yourself is what is more risky locking things down with rigid known practices. So you cannot adapt or embracing the unknown so that the next discovery can be revealed because that's really what this comes down to, right? These discoveries are revealed right through the trial and error, through the embracing of uncertainty, through the acceptance of complexity, through, through, through the accepting of the epistemic uncertainty of these situations, right?
A common theme throughout this podcast, you, you, you have to be able to jump in in many ways without knowing what you're doing. The inspiration to do the thing is more important than so-called knowledge about how to do the thing. And, and this, this makes a lot of people uneasy, especially if you're following that academic narrative and you like to read books on a topic and you like to do the training. Now, keep in mind, I'm not saying don't do those things.
But I think that, that, that, that, that, that half of that is absolutely correct. Study the things know them because you should understand the properties. How else are you going to pay attention to signals if you don't know what to look for? But the other half of that narrative where it says it's also telling you how to go about doing the thing, how to take the next step, it can guide you.
You've got this knowledge about, about how to approach the problem and and what pieces to bring together to extend it in really simple systems. Sure. If it looks like a Newton's cradle, if it's like balls bouncing into balls or something on a bill or table. Yeah. Right. But, but we're talking about real world situations. The things getting built today are not Newton cradles and billiard balls, right. These are, these are, these are complex things, they have a lot of interacting pieces.
The opacity is there. You don't get to see how the the the properties that you're noticing were realized. OK. So, so this is true for engineering or just building in general is is that you are being, you are being inspired by things that, that, that have been arrived at in a multiply realizable way that that path is never going to happen again. So even if you did find the path, even though it evaporated, even if you somehow did find it, it wouldn't be of any use.
There's no reason to think that that path would lead to the outcome. Again, that's not how things emerge. OK? Uh The, the nutrition and medicine example, you know, let's let's stop cherry picking studies to support some health narrative. OK? Which you see all the time, somebody has an opinion, veganism or carnivores or something in between or Mediterranean or whatever look, statistics are capable of telling any story or we talked about this in uh I think it was the logic episode, right?
You're always gonna find a study to back up what you say, OK, they're flipping in the flopping, the higher the complexity, the higher that you know, so-called a kind of proxy distance between what you observe and what the underlying phenomenon is actually doing. The data can be narrowed, simplistic methods can be used and interpretations can be layered on to suggest the causal how and to suggest that how has been figured out, right?
But in reality, very little about the path from input output can be uncovered. And really we should say recovered if we, if we understand multiple, multiple reliability, right? The path was there some kind of path happened if you believe in causality at all, right? But it's gone, you're not gonna be able to recover it. So it's not there for you to find opacity isn't because you can't see it. Opacity is there because it's not there to begin with. Right?
The path that gave us the pattern, the paths that gave us the patterns we see in healthy individuals. They're not there for us to study suggesting we should ingest the patterns we see in healthy individuals like mineral x in this food to better our health is speculative at best. There's nothing in the scientific or, or statistical arsenal that can change this. The opacity is absolute. What we can do is look at what has survived over millions of years, right?
Because again, you can throw your arms up. I was like, what the heck are we supposed to do if we can analyze, look one of the most scientifically rigorous things you can do, even though it's not going to sound like it. One of one of the most scientifically rigorous things you can do for your health is adhere to what your ancestors did. Now, the reason this is more scientific than some statistical study is because true science works by surviving years of reputation.
This is why Ockham's razor should be followed. It's not about providing the simplest theory. It's about using the simplest theory that survives because simple things can be tested. OK. So, so when you look at what ancestors were doing, oh, you know, they, they just had a different way of living. Well, no, they were surviving. And if they've been doing that for hundreds war thousands or want to include all of hominid evolution, millions of years. Guess what?
There is no statistical study that's going to come up against millions of years of hominid evolution. I'm sorry, that just isn't, it's not in the arsenal that just does not work that way. Ok. You're not gonna hear that a lot in the classrooms, but it's true. So, so saying something that doesn't, in, in a sense, you know, doesn't really sound that scientific kind of sounds like a naturalistic fallacy actually, when you're like, well, just do what your ancestors did.
You know, you're not, you're not saying that because, well, you know, the people that believe this are not saying that because they, they, they just believe old things are better. It's, it's, which would be a fallacy. What they're saying is that something that has survived for a long time must have done. So for a reason, there are too many opportunities for things to fail for that not to be the case. You, luck does not extend for thousands of years.
It just doesn't, a run of luck is always short lived. OK, long enough to make us think there's something to it but not long enough to survive thousands of years. So, so it's more scientifically rigorous to actually pay attention to, to ancestors, not necessarily for everything, but for a lot of things for, for things that have survived. Uh And this doesn't have to just be what people were doing. It can be things as well.
OK. So anyways, again, that's probably not another whole episode, but that's, that's the take on the nutrition example. Look at what your ancestors were eating. There is a reason for that. Your body is quote unquote designed for the stuff your ancestors were eating. That's not even up for debate. I'm sorry. OK. In philosophy, uh we were talking about philosophy as an example, rather than tying our lives to the properties seen in wise individuals.
We should instead see their attributes as goals to achieve, right? There are signals of what is possible. They're beacons that tell us that we're on the right track. The character attributes of a sage are not there to dictate the path to becoming a sage only to allow our multiply realizable lives to converge on something positive as long as we're paying attention. And that's of course, the key paying attention if you want to be wise in life, be really good at understanding what the signals are.
But don't pretend like you understand the path to get there. Those two things must be included in, in genuine wisdom, the paying attention to signals. OK. Uh uh uh An understanding of the properties of things of systems of patterns in life. I see this, I see that I notice this keeps reoccurring. I notice that these people have these attributes and these situations have these patterns to them. OK? That's half of it.
The other half is, is seeing those only as signals with which you could achieve in multiply realizable ways, meaning you're supposed to embark on life in a very naive fashion and stop pretending like you have access to information, you don't stop pretending like you can connect the causal change from input, input to output. This is never going to change. OK? If you, if, if you, if you were the one to figure that out, you'd be definitely getting the Nobel prize.
But it's not gonna happen because this is this is fundamental. We know this in computer science, we know this in complexity science. We know this from epidemic uncertainty from logic from philosophies that opacity that you can't break past that, that information that you think you're using to connect causal chains and extend patterns forward. I'm sorry, it's not there. It's never been there at the at the very foundational roots of science, we know that it's not there, right?
Get into science and look at how prominent mean field theories are where they start using gross approximation. But by adding one more electron to hydrogen, I mean, this is this is something that begins at the very beginning of the periodic table. And we're, and we're extending this to philosophies of life. We're extending this to nutrition and politics and governance and on and on.
I am sorry, but the opacity is absolute, it starts way before what we're talking about and and, and the idea that you can cast a path forward or a pattern forward rather is just absolutely and utterly fundamentally unrealistic. OK. I've said enough about that. Um the government example, uh we should only be keeping intervention at the highest level.
Ok. Now, this isn't a political opinion, although people will kind of say that as political opinions, this is a scientific and philosophical opinion, right? Because having any governing body reach too deeply into the process meant to converge on solutions will stop that system's convergence. Let me say that again, having any governing body reach too deeply into the process meant to converge on solutions will stop that system's convergence.
The intervention will retard the ability of paths to be attempted at a more local level. The incorrect assumption that the patterns noticed in society are themselves, the paths forward is deeply, deeply flawed. It doesn't align with what we know about how solutions emerge at the complexity. A given level of governance can do wonders. I'm not saying no governance, right? But cross that line of intervention and catastrophe is inevitable.
Government should use patterns as signals for when things are going well, not as recipes for making things better education. OK. Hot topic. Look, we got to drop the false narrative that what we learn can tell us how to achieve things. The notion that graduates have been prepared to take on the challenges of the real world. That, that, that, that, that their, their knowledge serves as a foundation for making society a better place. That's just borderline ridiculous.
It's a nice idea story and it definitely makes universities a lot of money, but it doesn't hold up to how information flows and how new things get created. Instead we should understand any education as a time to learn about the fundamental properties of the things discovered by historians, writers, philosophers, engineers and scientists.
Keeping in mind there were no giants only shoulders another previous episode, learning about those properties is not to learn how but to learn about the signals, the environment makes available. Instead of pretending causality is something that can be teased out of complex tasks. Let us acknowledge that we can never have such information. Let us instead focus on high level processes, processes that converge to good solutions by paying attention to signals. This is what education should be about.
And, and, and maybe the project based learning that is starting to become popular is a close proximity to this. I don't know enough about it. The take home message there is like, look, it's not necessarily do away with education altogether, but there has to be a change. Studying is great.
The the the the narrative that what you study is going to help you extend it to the next step is deeply flawed and quite frankly, people in education of any intellectual honesty should know this, they should be teaching it. We, we, we should be doing signals instead of reasons. OK. We should be following signals instead of trying to dig up pretend reasons. Finally, business organizations should learn to redefine their risk in terms of adaptation.
OK. Businesses should learn to redefine risk in terms of adaptation. What does the business do to, to, to mitigate risk? They try to lock everything down, they make everything rigid. We want this, this reproducible, we want this scalable, we want to and we know how scalability happens, we know it, we know it, you know, take anything, take something in music where a hot band comes out and, and then it explodes and it's big.
And then of course, the industry wants to repeat it and sometimes they can, they can get a few more bands coming out and then it just quickly wanes, right? It die down because you can't, you're not doing anything new anymore. You're just replicating, replicating is not creating. OK. So, so organizations have to redefine risk, not as uncertainty and we got to get away from uncertainty, but rather embracing uncertainty, think about it in terms of adaptation.
We cannot think that the patterns that have worked to date can be extended into, into the future. That's very problematic because it actually fragile realizes company into rigid processes and policies that cannot course correct where and when needed. OK. So we need, we need to keep our teams multiply realizable, allow them to find solutions. We never could have seen coming because if your company doesn't, it's only a matter of time that your competitors does. Ok. All right.
That's all I have for today. Thanks for listening. Hopefully, I, hopefully I gave you something to think about. If you like what you heard, please take a few seconds to give non-trivial five stars on the platform. You your choice. It would help out a lot. I'm Sean mcclure. This is nontrivial. Thanks so much. Until next time.