Everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I discuss how detailed knowledge falls short and how high level thinking is a far superior way to make sense of the world and solve real problems.
I'll discuss how the abstraction inherent in high level thinking is what brings us into the environments where real problems exist and how the only all knowledge worth having is that which comes after we've solved the problem, we'll look at how conceptual connections are made and explore the underlying mechanism that brings meaning to situations.
And finally, all argue that if you don't recognize most things in a textbook, the first time you touch it, it means you're doing things backwards, let's get started. OK. So there are two ways of thinking, there is detailed oriented thinking and there was high level thinking. One is concerned with understanding the specific details of a given situation and the other with abstract ideas and general knowledge.
Now modern society has rewarded the former, far more than the latter, right, detailed knowledge about something is considered deeper since layers have been peeled back and the specific components of a situation uncovered to understand the details is to know what goes into the phenomenon being studied, the guts or inner workings of the machine.
If you want an expert in something you look for the person with detailed knowledge, the idea that deep knowledge is superior comes from the industrial revolution. More foundation, the so-called age of enlightenment, the industrial revolution was spurred on by the creation of simple mechanical things. OK. Simple in the sense that each component bumped up against another in a visually obvious chain of causality, right?
The steam engines, rocket ships, bridges, office towers, these were all genuinely simple constructs that have causal chains of operation. These are the things that can be reverse engineered and understood the age of enlightenment as it's called is is where it started that intellectual and philosophical movement that brought sovereignty to reason and considered the evidence of the senses, the primary source of knowledge.
The enlightenment emphasized the scientific method and reductionism which posits we can understand something by insect think it's makeup that looking into the individual components is to know the thing itself for simple things like steam engines, rocket ships, bridges and office towers. This of course makes sense when the connection between pieces is wholly deterministic, things are predictable and controllable to know the inputs is to know the outputs.
But digging into the details comes at a cost, right? And that cost is a type of misunderstanding that increases dramatically with complexity as the dimensionality of the situation increases. The idea that digging deeper leads to more knowledge degrades, to dig deeper is to lose context. The act of stripping away and isolating removes the interactions and the behavior of any real world system is determined by those interactions.
As we hone in on the specifics, we lose the view that matters most the part of the phenomenon that actually interacts with the environment and affects our observations and often our lives. So under complexity fixing on details, relegates one's awareness to sterile facts, to void of meaning. And this is the point in real world situations. Details have meaning only by virtue of the environment they interact with.
If you strip away the environment, you're left with inputs to a journey, you know nothing about imagine sitting on an airplane with your two year old and playing with little plastic dinosaurs that you purchase at the Dollar store. Now by themselves, those little dinosaurs have no meaning, right? If you dropped it under the seat and lost it, nobody would care. It costs 50 cents. But to your two year old, they are his best friends, right? They mean everything to him for you to drop one and lose.
It would ruin the entire trip. You'd be talking to neighboring passengers trying to recover a small piece of plastic as if your child's entire happiness depended on it. The dinosaurs acquire all of their meaning through context. Now, this is true of any real world situation, the components that go into a system mean nothing without taking into account the circumstances, the conditions, the surroundings, the factors, the state of affairs.
Only by considering a system's components within the mess of their interactions, do the details of a system have any meaning, the environment in which details play out their dance must be considered. This is true of any phenomenon with an appreciable amount of complexity. Think about what this means for science. Now, science is built on the idea that knowledge is getting through isolation and extraction, right. It's by holding everything except what you're interested in.
Still that makes science possible. Everything from basic observations to randomized controlled trials is based off this premise, to understand the reasons behind things. You must isolate the cause from everything else and hone in on the single or few factors that supposedly dictate the outcome, the artificial narrowing of the lens of reality that science does. This works wonders for simple systems. But it's borderline nonsensical for the complex.
This changes everything to truly learn about something cannot mean to study its details. It cannot mean to dig deeper into the so-called inner workings because nobody has access to those inner workings. Recall from the last episode, complex things don't condescend to show us how they come to be. That information is forever lost to the mechanism of multiple reliability.
You remember that term from the last episode, multiple reliability understanding cannot come from the traditional notion of depth, rather it must come from something else that something else is movement. All we can do to learn about reasonably complex situations and phenomena is to take note of what doesn't move when everything else does.
Meaning comes from invariants to understand something is to become familiar with its behavior, not its details, instead of holding everything still and changing one thing. As per the scientific method, we should be letting everything move and noticing what stays fixed naturally, what stays fixed naturally. This is the only way to deal with the fundamental epidemic uncertainty in all non-trivial situations. Deep understanding is largely narrative.
What we need is meta understanding, right, which accepts that the only knowledge truly available are the high level processes systems undergo. And so what does all this have to do with high level thinking well to operate at a high level is to discard details? And I argue that discarding details is a far more powerful way to operate in the real world by discarding details.
We encourage movement through the environment because we are allowing details to always exist in flux as soon as details are decided on our capacity to attempt many possibilities is severely limited recall that attempting many possibilities is the only way complex problems get solved to talk about this all the time. This is the reason nature gives us heuristics to navigate the complex world, right? Rather than details.
Because general rules of thumb work details don't details don't work because they have no meaning prior to embarking on the journey. Details cannot assist in the finding of a solution because the right details and their meaning only exist. Once the situation is known, the environment must be sampled naively under the absence of information, right, in order to remain fluid enough to allow solutions to precipitate.
Only once the right solution emerges, do the detailed components that go into a solution matter details acquire meaning only once we have entered the void. OK. OK. So the truth is details were meant to die. OK. Details have to be disregarded if they are to serve their proper purpose, which is as variation in problem solving. I talk about complex problems all the all the time.
Look at any process that successfully navigates through complexity and you see variation and iteration variety is what allows for massive sampling and iteration is what allows for recurring assessment of how well the system is converging. Take any high level goal to get there. We must keep details in flux and only take actions that move us closer to the goal. It's not for us to know why certain course adjustments work better. Just that certain actions do so.
From a problem solving perspective, we can see that focusing on details is massively detrimental. But then why do we do it? Why is the entire academic narrative bent on this idea that textbook knowledge can help us solve real world problems. Why is the age of enlightenment a grossly outdated paradigm still with us. The problem comes from what I will call the authority of simplicity. OK. The problem with details is that they look beautiful, OK? They look smart, they look authoritative.
As soon as we codify an idea with symbols or give it a label, people tend to take that concept more seriously. Despite our natural capacity to work under uncertainty, the unknown makes us very uncomfortable, right? Concrete things give us comfort and this happens regardless of how true those concrete things are. We see this problem with mathematics all the time. As soon as something is mathematical, it takes on a look of authority. Look at all those fancy equations.
Someone must have really thought about this for them to encode the process with symbols. Math really gets challenged outside its own field because the language is esoteric. Nobody wants to look like an idiot, right? But anything can be mathematics. There are no real guard rails for mapping math to phenomena. I would argue just represent the details of symbols and assume whatever self-consistent operations math has to support must also be supported by the phenomenon.
Any narrative one wishes to encode can be encoded peer review in the in the scientific journals. You know, it's gonna hold math accountable to its own operations and and it will check that the math that you're putting forward uh you know has been used in models elsewhere. Right, you know, to use to model similar systems. But beyond that, nobody can argue, a given equation does not map to reality. Sure we have prediction. But what is prediction?
I would argue that's a pretty highly, you know, dubious term one that often means in sample curve fitting, which isn't really prediction or an extension of mathematical operations under the assumption that math natively maps to reality. Now, I'm not going to get into that is math discovered or invented debate in this episode. But needless to say the idea that math is anything more than a codified version of our own thought process is debatable. OK?
Regardless of one's take on math, most would agree. Its appearance adds a note of authority. And when it comes to maneuvering through complex situations, this is a problem. Authority makes it hard for things to die. Authority retards the ability of systems to leverage variation. The way they're supposed to. The only authority that should exist are the highest level goals we are working towards everything else must be allowed to perish throughout the process.
This is how information and problem solving works. It's the reason variation and iteration are the critical ingredients in making complex problems tractable. The perception of authority keeps things alive that shouldn't be. This goes against how problems get solved, which the man's details are not preserved but rather almost entirely destroyed. Save the few that persist.
Remember the only way to assess what is true under complexity is to note what doesn't move the false authority of simplicity doesn't allow details to die. I want to talk about this idea of Ockham's razor, which comes up a lot when we talk about problem solving and you know, things in science and models. So so and the true purpose of details is what I would kind of title this section. So with all this talk of details, dying, one might wonder what's their purpose?
I mean, why even bother having details at all? Why don't we just totally do things randomly and ad hoc and see what kind of pops out? Well, the reason for details to exist at all is to have something that isn't vague so that it can be tested by the environment. Now, this is the true reason behind this, this thing or concept or principle if you will called Ockham's razor, which states entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
It's usually inaccurately restated as the simplest explanation is the best one. This is not the right way to think about Ockham's razor. Since we're not after simplicity, for simplicity's sake, we are using simplicity because it's easy to kill. OK. In other words, we don't want to choose the simple explanation just because it has less assumption or because it's easier to understand. But rather because simple things are easy to test and destroy. OK?
Now here's the point, the only way simple things survive. The only way simple things survive is if there was something true or useful about them. Now compare that to vague things that can survive even if they are complete nonsense. Right. Vague things are ill defined and difficult to challenge. Vagueness, props things up longer than they should be because they are difficult to define if we can't define the thing. How do we argue for or against it?
Vague things linger and accumulate authority over time despite adding little value to a given idea. When it comes to assessing what is true, it's not enough for something to be long lived. It must also be unprotected, it must be always open to attack so that its survival. If there is a testament to genuine effectiveness, continuity is not truth, survivability is and so details are important but not as concepts to dig into for deep knowledge.
But as testable pieces that allow knowledge to be gained by observing what lives and what dies. The details that matter are the ones that don't move throughout the process of interest. The meaning that is carved out by invariants, OK. The key point is that the right details and what they mean cannot be known until the solution becomes apparent only once the solution emerges through trial and error or do the details have any meaning?
And this is why the reduction is take from the age of enlightenment is so deeply flawed. And I would argue wholly inapplicable in today's complex economy. The reality is connections needed to maneuver through complexity and solve problems, those connections occur at the surface. And to understand this, we have to think about the, the the this idea of abstraction and overlap. OK. These two concepts how abstraction relates to overlap is maybe a better way to say that.
So let's say I'm in the woods and I'm trying to survive now, I'm not gonna last long sitting there and hoping for the best, right. I got to move through the train, find resources that uh you know, enable me to build shelter and, and gather food and water. And what have you movement is how overlaps between my actions and the environment are made. It is movement through the woods that make surviving possible if I remain focused on how specific shelters are constructed, right?
Some detailed knowledge about specific shelters. I'm gonna find myself in trouble. The materials I studied may not be present in the woods. I might have detailed knowledge on which plants are safe to consume, but the plants I studied may not be in season when I get there or not even native to the area. Now, it's tempting to say, ok, yeah, but well, I know where I'm going and what's there. So I'd simply study up on the right things. But this is naive.
Any set of details can easily prove worthless to survival. What matters is putting oneself in opportunity's way and learning in the moment. It's not preparation one needs. It's adaptability, fixed sterile knowledge about individual things is not that useful upfront. Details fail to enable survival because there are countless situations that can play out. The environment is convoluted, interconnected with many things affecting many things.
There's no way to anticipate what will happen and it only takes one major event to wipe out all the other advantages. Right. Recall from a few previous episodes, the rich don't penny pinch, right? One major thing it barely ever happens but when it does and everything you penny pinched up at that point gets wiped out any solution, someone brings to the woods from their deep so-called knowledge is more likely to solve something that never needed solving a solution, looking for a problem. Right.
Ok. But surely a Navy Seal or a trained survivalist or whatever would fare better. Well, it depends if they do. It's not because of what they learned from books on the topic. It's because of their experience. They've picked up on those ineffable attributes that make survival possible and they've done so over years, they will have lots of details to talk about regarding survival. But remember those are after the fact details. Ok. They didn't come before they came after.
If survival was always the same as is the case with a bunch of detailed knowledge that never changed, nobody would find it very exciting. Right. What keeps people like Navy Seals and survivalists engaged is the ever changing nature of the effort. And of course, this is true for any area of interest. Also, if you actually watch shows where people try to compete, compete for survival.
If they're not too contrived, you know, it's often the non trained individuals that come out on top, they actually end up winning. And this shouldn't be surprising, but to many it is ok to solve the problems that matter, we have to enter the void naively and course correct on route. It's important to actually have a sense of naivete about this. The uncertainty is far too high to go and prepare. The only true preparation is the acceptance of extreme uncertainty.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't arrive with tools, right? Tools increase our ability to move through the possibility space as we've talked before, knives allow us to cut through brush and fashion additional tools, ropes will you know help us bind branches and set traps. Tools are not fixed ideas though about how things work they are apparatuses that enable movement through the environment further. The the the only tools worth packing are those that fall into the highest category of abstraction.
Now, this is important you don't bring a knife specific to cutting rope or shaving bark. You bring the most general purpose knife possible thinking about the details we have us packing for every conceivable contingency. And that's gonna weigh us down. Details are not mobile. They're viscous generality is achieved through abstraction and it is generality that enables overlap with the environment. We can understand this information in terms of connections between disparate things.
As I've written previously at the highest level of abstraction, everything is the same at the lowest, everything is different, higher levels of abstraction mean more details get subsumed into fewer categories.
All the different cars get subsumed into the category car in all the trucks, cars, crossover, suvs, they all get categorized into vehicles, the fewer categories that exist, the more chances there are for details to get connected since they fall under the same category because this is important. So we want there to be a connection between our actions and the environment.
OK. Well, the more general purpose, our tooling, the higher the probability or tools will find use in the environment abstraction generality. This is what makes overlap between our actions and the environment possible. This is of course how analogy works, right? To make connections between seemingly disparate things. Humans use analogy to connect areas that appear different when the focus is on details.
When the level of abstraction is increased, it means more details that would have been kept separate, are now connected in conceptual space. OK. So I would argue that detail oriented people are less likely to tackle real problems. And it's related to this this mechanism I just talked about about abstraction and overlap. So a consequence of people becoming attracted to the comforting concreteness of details is they're less likely to tackle genuine problems.
This is because of the abstraction overlap mechanism. I just talked about genuine challenges are the problems that exist when one is immersed in the environment. But getting into the environment means overlap. And that means abstraction only through generalities. Do we enter into the place where the true problem solving happens? High level thinking is what brings people into the realm of genuine challenges.
And this is why high level thinkers are more likely to deal with problems that actually need solving. OK? It's also the reason why high level thinkers tend to understand the situation and the details that matter better than detail oriented individuals, detail oriented people will have more to say about details. But much of what they're saying is disconnected from what matters we don't need what sounds smart, we need what is smart. We see this in software all the time. OK?
Those those we have individuals that are dedicated to, to documentation and so-called best practices, but they don't seem to create anything real. OK? They're like cogs focused on, you know, programming minutia rather than building something people want to use. Most computer science graduates. This is a fact they've never created an end to end piece of software. OK?
They can talk forever about four loops, programming language, design methodology, data structures, whatever but most are in apt at crafting actual applications. OK? One will be quick to argue that those cogs style details are needed as a foundation going forward. But I disagree to create software is to move quickly and craft things, people might want to create things that add to the economy. One must enter the economy and this demands abstraction.
Once there, after the fact, details can be understood in terms of how they contribute to the situation and users that we now understand. Again, the details that matter could not have been known upfront. And the only technical understanding that matters is how they relate to the problem being solved, which of course you don't know unless you're in the environment. This is true of all real world situations. It doesn't matter if it soft or anything else.
Just as dedication to programming minutia will prevent one from entering the economy and solving real problems. So too will upfront dedication to details, prevent exposure to genuine environments in any domain. So-called deep knowledge so often attributed to so-called experts is anything but those details are sterile, they are devoid of meaning and they're uncorrelated to the kinds of outputs we need to create.
So now I want to talk about the directionality of learning because we're talking about these details. You know, what does this mean for for for learning, right? Um Talk about the academic narrative and all this if genuine challenges only arise inside an environment accessible through abstraction, what does this mean for learning?
It means if you want to learn something, you should not be delving into the details rather you should be operating at the highest level of abstraction and entering the environment accordingly. Think about what I discussed towards the beginning with regards to context and meaning understanding the details properly can only come from proper context and proper context can only come from facing genuine challenges.
Genuine challenges only exist in real environments whose price for entrance is high level thinking again, so-called knowledge of details prior to embarking on the dirty means little right. The only details that matter are the ones that survived the process of discovery as per Ockham's razor. And the only way to know what those details mean requires we require as we're embedded in the right environment to be clear.
All of the learning that matters can only come after you have entered the environment knowing little about its nature. It is high level thinking that gets you there allowing you to call upon details at the last possible moment when they mean something. So I would argue that you should stop asking what books to read, stop asking what courses to take. OK, let me talk about this. So previously, I used that example, but sitting on an airplane with your two year old and and and losing right?
One of the plastic dinosaurs. Now this example shows not only how meaning is achieved through context, but that it's only achieved in one direction. OK. This is what I mean by the directionality of learning, the details don't inform the situation plastic dinosaurs by themselves don't mean anything. The information doesn't flow from dinosaurs to the situation. They flow from the situation to the dinosaurs to study details. Prior to embarking on a task is incoherent.
There is no mapping of fundamentals to situations under complexity to create what is new is to go head first into that, which you know little about you will have lots of detailed knowledge after the fact. But only after the fact, this directionality of learning is missed by many. One of the reasons why people keep seeking advice for their personal and professional lives. You know, they, they ask about what books to read or what courses to take. This is a mistake.
It's based off the false premise that reading will impart knowledge. Despite being entirely stripped of any real world context, one must have entered the environment to which the book speaks in order to understand the details. The book discusses when someone asks what book to read or what course to take, they're getting the directionality of information wrong. I'm not saying books and courses are worthless.
But if you don't recognize most things in a textbook, the first time you touch it, you're doing things backwards. Remember I said this in the, in the introduction, you're probably wondering what the heck I was talking about when you look at a textbook or, or you're faced with a chorus, you should be recognizing what you're seeing because you've been in this situation, whatever details are discussed will only means something to you.
If you're struggling through something real, no textbook or course can give you the context only a true struggle against the stresses of a genuine problem, you know, and maybe you say, well, maybe, maybe the course is kind of realistic and it gives you a project and yeah, that gets you in the right, in the right direction, but it's still contrived, right? Because you can't know what the right situation is. You can't know what that environment actually looks like.
And therefore you cannot know beforehand what the context is going to be. So a course, creator can't actually create that. OK?
I say go back to the books and go back to the courses as you're struggling through a real world problem that you have given yourself because you've entered the environment and then when you're looking at details and you're looking at specifics, whether it's programming constructs or you know, chemical bonds or you know, situational, you know, things related to negotiation. It doesn't matter what the domain is.
If you're looking at that information, if you're looking at those details, they're only going to mean something. If you're struggling against real stressors, stressor that you could not, could not have known upfront an environment that you could not have understood or known upfront. OK. Courses and textbooks. Those should be the last thing you touch because then you could use the details. I'm not saying, don't use details. I'm not saying details are completely worthless.
I'm saying that you got to get the order right. You got to get the directionality of information right? You got to get the directionality of learning correct. So this comes down to operating at the surface. I like to say today, we create things that are massively interconnected and opaque. Ok. The discoveries we make, they don't look like steam engines and rocket ships and bridges or office towers. A lot of those things have been figured out.
Quite frankly, our economy thrives off entangled information, not clean, causal components that bump up against each other. High level thinking is superior because it doesn't define knowledge in terms of isolation and extraction. Rather it enters the void where context and meaning live. It leaves the identification of discussion of details. Until after the discovery is merged. High level thinking looks only for behavior and invariants not static ingredients devoid of meaning.
High level thinking understands interactions implicitly rather than details mindlessly. OK. High level thinking allows details to die like we've talked about in operating the only way complex problem solving does which is via variation and iteration. It's high level thinking that isn't susceptible to authority of simplicity. It doesn't look to anchor truth on specific sets of assumed inputs by operating at the surface.
It allows swarms of details to make conceptual connections that detail oriented people fail to make critically. High level thinking is what brings people into the environment where real problems exist. Whereas the detail oriented remain caught in the weeds, high level thinkers embrace abstraction. And as we've discussed, this is the only way to expose oneself to the stressors that teach us what's worth learning. The next generation is going to need to learn to operate at the surface.
Letting go of history's denigration of high level thinking, detailed knowledge can no longer mean deep understanding, right? Rather it must now be considered disconnected thinking thinking that lacks context. Beware those who are quick to discuss the details as there's a very good chance that they have a bad solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist. They say the devil's in the details. Well, if that's true, the angels must work above them. I suggest you work with the angels.
All right, that's all I got. Thanks so much for listening. If you like what you heard, please consider giving non trivial a five star rating and maybe a little short review on the platform of your choice that helps out a lot. I'm Sean mcclure. This is non trivial. Thank you so much. Until next time.