So life has a lot to do with searching for answers, and answers have to do with information, right? Answers are literally a response to a question, a statement, or a situation. So if I ask you what is the capital of France, then the correct statement is Paris. But of course, in real life, most questions we have or answers that we are seeking are not so obvious. They're not so basic. They might be a little bit more profound. They might have more to do with what is your purpose in life?
What should I be doing? Maybe what job should I be taking? What should I be working on? How should I prioritize a backlog of tasks? Who should I invite for dinner? Whatever? What environment should I place myself in? But in all cases, answers are a response to some question that we're asking. And seeking answers is very much a part of life.
And you could say that it really does span the spectrum of kind of everyday, kind of day to day things like you're looking for a new recipe or something on a search engine, all the way to the most profound what is the meaning of life? And then just everything in between, right? Who should I invite for dinner? Where should I go today? What should I have for dinner? Life is all about seeking answers to our questions.
Now, the only way to produce a response from the inputs of a situation is to process the information, right? So if you think in terms of computation, obviously, if a computer is to respond to what is two plus two, then it must process this information using its arithmetic logic unit, right? It's Alu to provide the response for.
Of course, in everyday life, it's not really about computers per se, but our minds are still doing some type of computation or something that we're interacting with is doing some type of computation, some type of processing, right? There's inputs to a situation, some type of transformation of that information takes place, and then at the other end of it, if it gives us an answer, is the output.
And so it's a good way to frame the searching for answers in everyday life as the processing of information. And so if we understand that answers are a response to a question or statement, and we understand that the only way to get an answer is to process that information, then answers obviously have to do with information.
And if that's the case, then you can say, as a general rule, we should probably be seeking out the best information possible as part of trying to find the answers that we're seeking in life. But now let's think about what an answer is. And I'm going to argue that real world information doesn't really have a location, quote, unquote. What I mean by location is it's not like a singular thing. So let's break this apart a bit.
Well, real world situations, as I mentioned, often are high dimensional, which just means there's a lot of things that go into what we experience or what we observe or what we measure. So, for example, the success of a business is going to depend obviously on more than one thing, right?
It's some convoluted mix of the quality of the product or service, the marketing strategies that are employed, customer satisfaction, economic conditions, competition, taking into account employee performance, and just a whole slew of other things. And I'm using the success of a business as an example.
But you can literally take anything in the real world, anything that is not part of maybe an academic or laboratory setting, where the complexities have been stripped away for the sake of understanding a more precise version of something. In the real world, there are just countless factors that come into play and that arrive at some synthesis that we then end up experiencing, right? So that's what I mean when I say the real world is high dimensional.
Every dimension is one of the variables that would come into play, and there's many, many of them, and they interact in a complex fashion. So if that's true, that real world situations are high dimensional, what we can also say, bringing it back to the topic of information, is that high dimensional information, or the information that exists in a high dimensional setting, leads to, for example, different people making different predictions.
So, for example, let's go back to that kind of business example, extend that out to the financial market in general. So financial markets are obviously influenced by a myriad of factors, right? We have economic conditions, geopolitical events, there's investor sentiment, company performance, and on and on. And so now imagine you're trying to make a decision in that space.
So maybe analysts and investors, right, they're going to use various models and algorithms and sources of information to try and predict, in this case, the future value of financial assets, right? But that's not really a single thing with a single location. So due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of all these various factors that come into play, different analysts are going to arrive at different predictions, right?
So someone will use, let's say, traditional valuation methods and fundamental analysis. And that will give them what? Well, certain answers, right, or certain facets of the truth. And then someone else might use technical analysis and maybe study market trends, okay? But the continuous flow of new information and market dynamics and evolving economic conditions, that means that different people are going to get different answers, different predictions, different estimates.
And not only are they different, they're subject to change. They're not static things because those variables, as per the name variable, are changing. They have different ranges to them. And so there is no single definitive answer regarding, with this example, the future value of a financial asset. Okay, now again, as I said, I was using the success of business as an example. You can map that to. That's analogous to really any real world situation, right?
If you're walking into a room and there's many people and there's many things going on, and you had to guess or decide or predict what was going to happen next, it would be very difficult to do. Now, you might be able to kind of read the room and do that with some success. But then if you ask someone else who is just as capable as you to do the same thing, you would get a different answer. And it's not that either one of them is right or wrong or is necessarily better.
It's that there's different ways to read that room. There's different ways to read the situation. There's so much going on, and then it's dynamic. Person a might be right, and then some time passes by, and now person B is correct. Or maybe just person a got it right, but the notion that they got it right because they were somehow better at making the guesses is a bit of a false narrative, or at least it could be. Could have been luck, could have been randomness that they got it right.
So real world situations are high dimensional. There's a lot of things that go into them. And because of that, if someone goes to make a decision, take an action, make a prediction, you should expect different people to get different results without it necessarily being that one is better than the other. Okay? It's almost like a weight on the end of a string that's flapping around in the wind or something, and it's got no definite location to it. It's got all locations.
It's kind of a delocalized thing. And so what we can say then is that real world information has no location. It's not a singular thing. One isn't necessarily better than the other. It's kind of flapping around all over the place. It has some sense of location because it might not occupy all possible, quote unquote, positions. I'm using location and position in the abstract sense, right.
If we were to imagine a space of possibilities, and we were to say the answer is located somewhere in that space of possibilities, I'm saying that it doesn't really just exist in one location in the real world. And so if that's true, that real world information has no quote unquote location, then we should not expect our efforts in searching for answers to arrive at a single thing. Okay? So let's go back. I began by saying, look, answers have to do with information, right?
Quite literally, it's some kind of response to a question or statement or situation. But more to the point, the only way to produce a response is for some information to get processed, right? So answers have to do with information, and we should seek out the best possible information possible. And then I said, but when it comes to real world, information doesn't really have a quote unquote location. It's not a singular thing.
I use the example of a business depending on some convoluted mix of many different things, right? Product, services, marketing strategies, customer satisfaction, economic conditions, competition, employee performance, and on and on.
And if you were to take that same example and kind of say, okay, people that are making decisions in the space, let's say some analysts looking at financial markets, trying to make a prediction, ask any two people about, let's say, what the value of the financial asset is or what it's going to be tomorrow, you're going to get different answers. And it's not that one is necessarily better than the other. There's different ways of slicing that.
All we can do is kind of get proxies to reality, slices, thin slices through the real situation. And you could do that for any real world situation. I was just using the financial market as an example. And so what we can say is that real world information really doesn't have a location. It's not a singular thing. It's not a well defined thing.
And as such, we should not expect our efforts in searching for answers, which is so much of human experience, to arrive at a single thing we should not expect. So now I want to talk about kind of the main point of this episode is this notion that we should look for conversations, not answers. So we know that we need a goal in order to aim our efforts towards things that we want. This is true in all cases. It doesn't make sense to be completely aimless.
I mean, yes, there is benefit to having some randomness in your life to explore the space of possibilities that I talk about a lot. But we definitely need a goal. It helps anchor our efforts on something, right? And even if the goal has all these kinds of almost false expectations, they don't go the way we think. It kind of provided the original motivation to begin with. So goals in that sense are quite important. You need a target.
So for example, we're looking to end know well, the United nations has a quote unquote sustainable development goal that quite literally hopes to quote unquote end poverty in all its forms everywhere. So pretty lofty goal, right? So maybe it's a bit of a reach, exceeding the grasp, or maybe people think this is quite possible, but that's the goal.
And in having that goal, you're going to end up orienting a lot of effort around what most of us would agree is a pretty positive outcome if it could be achieved. Okay? But now consider what we've been talking about, the fact that real world information has no location. So if you have this goal of ending poverty everywhere, that's going to involve searching for an answer or answers, right? And that's going to involve, as I've been arguing, the use and processing of information.
But then if we take a look at what information actually is objectively, we say, well, the way that information works or doesn't work is that it doesn't really have a single location. So stick with this poverty example. Poverty is going to be influenced by diverse causes, cultural and social context, right? Individual circumstances, economic dynamics. There will be political factors, maybe long term versus short term solutions, right? Global interconnectedness.
Like any real world situation, it's high dimensional. And what we can say is that while conversations, in contrast to something like an answer, does reveal highly valuable information and it does move us, tend to move us in good directions if we stick with them. So we can have conversations about poverty related to what could we talk about? We could talk about insights, maybe into local contexts, right? So the local community and what it does and how to consider that context.
Because we have different value systems and different ways and perspectives of looking at things, we might be able to identify some causal factors or slightly causal factors, which could help elucidate some of the context and important information we need to process towards an answer. Take into account things like community participation, right? Cultural sensitivities, feedback on program effectiveness. So if programs have been put in place to alleviate poverty, how effective were they?
What else can we talk about? Building trust, knowledge sharing, policy development, awareness and advocacy, and things like this. So I said one, look, we need a goal to aim our efforts towards things that we want. But then I said two, as I've been arguing, real world information doesn't really have a location. So you could have a goal, you can go search for answers. But what you're going to get is not a single thing. And then I said three.
But what we can say that is good is that conversations, while they're not really answers, they do reveal highly valuable information that tends to move us in a good direction if we stick with them. Okay, now that's assuming you're having a real conversation, right? You could say, well, no, I could get into arguments with people, and they never really seem to converge anywhere.
Well, there's good arguments and there's bad arguments, and even argument and conversation is not necessarily the same thing. Right. A quality conversation, whatever it gives you, which is not an answer, and maybe not even a set of answers, should be giving you something of value. It should make you think, consider, contemplate, and allow you to reorient your efforts towards something more positive over time.
And so if that's true, that we should look for conversations, not answers, then when it comes to needing a goal to aim our efforts towards what we want, we should make conversations the goal. And I think that stands in contrast to the way a lot of us approach life, which is that we're always searching for answers.
Again, like I said at the beginning, it spans the spectrum, everything from the day to day kind of menial things, looking up an answer, I don't know, to a recipe or what to have next to eat or where to go to eat, what restaurant. Maybe looking at a review. We're looking for answers all the time, all the way to the meaning of life, and then everything in between. What should I do for a living? What is my career? What do people think of me? What should I create? What should I build?
What should I put out there and on and on? What should I say? What should I present? We're always kind of looking for the answer, looking for the answer, looking for the answer. But what I'm saying here is that it makes more sense to look for the conversation, because looking for the answer is kind of like chasing a ghost. It doesn't have a quote unquote, location. It's not a single thing. In some sense, it just doesn't really exist.
But that doesn't mean you can't make a lot of positive moves in your life, which you can. If instead of always looking for the answer, maybe you should start looking for conversations. Because if we take an honest look at what information is and how it works, looking for conversations can actually give you the thing that you want, which is something that maybe doesn't really have a label to it, but something that moves you in a positive direction. So let's make conversations the goal.
So what can we kind of do about this? If we know we should make conversations the goal, what could we implement? What could we do in our life to make that more practical? Well, I think this comes down to placing ourselves in environments that facilitate conversation. Right. We could say that we know human behavior is largely a byproduct of our environments. Okay. And there's all kinds of examples of this. It's kind of like the saying, show me your friends, I'll show you your future.
Kind of related to that. And I've talked about this idea of putting yourself in an environment that's the decision to make, as opposed to something maybe that's a little more specific. Because if you put yourself in the environment, then the thing that you want tends to be a byproduct. And I've also talked about this idea of, yeah, you can have a goal, you can have an aim, but don't aim directly at the thing you want.
Make the thing you want the byproduct, because that tends to be how situations and complexity works. So human behavior is largely a byproduct of our environment. Kind of makes me think of an episode a while back, too, where I said, if you want a clean house, invite people over. Right? If you want a clean house, don't clean your house. Don't make that the goal, because then you'll probably never get around to it. If you want a clean house, invite people over.
Because if people are coming over, guess what? You're going to clean your house. Right. So our behavior tends to be a byproduct of the environments that we're in. And if that's the case, then if we should look for conversations and not answers, then we should place ourselves into environments that facilitate the conversations. Right? And I think a practical way to do this is think about choosing tools that actually facilitate having good conversations.
So I know a lot of life today is obviously online, and so there could be applications that maybe help with this. It could be certain social media apps are maybe better than others. I find ones like Twitter and maybe, or now it's called x, right. It's not actually great for conversation. It's good for just kind of throwing an idea out there and getting a little bit of awareness around your ideas. At least that's what I use it for.
Something comes across me as what I'm doing something, I'm building something. And then I get this idea, this kind of truth that seems to be revealed to me, and then I put it out there on Twitter, and then hopefully someone can benefit from that. But I don't get a lot of conversation around know there might be other applications that are more dedicated to a smaller community.
And so maybe that smaller community that gathers online can get more into in depth into some of those ideas that I've had. Maybe. I think I might actually come out with an application that does this someday, because I feel there's a need for a smaller community to get who wants to have the deeper conversations, right.
It could be something in the world of business where, okay, there's a lot of people here, but how do we maybe have a smaller, tighter group of people that get into deeper conversations about what's going on? Right. Again, we're not just looking for answers, we're looking for the conversations. How can we facilitate that? And there might be some tools that help do that. And maybe the tool is not really necessarily a piece of software. Maybe it's like a meeting room, right? Something tangible.
Like this room only sits ten people, and so we're going to put it on a schedule. The first ten people to sign up to get into this room will have a talk, and you define it really specifically. It's for 1 hour, and you choose a topic, and then that's it. And everything else is just that dynamic, focused conversation. Maybe it's a coffee group, a men's group. Some people have, or, I don't know, anything that kind of forces a bit of a smaller, tight knit community. It could still be online.
I think that's possible, but could also be a physical location that allows you to get into conversations. I think another tool that's now just in this last year become prominent are things like chat, GPT, these large language models. So artificial intelligence. I think what's so great about it now is it's not anything like a search engine where you just kind of go ask for questions and you try to get the answer. You try to get the answer, you try to find the article or find the answer.
It can kind of help with that too. But I would say AI is not really for giving you answers, it's actually better for giving you conversations, because AI is so much closer to human interaction. Now, I'm not saying it's quite on par, but if you're going to use a technology tool, it can actually be good for conversation.
And you can ask it questions and it can kind of say something, and it might be almost a little bit dumb with the way it does it, but maybe it said something that triggered you, and then you ask it another question, then maybe it does kind of say something smart. The point is, you're not looking for the answer. You're looking for the conversation.
And so I think whether it's a physical rim or a piece of technology, a tool, something on a schedule, a group, a community that you join, I think the point is, don't make the answers the goal. Make the conversations the goal. Understand that answers in some sense don't really exist. Okay? But conversations do. And those can give you what you're really looking for, which is this kind of doesn't really have a name for. It's kind of unlabeled.
But whatever it is that it's giving you can really orient your efforts towards productive means. Okay, so just a really quick recap. I said, answers obviously have to do with information. We need to seek out the best information possible, because so much of the human experience is tied up in searching for answers. And then I said, but let's think about what information actually is a little bit more rigorously. Well, real world information doesn't really have a location.
We know that situations in the real world are complex and therefore high dimensional. Something that we know about high dimensional information is that any two people or agents or individuals or whatever that tries to make a decision in those high dimensional spaces are going to get different answers. But the answers, one answer is not necessarily better than the other.
They're just different because you're hitting it from a slightly different slice, a slightly different angle, because high dimensional situations are so multifaceted. And that kind of leads to this conclusion that while therefore a real world information, which is baked into the human experience of trying to find answers, has no quote unquote, location. It's not a singular, defined thing, which led to the big argument of, I think we should look for conversations, not answers. Right?
We do need a goal. We do need to aim for something. But if you make the aim the conversation rather than an answer, you end up getting something better than what an answer would give you. Because the answer is kind of a ghost. It's not really real. Even if you think you got the answer in some sense, that's not what you have. Life is dynamic. It's always changing. But if you make the conversation the goal, you do get something really valuable, even if it doesn't have a label.
And I think because of that, as kind of a rule that we could put into our life, we should say, well, look, if it's true that we should look for conversations and not answers, then why don't we take the action of placing ourselves into environments that facilitate conversations, not ones that you think might facilitate giving you answers because you're kind of chasing a ghost. But facilitate the conversations. We know human behavior is largely a byproduct of our environments.
And so if it's true that looking for conversations is better than looking for answers, and we should place ourselves into environments that will facilitate conversations, and that makes the things that we're after kind of a natural byproduct. And I think you can choose people, places, and things that help you, that help facilitate conversations. Right.
People that are open to conversations, meeting rooms that kind of constrain the number of people that can be there, a time frame that constrains what can happen for how long, and you facilitate the conversation that way.
Tools, applications that kind of orient or bring you towards smaller communities that are dedicated to some deeper conversations, and even artificial intelligence, which today is much more related to having a conversation than the last 20 years, 30 years of kind of going on to search engines and trying to find answers. Okay, make having conversations the goal, not searching for answers.
If you make looking for conversations the thing that you're after, then I think you'll get what you need to orient the energies of your life towards things that are truly productive. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, take care. You, Samuel. Name.