The nature of knowing
I’ve been expressing to people the difference between knowing something mentally and knowing something on a gut level.
Trying to narrow down the meaning, I’ve come up with at best an example:
You first know something is true on a mental level. You do the math proof and you can find the area of the triangle using the formula. And then, hopefully, you actually know something. This is when you draw a rectangle and then you automatically visualise the rectangle around it and realise it must be the half of that rectangle. It couldn’t be anything else.
What follows is all the ways I’ve been seeing the difference between the two.
Socrates and Knowledge
Socrates believed that no one willingly chose to do evil. All who did were ignorant in some way. Many think this is just silly, but one justification for this view is that doing evil actions damages the soul or the self. Thieves do not realise that by doing evil, they will make themselves unhappy. The Ring of Gyges.
So say that people know mentally that stealing is wrong: it’s illegal and if they’re caught no one will trust them.
But what people don’t truly know that it’s wrong: they don’t feel bad when they do it, they don’t feel like they’re hurting themselves when they steal.
It’s one of the least relatable examples, but it chronologically was my first.
Why Self-Help Books are Long – Tai Lopez is Wrong
Tai Lopez brags that he reads 100s of books every year. He reads the contents page of the book, will read a view pages, and then read the final page. He thinks he gets all the same knowledge that’s in the book, and that a lot of the books are fluff.
This doesn’t work, by in large, because much of self-help is not novel or complex. Behaviour change is complex. Over the book, the author re-iterates their point and demonstrates it from many angles. For a reader to agree with the author is not hard. For a reader to internalise the author’s points is what makes the book good.
This is also why I don’t bother with book summary sites like Actionable Books or Fight Mediocrity (though the latter is good as a blurb to see if you want to read the book).
Mythbusters vs Science Class
A bad science class would be one where everything is based on theory with no practicals. Without being able to see the indicator change colour, a titration is hard to care about. Without being able to drop two weights off a tower, you may forever believe that the heavier weight will fall faster.
Mythbusters is the opposite of this. Each episode is an experiment with n=1, but it’s far more entertaining than the layperson would find any research paper. Then the narrator comes in and gives some physics explanation, to reinforce that there’s a scientific reason why that’s the case.
At certain levels, Science becomes hard to demonstrate. Perhaps this is why it’s easy to intuit the relationship between speed, momentum and injury; it’s harder to imagine little cars running around an electrical circuit; and few have an intuitive understanding of Quantum Physics.
If you’re thinking that Mythbusters encourages a simplified, unthoughtful understanding of Science, that’s good. It’s dangerous when you gut-level know something without head-level know something. I hope to talk about that in the future.
System 1 and System 2
Cognitive Psychology has the idea of your brain having two ways that you interpret things: System 1 and System 2.
“System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
System 1 is useful because it helps your brain make fast decisions. Without it, you would never be able to choose between Water and Food, or you might react too slowly to a loud noise, or you may spend ages calculating which car to buy.
System 2 is useful because, well, it’s more often right. But it is time and energy intensive.
When you know a fact on a mental level, that’s System 2. You need to be very careful so that you don’t make a mistake.
When you know a fact on a gut level, that’s System 1. You don’t need to be so slow and methodical because your System 1 can work so much faster.
By the way, if it’s hard to remember, I remember that System 1 reacts quickly, and can skew your perception. System 2 arrives 2nd, after your emotions have already started reacting, and tries to make sure you’re acting rationally. If you want to know more about these two Systems, biases and better decision making, highly recommended book in Thinking Fast and Slow.
If you’re thinking that you’d prefer to just train your System 2 because System 1 is subject to so many biases, that’s good. It’s dangerous when you trust your gut-level knowledge without fact-checking it with your head-level.
Convincing Someone
You should not try to persuade someone by always being right. The “perfectly rational” should be glad and willing to realise when they are wrong, and change their decisions instantly. The atheist and the faithful seem to resist this.
Firstly, of course, because emotions. Pride, anger, fear, etc.
Secondly, if you focus on changing someone’s mind using pure logos, you’ll only ever be able to change their head-level of knowing. That’s what happens when someone (usually me) resentfully murmurs, “fine, just do it your way.”.
Convincing people requires them to mull over the idea themselves. Only once they have thought about it deeply will they have any type of change on a gut-level. And that’s when they’ll be happy to say yes. This is the epiphany (angels not included).
Start-ups have potential. Rejection is not not good. Cambodia is poor.
Now, I’m trying to recognise things that I know but not things that I gut-know. I encourage you all to do the same. Here are just a few which I have written below:
- Many start-up ideas have potential. I should stop being so sceptical of them and start thinking about what would need to be done in order for it to work.
- Rejection isn’t a big deal. The pay off of talking to people can be huge, while the downside is limited, especially if you won’t see them again. But I still don’t talk to strangers at bars.
- I should be donating more to charity. It is morally unjustifiable to buy anything non-essential for myself when I could be using that money to vastly improve the lives of others. I’ve yet to make the same argument re: my time and energy.
Can you see this going on anywhere?