If you arrive at the same conclusion, but you use reasoning to get there, as someone else who arrives there by prejudice or a ridiculous theory, then your conclusion is more valid, even though it has the same solidity. Now that is a strange thing to say, almost that one person can be more correct than another, but it matters. The reason it matters is reasoning itself (scientific or logical), without which we are employing guesswork and intuition. An argument for believing that a truth is solid may be the conjecture that it Stands to Reason from your perspective given the limited amount that you know about the subject. But this is not a valid reason to think that you are correct in comparison to good reasoning, where the conclusion would become different if the reasoning were to differ.
Being correct is a power, it is itself a reason for others to adhere or follow. The position of demonstrable, or reasonable, correctness, being the enabling force of that power, in an argument, in a battle, in a movement. I will caveat at this point that in an argument between lovers, there is no real point in being correct, there is nothing to be gained from being correct, and it may not help you to be correct, bear that in mind all you lovers! Bear in mind also here that I am talking about arguments, different stances on subjects that can be nearly proven, not about subjective matters. For subjective arguments we decide what criteria we use to form our position, in objective arguments we are bound by what is measurable, demonstrable, and reasonable logically. What is at least hard to argue with.
Let’s take an example, a person you know says the summers are getting hotter and shorter, they think that the reason why is that the god they believe in is angry about education postulating homosexuality as a naturally occurring human trait, which is in opposition to what their pastor tells them (that being gay is a lifestyle choice), and he (their god is male) has decided to punish the people, all the people, not just the gay ones, by making the crops likely to fail. Another person you know thinks that man-made global warming is the cause. They say that the weather is becoming more extreme because humans have been burning fossil fuels for centuries. You have yet another friend who thinks that it’s just the way the cycle of weather happens and believes that ice bores show that extreme weather existed long before humans had learned to release energy from coal or wood. Let us position you as undecided…
I would ask you now to examine where you will start in deciding what you will think? Not what you think, we haven’t gotten there yet. It is much more interesting to examine how we all arrive at our thoughts, and it’s a way of knowing ourselves. I’ve said in a previous post that most people, in my limited estimation, are blind to themselves. Most, I think, believe that they are rational actors who know what they know because they trust their own reasoning. I would argue strongly against the notion that people are usually open minded enough to be swayed by compelling evidence when it arrives. I think that I have more consistently observed the exact opposite, that people continue to hold on to disproved and false information when they can. The stronger the hubris, the tighter the grip…
So if we remove faith, and we use instrumental reason instead (the goal of the enlightenment), which statement from above cannot now hold valid reasoning? It’s the god one if you hadn’t already guessed, because it is in no way verifiable. The phenomenon of the summers being shorter and hotter may remain true, it is true in this scenario, but the two competing theories remaining in the argument have valid reasons to follow them in some way, and they will continue to be valid until more is known. That is not to say that either could be said to be 100% correct, note that they cannot both be 100% correct either because they are mutually exclusive (if one is true the other is untrue), but one of them will emerge, in time, as the dominant theory because more science will be done. Also they may both hold truths and form part of a bigger picture, so both may have truth in them (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). At any point where one wins out over the other, then those persons who were more swayed by the falling theory will have to change their thinking, lest they display the sort of dogma that knocked our god-as-an-angry-weather-manipulator followers out of the argument earlier.
There’s also the issue of what we can know, what is our capacity to know, how likely is our ability to grasp, and are we even interested anyways if the information is not immediately useful to us? I am a professional in my field, but I am what could be described as an all-rounder, capable of quickly learning enough of a thing to achieve a goal, then equally as quickly discarding the thing I learned because it may be years before I see the problem I just solved arise again. Expertise is a repetitive endeavour in a narrow part of a subject, a person may be a historian yes, but they may actually be an expert on the reign of Julius Caesar rather than all of history, and it would be silly to think that the all-of-history expert could even exist. I personally do not in any way specialise, because I do not work for, and have not recently worked for, any company or structure that requires any specialised work. When I was a cutter I knew everything there was to know about being a cutter, I was an expert in a limited field, but not an expert on the garment industry as a whole. What I do now is to rely on an experienced approach to tackling technical problems, a methodology, what I do NOT do is to use stands-to-reason thinking.
This mistake, too often made, leads people to spend five minutes reading something on a google results page and to conclude that whatever they read about must be simple to achieve because on the face of it it seems that way. What they miss is everything that happens by implication, experience data, a grounding in the subject. In an earlier post I mentioned the Dunning Kruger effect, a fascinating measured phenomenon that echoes the old adage that he/she has just enough knowledge to be dangerous. This is where a person reads the summary or the footnotes of a complex subject and doesn’t realise from them that they are written to remind the knowledgeable person, not as a guide for the beginner!
Dunning and Kruger observed in their studies that the person/s with the least knowledge very often heavily overestimates their level of competence and understanding, whereas the well-versed knowledgeable individual looks at complex scenarios and sees the breadth of what they do not know enough about to declare themselves an expert, they see what they must yet learn. The all-rounder knows that they are not an expert, and that there may be many times where they might need to engage with an expert. The actual expert tends to do only this one thing, hence expertise. So in my line of work the expert Network Engineer never sits down to help an end user, does not develop apps, rarely encounters a database, nor is involved in any way in the server maintenance. That s not to claim that they do not have abilities in those areas, just that they are not “Experts” in them. The confident inexperienced fool looks at the all-rounder and falsely concludes that they themselves are better suited to profess the solution, in this way they erode confidence further. Remember that to offer the solution is not to do the solution, everyone else’s job looks easy when you don’t have to do it, add to that that we often assume when we do not understand what someone does outside of our limited observations, that they do very little. We all do that one a bit.
Knowing how little you know is the first step on the journey to actually knowing. I have been in the company of so many people who have professed great knowledge about this and that subject, only to have them have faith shown in them and to then fail to meet that deadline, make excuses, blame something outside of their control, or widely miss the mark on that result they promised. One might assume that the people who exercise enablement powers might start to realise that the person who speaks first, he/she that has the immediate answer, may be very much on the left of the DK graph if we are talking about a complex matter being the subject of discussion. But then those enablers would have to start thinking in terms of results instead of hard work. Think of it this way, it is a perfectly true thing to say that you could successfully cut your lawn with a pair of scissors, the effort to do so would be undoubtedly huge, and the outcome would be a cut lawn, but it is ridiculous to think that that would be the best way to measure the validity of the endeavour or to judge the value of the work of the person who decided to perform the task in such a stupid way.
Is it better to do half a job quickly than to do a good job at a reasonable pace? I think no, yet this never seems to be the case in my observations. “He seems to be a confident fellow, let’s go with his suggestion/plan”, this must be what runs through the head of the Colonel, or the boss, or the sports coach. I am always wary of people who say “oh that’s easy”, these folks have historically made the most frequently occurring and unnecessary balls-ups that I have witnessed, or they are giving their opinion on a task that is somebody else’s. It’s simply too easy to say that something is “easy”, until you have to put your money where your mouth is and do it. That’s not to say that confidence doesn’t help, nor is it in every case undeserved, it’s just that it cannot be the only factor in the decision to empower.
On the other side of the coin there is the sometimes debilitating fear of the experienced non-expert person who has lost their confidence, or in some cases had it taken from them (Gaslighting is the term for that). This in many ways is where I am, too much has happened to me to not realise that I am now changed by my experiences, and I realise that you may be changed too by yours. I have to admit that I have the jitters in almost everything I do. Bear in mind that everything that progresses or moves toward being more optimal is a product of two forces, that of first disappointment, and then of vision. The seeing that something is less that it could be, a negativity toward it, then an imagining how it may be better, so a positivity, a hope for it. But negativity can be overwhelming if consistent, the jitters are the prize for being too long in that state.
In my working life I have been at the mercy of power-enabled and overconfident nincompoops too often, adrift from a supporting structure and held personally responsible for too much complexity for an all-rounder (I mentioned that earlier). In my personal life I have faced failure and loss and instability too many times not to begin to believe that everything good is merely temporary. I envy the ignorance of high confidence, and the peacefulness of having given up completely, in equal measure. Yet my compass is not pointed firmly in either direction, I still quite naively think that I can make a difference. These two perspectives being at the extremes of this particular Overton Window (a moving framework that defines the edges of normally politics by the position that looks like it is at the midpoint currently, but we’ll use it in this context).
When you give in you get calm, when you don’t know much you feel the confidence of the ignorant, somewhere in the middle you might wake in a sweat worrying about the potential of the task you have been doing to fail spectacularly, or the result of a decision you have made that has an impact on someone else’s life. Sometimes it may even be that you don’t remember if you left the fire door open when you went for a smoke. Far too often people tell me of how much better their lives are after they take a risk and make a change, a friend of mine is currently peppering me with that perspective, but I am risk averse by nature, I favour stability. Alan Watts gave a lecture on the falsehood of chasing stability, I watched it, I agreed with it, and of course I did nothing further. The best position to be in, paradoxically, is that of Moral Hazard. This is where you do not face the result of what you have done or decided, other people do. Think of sending the troops you do not know into battle, from the comfort of headquarters a thousand miles away, they are just stats on a board to you.
Once again my post has turned into a rant of sorts, but that’s what I do, I see the ills of things because I have been cursed with the brain of an curious person, and my catharsis is to write, to pour it onto the page so that in some way I may attempt to quiet the overactive nature of my mind. By this measure I can fool myself into thinking I have processed, that I have nothing more to say so I have no reason to keep ruminating about the thing that is bothering me, and in some way I am correct and I can now go to bed eased of it. I would encourage you to try this also, it works for me even if nobody ever reads it, that’s not the point of writing…
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