pinkfloydpsw's Blog

We each are limited by what we know, but do we have to be?

If I pose you a problem you will try to solve it, of course you will, we are humans and we are good at that sort of thing, each person thinks they are anyways. Unfortunately though, there are many amongst us that vastly overestimate this ability in themselves, I have found this, in my admittedly limited experience, to be a product of an enlarged ego. Everyone wants to be thought of as a problem solver because people wish to have a usefulness, each of us wants to be validated, each of us hates to be in error. But some often make a problem worse by trying to solve it, and some overcomplicate the solution so as to make the task then of less value than the result. I have known all types. Am I a problem solver? That depends on the problem I suppose…

If I gave you a crossword puzzle you might try to resolve it, but try to solve a clue when you do not possess the word that fits, say it’s not in your vocabulary, and see what happens. This is a lesson in the limit of your knowledge, one that can be learned from. People who do crosswords regularly often also widely expand their vocabulary at the same time. Crossword on the knee, pencil in their lips, and the Oxford English Dictionary by their side. Say the clue is “when things are somewhat the same” and there are 10 spaces, well you might say “similarity”, but what if you didn’t know that particular word, you’d never used it or heard it in context, how would you ever get those spaces filled?

I say you might ask somebody else, look up the term on google maybe. This is to meet a barrier and attempt to overcome it, when you solve by looking beyond your experiences and knowledge, seeking. Conversely, if you chose to stay within your limits, your own intellectual capital, then you will present a solution that does not mitigate the problem or solve the clue. You couldn’t solve it unless you expanded your knowledge, and that takes you to first recognise its limit. In some people this seems like a weakness that they cannot handle at an emotional level, so they make the claim that their version of not knowing something must be treated as equal to the knowledge of those that do know. Now this shouldn’t work in matters of measure, and should be very difficult in matters subjective also because of reasoning.

Studies show (that’s always a dangerous way to start, but I heard this on a BBC Radio 4 programme, yet I can’t remember which one) that the quickly offered solution is rarely the most optimal, but is the most often selected. The reason for this phenomenon, I think, is that the person seeking the solution is seduced by the confidence of the early speaker. I find it fascinating that those persons that hold the power to ask for a solution, also so often remain wholly oblivious to the well known fault in this mechanism. Maybe they aren’t, and they choose to not know things they do know, like they are inconvenient.

We will concentrate on, not the quickly delivered unconsidered answer, but the limited one. “If you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail”, did you ever hear that one? If you only have one area of expertise then you will only ever offer that, regardless of whatever problem you are faced with. Each of us is limited if we do not seek the answer, if we use only our existing knowledge and experience. It’s not easy to say “I don’t know”, but it is useful to the goal to stand aside sometimes even if it is not useful to yourself. We have an option however, the internet allows each of us to have a resource available where the answer may be easily accessed.

“In the age of information, ignorance is a choice” – Donny Miller

We must trust something that gives us information, and in this we have choices. Trust a friend not to lie to us, trust a peer group, trust the government, trust public opinion, trust expertise, trust a publication, trust the media, trust what you can prove, or trust your own judgement. None of these are flawless ways to arrive at truth on their own. Descartes reduced what could be proven to a simple conclusion, just that he could say he existed because he was aware that he did. The famous phrase being Cogito Ergo Sum, I think, therefore I am. I think trust is often the problem, some people trust in the wrong place, like Dave down the pub, or your most charismatic neighbour, or the guy who seems to you to know what he is talking about simply because you do not. People are often wrong, not deliberately, but just because they repeat non true things perpetually. We all can at times be an echo chamber to a falsehood.

Wisdom may not be the knowledge itself, but the ability to pick the correct sources for knowledge. I need to arrive at a conclusion, I cannot move forward without it, who do I look to? Like Socrates I could seek out the people who should know and attempt to get them to tell me, but there is a flaw here in modernity if we look back to an earlier statement (and it may always have been so). If, in a Socratic manner, we start asking questions of the people who do a thing, in an attempt to gain knowledge from them, we might also find the problem he found, that all that endeavour might do is expose them as also not knowing. Rather embarrassing for them methinks.

I figure a lot of people are in the position they are in because they were the first to speak, not because they had the best thing to say. Many corporate structures are tainted by positivity, and the mistake gets repeated to the point where there is no wisdom. There is also the Peter Principle to contend with, where anyone who was good has been promoted until they weren’t, or the effect of sycophancy where personality matching is the criteria for opportunity to be offered. Some folks may even run their business like the employees are merely contributors to their ego, selecting people that are unimportantly inept, maybe so they have somebody to feel superior to.

We have to trust something, somebody, but what are we left with? Success, we can trust success… Nope, that one won’t work either in modernity, and for many reasons. Reality TV is a success but it’s not even the resemblance of reality, Ed Sheeran is a success (wow), Apple are a success despite their products often being overpriced and less useful versions of better devices, fast food is a success, cigarette companies are a success, hedge funds are a success, credit default swaps and capitalised debt objects are a success etc….. A success is no guarantee of correctness or best value returned.

There is one simple thing that can be trusted, one source of knowledge that stands above all others, science. That which can be repeatedly demonstrated, by anyone that is able, and which if differed would yield different knowledge, is our very best source of knowledge to trust. Karl Popper had a theory called the Falsification principle, whereby something can only be true if it can be falsified by changing its parameters, but if repeated without changing them holds the same result consistently. So if you cannot ever falsify without changing, then we have a truth worth trusting. Fuse wire is an example, if you buy a 16 amp fuse and try to put anything more than 16 amps through it it will deteriorate and open the circuit, and every 16 amp fuse will do exactly the same thing, it can only be falsified by changing the wire.

Paul S Wilson