Neal's Puzzle of Life, A Mini-book: The First Conceit: Pragmatic Unwrongness (25 pages)

 

 

The following is the first of three “conceits,” or personal conceptualizations, of Neal’s puzzle of life that collect to a single mini-book. It begins with a few page intro, followed by the first (twenty-page) conceit. The following two of forthcoming.  

 

Intro to the Puzzle of Life 

 

When you see the “extra” in extralogical, you might assume it takes logic and makes it “superior.” Such a system would be better described as “super-logical.” A super-logical system would incorrectly suppose humans are merely imperfect logic machines that can be made “better.” But a pure (deductive) logic machine only directly deals in thought processes, little to none in truth, wrongness, delusion, bias, and circular reasoning. These extra advantages and disadvantages are the inescapable consequences of an extra-logical thinking apparatus, especially one produced by chance evolution. This is why the system deals so heavily in avoiding wrongness—and suspending judgment to maximize correctness when it becomes necessary. It takes extra things into account.

 

But if you take these extra things into account, it’s about as logical as you can pretty much get.

 

 

Only in hindsight do analyses follow logical progressions. In real time, the answers often arrive before being explicitly asked. Partly due to finite intelligence, partly by design, the unconscious has limited communicative capacity, hoarding a treasure trove of questions and answers.

 

If one’s imagination isn’t restricted to readily available frames of reference--and they can comprehend the nuances between how things are and how they could or should be--it adds variables to an already complex puzzle. True free thinkers aren’t just inclined to doubt the answers to the popular questions; they seek new questions. But questions don’t guarantee answers, and seeking questions doesn’t ensure you’ll find them. Having way more questions than answers and unable to build satisfactory models of the World, confusion inevitably ensues. Unidentified questions obscure the existence of the confusion, exacerbating it.

 

An expanded imagination creates tremendous opportunity for learning, but it hardly makes life simpler and easier. Victimized by the latter, the author was compelled to exploit the former. The result was what became known as extralogical reasoning (ER) and his three “conceits” of the puzzle of life.

 

From a certain point of view, a person’s point of view is that person. It dominates their perceptions and decisions, making their views relevant, however misguided. Following a similar line of reasoning, a person’s solution to the puzzle of life is the puzzle of life, and the puzzle is that person, even if never wittingly discovered. If a person ever solved the puzzle, the puzzle would change, making it fundamentally unsolvable. “Solving” the puzzle means iterating progressively better solutions as the puzzle continually changes. The puzzle of life, as you can see, can be viewed from different viewpoints. Each conceit, as I call it, is one of three major viewpoints. 

 

Like everyone else’s, my solutions are continually changing, even as I make this presentation. If you followed my blog, you could track its evolution over the past few years. A few years from now, maybe my conceits will be different; maybe there will be a fourth. No better at solving puzzles than the average nine-year-old, it’s not a term I would have picked. It was my mentor’s, Steve “Bish” Bishko, 1946-2015. He founded his own reasoning system to solve his puzzle of life called life engineering, the precursor to extralogical reasoning. As my mentor, Bish is probably my most regular muse. I often imagine going back in time to present the conceits to him.   

 

The first conceit is the most practical and accessible, based on “pragmatic unwrongness.” Pragmatic unwrongness emphasizes avoiding, recognizing, and learning from wrongness; suspending judgment; holistic management of one’s beliefs; and intelligent skepticism and humility. As I’ll show in all three conceits, management of beliefs is the same thing as life learning and managing one’s psychology.

 

The second conceit digs deeper into mathematical and scientific reasoning. It presents the sentient duality as a justification for pragmatic unwrongness: Self-awareness and self-delusion are a consubstantial duality, two of the same essence. I explain that even in the absence of cognitive and emotional bias, a thinking apparatus must still have logical, epistemic, and “self-referential” bias. And if it carries the inevitable constraints inherent to an evolutionary process, self-delusional will predominate. Self-understanding is not the absence of self-delusion, but sufficient awareness and management of it—through pragmatic unwrongness.

 

The third conceit will present my philosophy of Nature based on Complexity or Complex systems theory, which extends to human psychologies, the puzzle of life, and the modern world. And this will lead, yet again, to pragmatic unwrongness. 

 

 

The First Conceit: Pragmatic Unwrongness 

 

A lot of bad thinking results from confusing related things:  

Thinking for opinions (which are usually optional and should enhance learning) vs decisions (mandatory and not directly connected to learning); correctness vs practicality; truth vs. beliefs (i.e., criteria/needs for beliefs other than truth); intelligence vs logicality; judgment vs competence; wisdom vs raw intellect; knowledge vs understanding; skepticism vs open-mindedness (which are the same thing); intellectual authorities as a means to learning vs ends in themselves; and preconceived ideas (dogmas, rules-of thumb, etc.) intended to eliminate the need for context-based thinking /vs preconceived ideas to compensate for the inability to exercise judgment when lacking information and/or knowledge.    

 

Even if you don’t entirely agree with the forthcoming analysis of the above, if you can explain the nuances between them, you’re well on the way to “solving” the POL. Had I been able to do so before seven or eight years ago, the first forty years of my life might have been a lot easier. This conceit will attempt to reconcile these confusions.     

 

What most distinguishes a true solution to the POL is a foundational epistemology, or system of thinking and decision-making methods for application to context. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the dynamics of the thinking, decision-making, and learning. Sometimes people call it the study of how you know what you know. Epistemologists, as I’m now defining them, are those who favor context-based methods and rely as little as feasible on attachment to specific ideas, decisions, and conclusions. Dogmatists are defined as the opposite. Because most people don’t believe in epistemology or attempt to articulate epistemic methods, few truly discover the puzzle of life.

 

Confusion arises because no one can rely on just one. Methods can only be systematized so much without telling people what to believe and do, and no set of theories and principals could fully prepare you for every situation. Life and Nature wouldn’t be what they are without variables in a perpetual state of change. Sometimes, as mentioned in a few paragraphs above, one must rely on preconceived ideas when context-based thinking isn’t practical, and this is confused with attempts to eliminate the need for context-based methods. Many freethinkers don’t like dogmas, but, often reinforced by ego, they forget that you don’t have to agree with advice to take it (and can and should remain skeptical). 

 

There are many reasons to be skeptical of human judgment, both your own and others. The exhaustive research of Daniel Kahnemen and Amos Tversky, John Haidt, Phillip Tetlock, and complexity theory have shown this--much of which is examined in the works of Duncan J. Watts, Nassim Taleb, and Micheal Lewis, author of the famous Moneyball. Bias exists in many forms other than emotional. Skepticism of both oneself and others is an indispensable part of life learning, which goes well beyond knowing the answers. At the same time, this self-skepticism seems to challenge the prudence of context-based decision-making. 

 

A question that must be asked is: “How to manage self-skepticism with life learning and context-based methods?” The answer is pragmatic unwrongness.     

 

 

Pragmatic Unwrongness     

 

The core of pragmatic unwrongness is suspending judgment and decisions, whenever practical. It may be obvious that suspending judgment is the best means of avoiding being wrong, but the ease with which one can be wrong is apparently less so. Even less is that wrong beliefs lead to more wrong beliefs. Least obvious is that suspending judgment is also the best means of being correct even if the overall conclusions are the same. Knowing means knowing the answers; understanding means knowing how the facts that support them fit in with each other. If you suspend judgment, you’ll collect more supporting facts and will have a better chance of knowing how they fit together because analyses that suspend judgment are purer and less circular than ones that come to conclusions prematurely.   

 

Avoiding wrong beliefs is especially important for the mentally ill. Emotional states—depression, anxiety, and hyper-mania—are when people most want to make decisions and forms conclusions when it’s also the worst time to do so. This is not just because one’s thinking is impaired; it’s when beliefs most imprint on the subconscious, corrupting the victim’s thinking. The key to minimizing corruption is a general habit of suspending judgment and decisions to prepare oneself for these times, which curbs corruption and impulsive decision-making. 

 

Pragmatic unwrongness treats wrongness as more dangerous than correctness beneficial and necessary. Even if it’s done mostly subconsciously and if they’re riddled with contradictions and hypocrisies, everyone has a cognitive and emotional reflex to reinforce their beliefs in mutually supporting packages. It should, therefore, be assumed that the more a belief or model of reality deviates from the truth, the more the beliefs and models that will come to support it will also deviate from it, including future beliefs and models, which can only be guessed. Wrongness is a positive feedback loop—wrongness leads to more wrongness. The cognitive and emotional systems also reinforce behavior, goals, decisions, plans, and the language of models of reality with beliefs.  

 

The reinforcement of beliefs is strong enough that even when the subtlest elements of corrupted thinking are recognized and tossed out, their supporting beliefs can linger indefinitely. This makes it easy to mistake progress for cure and/or improvement for competence. Extralogical reasoning calls these vestigial beliefs, and the subconscious is rife with them. During emotional states, harmful beliefs that are rejected by the conscious can linger as latent beliefs, which might be accepted in one form or another following subsequent emotional states (many latent beliefs are also vestigial). Due to the cognitive and emotional systems relentless belief reinforcement, ER advises against believing in cures and guarantees: The former blinds you to vestigials; the latter cultivates the wrong attitudes and beliefs. 

 

Resulting from the same cognitive mechanisms, goals, plans, and correctness aren’t as necessary or beneficial as thought to begin with. Everyone suffers from the causation bias, the tendency to automatically assume an ascertainable and satisfying relationship between cause and effect. The tendency to jump to conclusions has been shown to be more than just a mistake: It’s what the thinking organ does by default. Combined with the social and emotional benefits of beliefs, this makes an opinion on any given issue seem much more necessary than the case. Nor is correctness as informative as believed. Correctness doesn’t necessarily tell you what requires most emphasis: You control some factors more than others; certain mistakes, especially in prioritizing, are more likely than others; and people have different strengths and weaknesses, both in resources and abilities. 

 

Reinforced by social and emotional factors, premature goal-setting and planning aren’t as beneficial as thought, either. The setting of specific goals is more of an effect of motivation than cause. In other words, yes, many motivated people do set specific, official goals, but they set goals mostly because they’re motivated; little if any of the motivation comes from the goals themselves. Confusion between cause and effect is a common example of confusion between correlation and causation, one of the commonest fallacies. 

 

 

Intelligent Skepticism and Humility and Learning 

As you might have deduced, pragmatic unwrongness, however intuitive, is not an entirely natural way of thinking. People are cognitively, emotionally, and socially programmed for opinions more than logic and truth. Epistemic beliefs, especially if coupled with ER Deism, is a viable alternative for those with the right proclivities. If you put your faith in your beliefs about beliefs, your knowledge of knowledge, your understanding of understanding, etc., it becomes easier to be objective about everything else. Among other things, full adherence to ER is not required to benefit from it, especially for mental health management. And pragmatic unwrongness can be incredibly empowering.      

 

True pragmatic unwrongness must be supported by intelligent humility. Intelligent humility and confidence are one in the same. Confidence is not thinking and acting like you’re great at everything; it’s about healthy acceptance, including of one’s weaknesses and limitations, even if they’re merely human universals. Confidence without genuine humility isn’t confidence; it’s hubris, which is more dangerous than ignorance. 

 

Intelligent humility requires intelligent skepticism. Intelligent skepticism is open-mindedness, and open-mindedness is mutual skepticism with a desire to learn. You shouldn’t just be skeptical of other people because they’re flawed and limited; you should also be skeptical of yourself because you, in one way or degree or another, have those same flaws and limitations, including a limited ability to understand things based on limited information. Skepticism without self-skepticism isn’t skepticism; it’s arrogance. Skepticism without skepticism of others isn’t, either; it’s meekness and/or intellectual apathy.  

 

And one must want to learn. Learning has nothing intrinsically to do with people. People are simply a means to an end. God and Nature don’t share their monopoly on truth with mortals. And learning is about a lot more than truth—but ideas, questions, explanations, understanding, proficiency, and wisdom (and counter explanations, questions, data, etc.; don’t underestimate the catalyzing effects of refutation and debate). This doesn’t come from worrying who says what, what their credentials are, or taking people’s words for things--nor blind contrarianism or dismissing other people’s ideas. It comes from intelligent skepticism.   

 

 

Intelligence’s Role in Judgment—and lack thereof—and the Root of Epistemic Weaknesses 

 

Many believe raw intellect is their judgment’s greatest asset. No doubt, this can be leveraged to one’s advantage, and this is largely what ER is. But raw intellect is more of an advantage—and especially guaranteed advantage—in matters of competence or proficiency. Judgment, decision-making under uncertainty, is different; judgment takes a bit more maturity and pragmatism. Above all, it takes the honed, self-conditioned discipline provided by pragmatic unwrongness. To exercise effective judgment, one must understand how easily their intelligence and knowledge can be nullified by cognitive and emotional bias—and learn to act accordingly. And there is no one more biased than those who think they’re impervious to it.

 

Emotional and social bias are profound, but they’re more reinforcers than root causes. ER asserts human bias is rooted in the cognitive system. The need for coherent or resonant models of reality led to the evolution of highly effective but no less flawed cognitive mechanisms. Collectively, I refer to them as Artificial Resonance. To avoid a perceived reality based on disjointed thoughts and images, Resonance doctors subconscious and sensory inputs to create the coherent experience people call reality. Resonance works by connecting related events and twisting them into causational-like relationships, creating a perceived reality based on a “harmonious narrative.”

 

A fallacy generally occurs when someone establishes a connection between variables and makes illogical simplifying assumptions about their relationship. This is exactly what Resonance does, making it the origin of most fallacious reasoning. Resonance is additionally responsible for: 

 

The overestimation of the ease and necessity of correctness; the tendency to blur observation and conclusions, causing one to leap to the latter; the availability heuristic, or underestimation of the potential significance of unknown information; the tendency to be almost infinitely more inclined to confirm one’s beliefs than question them (which is not the same thing as questioning other people’s beliefs; see also confirmation bias); most generally, causation-fixated reasoning that leads to confusing correlation-causation and the resulting ineptitude at probability and statistics (the study of correlation, highly relevant to the modern World); and much more. 

 

It doesn’t stop there. Working ex-post facto, Resonance rationalizes, reinforces, and/or simplifies prior conclusions and events, imparting hindsight with artificial clarity and perpetuating the metastasis of wrongness. 

 

It is only here where social and emotional factors come in, tremendously reinforcing them.

 

The intellect is not independent of the older and more influential cognitive and emotional systems. They’re an entangled unit unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts. I call this the emergent system. Order of influence is the emergent, cognitive, emotional, and intellectual systems—and people are cognitively, emotionally, and socially programmed to believe the polar opposite. Since the thinking organ’s tangible components are mostly subconscious and the overall psychology is dominated by an emergent system, this makes the most powerful components the least understood and most known component, the conscious, the least powerful. The thinking apparatus is, therefore, forced to put (otherwise) undue stock in conscious beliefs in its attempts to model itself. This is one of many reasons a self-aware thinking apparatus, engineered or evolutionary, will always possess inherent self-delusion, not merely fallible self-awareness. As discussed in Johnathon Haidt’s best-selling The Rational Mind and in the second conceit, no one is designed for rationality and truth; they’re designed for simulations known as rationalization and beliefs. The need for comforting, motivating, coherent, and socially strategic models of reality places tremendous constraints upon people’s beliefs, behavior, and perspectives. To reach one’s potential, one must gain self-understanding through awareness of their delusional nature—and act accordingly. 

 

If the intellect doesn’t manage the effects of other components, it will operate as if independent of them. But it’s not because it is independent, of course, far from it. It’s just that the intellect will manifest in areas where the others have comparatively little involvement, then in other areas, the intellect gets shut out, leading to distinct manifestations. Too much emotion can cause problems, but too little can, as well. The intellect evolved to enhance the more primitive cognition that was already there, not as a completely self-contained entity (note that cognition is a broader term then cognitive, which usually refers to the cognitive system). When operating optimally, one treats them as a unit, always skeptical but never ignoring their intuitions and emotions. Managing the biasing effects of the cognitive system requires greater study than the emotions because the system functions almost completely unconsciously.         

 

Personal experience and well-known research in cognitive psychology and sociology have shown that raw intellect bares little correlation with the magnitude of these biases, which manifest on a spectrum (see works of Nassim Taleb and Phillip Tetlock and Everything is obvious--once you know the answer: why commonsense fails us by Duncan J. Watts). If both intelligence and bias are high, a person will tend to be more logical than intelligent (this might even be the case if both bias and intelligence are comparatively low, albeit much less so). Testing and correction, via training and/or experience, are the best means of keeping bias in check. It is when one lacks information and/or a means of rigorously testing and correcting their understanding, when one is practicing judgment, that these biases really come into play.

 

Obliviousness to the cognitive, emotional, and emergent systems is demonstrated by how laughably overrated the predictive powers of conscious beliefs are; that is, how well the intellect can predict their behavior, perspectives, and other conscious beliefs. Many act like the right intentions and knowledge, and sometimes just one, all but guarantee appropriate action. Even the best of intentions means little without an intelligent plan and the intelligent execution of that plan. It’s wise to believe that a piece information is only as useful as your understanding of how to use it. In fact, especially in matters of judgment, overestimation of know-how is usually more dangerous than having the minimal know-how.   

 

The increased need for self-conditioning and self-imposed correction is the result of the lack of external conditioning and correction of the relevant area. Self-correction/correcting/corrective is a term in philosophy and science that refers to an activity or pool of beliefs’ ability to correct itself over time. It’s measured by the domain and its principals’ testability and trainability/teachability; incentives (usually social and monetary); mix of cooperation and competition; and purity/clarity of objectives, e.g., some fields have marketing, legal, and bureaucratic constraints. Math, science, and engineering are highly self-corrective. The mental health field--being an inexact science laden with legal, university curricula, bureaucratic, and marketing constraints—has much less (don’t pretend their patients aren’t clients). Life and society’s pool of beliefs have less still. 

 

Self-correction in science and engineering has allowed them to become humanity’s most successful fields. The rigors of scientific testing don’t just make it possible to prove ideas correct, but to disprove wrong ones. They triumphed in their pursuit of truth by exposing falsity and adjusting accordingly, often despite great individual opposition. As I've said, don’t let the survivors-biased nature of popular history fool you: Science rose to glory on the backs of its members’ failures far more than by standing on the shoulders of giants. Resultantly, Aero-astro engineering can put unmanned rockets into orbit around Mars; quantum mechanics can predict the magnetic moment of an electron to one part in a trillion; cell phones and blue-tooth allow people to talk to someone half-way around the world while jogging; and automobile manufacturers pump out dozens of cars day after day. 

 

The “easier” social sciences are much less self-corrective, explaining lesser success at treating mental illness and predicting wars and the economy. Psychologist Phillip Tetlock, for example, gathered predictions from one hundred political pundits over a twenty-year period (1984-2004) and found the pundits were not only outperformed by the simplest statistical methods, but barely did better than random guesses. Chronicled in the events of Micheal’s Lewis’s award-winning Moneyball, Billy Bean, former GM of the A’s, made the best recruiting effort in MLB history relying solely on statistics. The social sciences and pedestrian endeavors with less self-correction are “easier” largely because of the relative lack of rigorous testing, which readily allows for an exaggerated sense of understanding. Putting it crudely, there’s more room for bullshit.

 

Personality and personal orientations are also relevant. Yogi Barra once said that “In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they are different.” A central part of thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, etc. comes down to understanding what’s importance and what isn’t and their relative importances. Often due to nature and/or training, the perspectives of highly intelligent people are more likely to be skewed toward the abstract and theoretical. This is all well and good if you want to be a physicist--but not necessarily if you want to be a pragmatist, manager, or leader (if such a thing is more than nominal). 

 

One’s sense of importance is arguably more influenced by personality and conditioning than straightforward teaching (note conditioning and teaching are different, despite obvious overlap). If you treat something with an artificial sense of importance, you cultivate an artificial sense of importance. Heavily immersing in theory, especially the wrong type, skews one’s sense of importance accordingly.

 

 

 Intelligent Skepticism

 

Consistent with this conceit’s thesis, part of having good judgment is knowing its limitations—and your own. The less you rely on direct evidence, data, and tested knowledge and solutions, the more you rely on judgment; and the more you rely on judgment, the more vulnerable you are. It’s tricky business. On the one hand, ER advocates context-based thinking and decision-making; on the other, it preaches the unreliability of judgment. For all it’s a priori theorizing, ER still believes in the scientific method and that direct evidence is more reliable than indirect evidence and expert opinion. An example of indirect evidence is using someone’s qualitative reasoning skills to assess talent for physics; direct testing evaluates how well someone does learning physics. Philosophers—and judgment itself--find niches because not everything can be/has been tested and experimentalists and empiricists need theories to guide testing.  

 

It takes skill and discipline to engage in context-based thinking without unduly relying on judgment. The key to good judgment is understanding the contrasts between independent and dependent thinking and finding the right balance. 

 

Dogmatists give dogmatism a bad name. It isn’t so much that dogmatism is foolish; it’s dogmatists that are. When people reach failure with the ostensible use of certain methods, their critics are too quick to blame the methods without taking sufficient look at how they were used. Something is only useful for what it is—not more, less, or something else. Reality is often a poor model for how things could or should be. Save ignoring context, the biggest mistake dogmatists make is failing to be dogmatic. They think their relying on sufficiently tested ideas, well-trained experts, and expert consensus but don’t understand testing, training, and expertise generally. This is unfortunate—because neither do the “experts.”

 

The first thing one must do to follow expert advice is find the right field, not merely one they think is similar. Not only does history show that experts are often wrong, but barely do any better than the layperson outside their specific area of training. For example, many think bodybuilders and powerlifters are necessarily experts on athletically-oriented strength training. The “sports” are completely different, and absolutely none of it’s athletic. But as expected, when the advice of bodybuilders and powerlifters is solicited, four out of five times the “experts” prove as oblivious as those who depend on them (this may be less the case than it once was). 

 

Next, don’t merely solicit the opinion of one expert. Expert consensus is hardly assured. They frequently disagree, and because competition catalyzes learning, a field’s self-correction and long-term progress depend upon it. Society’s pool of beliefs is laughably inconsistent, and nuanced elements of Resonance obfuscate just how much. 

 

Because judgment isn’t as reliable as competence, neither is expertise from one field to the next. Self-correction among fields and pool of beliefs exist on a wide spectrum. None have zero; none have one hundred percent. Practiced does not necessarily mean tested, or equally tested. Some things aren’t as easily tested; for example, psychology is a much less exact science than classical physics. Skills in some fields are more trainable or teachable than others. If you’re smart enough, you can be trained to solve math, physics, and engineering problems (even if not to make novel discoveries). This is less the case for mental health professionals, who rely more on judgment (see article on pychiatric diagnostics). Some areas, such as sports, have problems with controlled testing—testing methods in isolation to eliminate obfuscating factors. Sports guarantees winners regardless of the quality of competition and their methods, allowing wrong beliefs to persist. Sometimes, only packages of methods are/were tested. They aren’t/weren’t controlled, and seeing how it fits with other packages may be infeasible. Some areas/fields like personal training and the mental health field are impurified by society’s pool of beliefs and marketing, legal, bureaucratic, and university constraints. 

 

University constraints should not be ignored. Ideally, training in the mental health field, where judgment is so crucial, should be based on wisdom first and knowledge second; but constraints, along with the greater teachability of knowledge, ensure the opposite. This isn’t just a problem because of a lack of the right training; its absence conditions the wrong perspectives and working beliefs. As said, one must understand the relative importance of knowledge. Thanks to Resonance, if you treat something with an artificial sense of importance, you cultivate an artificial sense of importance. Because everything must be done in university, psychology and exercise science majors, for example, spend way too much time studying non-action-worthy theory that skews their sense of importance.              

 

One must research and question methods and principals, especially if they want to learn. This includes questioning the experts directly, which doesn’t have to be oppositional. On the contrary, it should be educational—both for you and the expert. Remember, you can’t be open-minded without being skeptical and vis versa. This essay focuses on decision-making, but you often can’t separate them, especially since the experts themselves haven’t done enough learning. If you ask questions the right way, the experts might even thank you for it.    

 

Finally, don’t just evaluate the field, but the specific principals. They should ideally be both testable and have been tested. Falsifiability is best explained by defining its antonym. A non-falsifiable theory is one that can at best be proven right, never wrong. If a theory is falsifiable, there are hypothetical tests that could disprove it, but if the theory is valid, these tests fail, reinforcing it (this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily proven). The longer a theory persists, the better the chances it’s valid. At the same time, lingering hypotheses left unchallenged often harden into “facts” without adequate testing, reminding you that time is merely a heuristic.

 

But even if you choose to take expert advice, you shouldn’t believe it unless you understand it. Again, an opinion is probably optional. A consequence of Resonance is that it will try to turn your models of reality into (what you perceive as) reality itself, making you vulnerable to needless wrongness.

 

But context-based thinking free of experts must still be understood. Nothing in life exists in an isolated universe: Beliefs, decisions, goals, interests, attributes, abilities, pieces of knowledge, etc.—all interact with themselves and each other in complex and dynamic ways. Life and Nature wouldn’t be what they are otherwise. The variables are always different, and how two variables interact is often influenced by the other variables they interact with. Moreover, being inexact sciences with a host of criteria and often little supervision and direct incentives, most life-related areas involve low self-correcting pools of beliefs, including society’s and those of the mental health field.   

 

Nevertheless, those with the worst judgment, however, are those who rely on it most, people who can’t be bothered with testing, direct evidence, and the possibility there might be important information they don’t have. Hubris is more dangerous than ignorance; overestimation of know-how tends to be more dangerous than the minimal know-how, especially in matters of judgment. Many may think they’re engaging in context-based thinking yet base context only on what they already know and their accompanying assumptions (or what they think they already know). Knowing facts doesn’t mean you know how they fit together; knowing many facts doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have many, if not more, false assumptions. No one with good judgment readily turns one fact into several. Sherlock Holmes, operating in an area that was half competence besides, was known for turning one fact into a few more, not many. Interpolations and, especially, extrapolations are more often fallacious than not.   

 

For these reasons, information without testing is potentially dangerous. 

 

 

A Summary of Thinking and Decision-making Steps in Judgment 

 

Since this conceit’s an overview of pragmatic unwrongness, I will merely summarize ER’s principles of judgment below, leaving exposition for upcoming articles and the eventual book.  

 

The first principle of judgment is Suspend judgement as much as practical. The second, Don’t get burned by what you don’t know; i.e., don’t fail to acquire attainable information; account for what you can’t feasibly attain. Third, Be wary ofthings you think you know that haven’t been adequately tested. Fourth, Don’t get burned by personal flaws. Five: Apply logic.

 

In extralogical reasoning, the extra comes before logic.

 

 

Recognizing and Learning from Wrongness

 

One learns, or truly learns, when they find out they have flaws and/or incompleteness’ in their understanding of something and adjust accordingly. This first means learning the specific lesson, then integrating the lesson into your general understanding of the relevant topics. Thus, one turns knowledge into understanding. The second requires recognizing symptoms and connecting them to “disease,” so to speak. If done well, this will likely include epistemic learning—i.e., what mistakes did I make in my thinking; what can I do to prevent future mistakes; what fundamental misconceptions might this relate to?  The “reflex” to connect symptoms to disease is the symptom reflex, and honing it is the key to successful life learning. 

 

Lacking this reflex is one of the defining symptoms of insanity, which, in turn, is almost always accompanied by an inability to turn intellectual into working beliefs (the lack of symptom reflex covers the clichés of repeatedly doing the same thing after repeatedly getting undesirable results and/or not learning from mistakes). They’re sometimes dubbed “disconnects.” Victims struggle to connect symptoms to disease, and they suffer from disconnects between intellectual and working beliefs. The symptom reflex is often suppressed by mismanaged emotions, including an inability to compensate for a lack of emotional response to mistakes.     

 

The best learning occurs when you recognize and respond to wrongness. This is why failing in life is so integral to understanding it. Failure reveals more flaws and incompleteness’ in your understandings than success while provoking a greater emotional response; and conscious beliefs insufficiently supported by emotions have little effect on people’s decisions and perspectives. I don’t believe in more than discouraging failure. Barring extreme cases, parents shouldn’t stop kids from failing by force, manipulation, or pressuring them to conform to the “guidance” of those who supposedly know better. And yet parents do, even in cases where their attempts inevitably cause way more immediate harm than good. However powerful, the human intellect is mostly an appendage to a social and emotional psyche, a psyche, ironically that’s all but defined by its need to believe exactly the opposite.       

 

But the precious few who excel at life learning don’t just connect systems to disease and turn knowledge into understanding: They perpetually rehabilitate. They know it’s unwise to believe in cures and keep their eyes peeled for vestigial beliefs, the supporting beliefs lingering after the elimination of major misconceptions. Belief networks are in perpetual flux, and transitory beliefs in the form of gut reactions and the like constantly arise, micro-corrupting networks (discussed in the third conceit). Life is about being a work in progress; that’s the journey. The destination is the asymptotic approach to solving its puzzle.   

 

 

Many respect people with strong beliefs. I respect those who are smart about their beliefs. But someone who’s smart about their beliefs knows that this goes beyond having beliefs that are smart. Sometimes, being smart about your beliefs may mean boldly proclaiming them at the expense of offending people, but most of the time, it’s about knowing what not, or not yet, to have an opinion on. Ultimately, it’s about holistic management of beliefs, which is synonymous with life learning and managing one’s psychology. You’re charged with the operation of a network you have limited control over; be careful what you allow into it. 

 

In the end, you don’t exercise selectivity because you don’t care about your beliefs: On the contrary, it’s because you care about them—and the puzzle of life.   

 

 

The next conceit presents the sentient duality--that self-awareness is always accompanied by self-delusion—as an alternative means of understanding pragmatic unwrongness.