Embracing Ignorance

Thinking for oneself is hard. It’s probably not our default setting. Or maybe I am phrasing this wrong. Maybe I should say it is hard to know what is true, and to have confidence that what one thinks is on sound footing.

Almost nobody, most likely nobody, in the wild uses axiomatic and rigorous language. So we can be confident that a certain share of what gets said is factually wrong, or logically wrong, even among people who trust each-other and believe that truth is being told.

I have started to get a blunt sense that even most of the very smart people I know, in day to day life, really don’t do much critical thinking. I don’t want that to sound like a condemnation, it isn’t. It’s an observation that applies equally to me. There is a lot of talk today about mindfulness. We need this talk, and it offers benefits, because we are creatures of habit. Habit is the opposite of thinking, because thinking logically is using willpower. A + B = C. It doesn’t come to us without pausing and considering. We don’t spend the majority of our day doing this, or we wouldn’t understand the word pause in this context! We pause and think. So it is our normal way of being that we interrupt, which is not thinking.

An observation. I have been watching lectures online, because I am trying to learn. Students almost never ask the instructors questions. I also remember being in school, and almost never asked questions, myself. There are a couple reasons I can think about. The first, it’s because everything is so new. You barely grasp the material, let alone have the wherewithal to pose an intelligent question. We don’t know what we are ignorant about. But the second reason is that it’s because most of the lessons are simple, and so student’s think they understand, and so no need to ask questions. They don’t believe they are ignorant. They don’t pause and think!

The second reason is related to overconfidence, but also fear. Overconfidence, because, we don’t see our own ignorance. Fear because people don’t volunteer their lack of knowledge about simple concepts. Feynman talks a lot about this problem. It is a problem. We learn the labels of things, like the names of the different birds in the forest. We don’t spend time making predictions about how those birds will behave, and seeing if those observations end up coming true. Watching predictions be falsified or confirmed is how we know things are valid. It;s the essential difference between book smarts and street smarts. People with street smarts know what they saw with their own eyes. What do we really know if we can name all of the birds, but then can’t say anything else about them? That is what Feynman asks of us.

It’s up to us an individuals to go out there and learn what is true and what isn’t. If only we can pause, think, and have the wherewithal to test what people present to us as facts. Unfortunately, the only members of our society that do not have this fear are children.

Maybe that is why we find children so amusing, and so enjoyable to be around. It is exactly the title of the Feynman book. It is the pleasure of finding things out.

I still feel this pleasure a lot of the time. It is one of the most important things to me. It’s the reason I can spend an entire day watching lectures on YouTube or building charts. At work that is all I do, really, get some data, make a chart, and think about it. It’s also the reason I don’t get much pleasure out of a lot of pop culture.

I have been reading Feynman again. Specifically, The Pleasures of Finding Things Out. Most of what I have to say is regurgitating ideas from him.

It’s lonely and disheartening. The will of groups is how we mostly organise ourselves. It could be business, sports, whatever, doesn’t matter. Usually there is some version of going with the crowd.

It means that to engage in conversation with others, we first have to come to understand the groupthink, and this is hard to do. It takes a lot of the resources we have available in our brains. We also have to keep track of what we, as individuals, believe and hold true. We also have to keep track of where, specifically, there is disagreement between groupthink and our personal knowledge.

Other people also have a tendency to reject ideas out of hand. I am also equally guilty of this. It’s because I do not pause and think about what people are telling me. I am not always mindful. I am not always paying attention. But most of us aren’t. We are on some level of autopilot.

And this is perfectly fine. I think most of the time what we are actually doing, as people, is understanding what is in eachothers heart. Or you could say we are trying to figure out a host of other things about people around us. Whether they are happy or sad, whether they need help, whether we need them to help us. I think we sometimes look at other animals and think that they act out of instinct, and that somehow we have no instincts. We are social animals, and our instincts are mostly social. That is what separates us from pretty much all other animals. Its the basis of culture, after all. Which gets us to the ability to reason in the first place. In a way, what we do on autopilot is necessary to even have the luxury of pause and think. 

Anyway, the title of this post is embracing ignorance. So I will explain that.

I used to think I understood many things about the world. But as the saying goes, the more you know, the less you understand.

It’s because I have built up all of this education, and I think I know some things, and then I go and make a chart, and nothing about the chart makes any sense. After doing this for a few years now, I have started to come to grips with how little there is to take as fact.

And then I have to go sit in meetings, and watch people talk about the charts. They have such confidence, unless you ask them simple questions about the chart. They don’t have answers. They might even get angry with me for asking the questions. Actually, often they get angry.

Confidence is all anyone seems to care about. That’s the groupthink. So then, you have to ask questions about the sacred truths of the groupthink. You have to find a way that, even in their accounting of the chart, it doesn’t add up. This gets really difficult.

They say you have to know how to solve a lot of equations, first, before you can ask any questions. And there are infinitely many different types of equations, and different experts all have different ideas about which equations are important. And you can spend all of your day just doing equations. And then end up back to where you started. The chart still doesn’t make sense.

That is because we really are ignorant. We would do better off if we started with the premise that the chart doesn’t make sense. Maybe we could make some progress. And we will probably never solve this problem, that people are mostly on autopilot. That they don’t pause and think, and the natural response is rejection of questions, and the questioner. It’s part of life.

So it goes. 

But it poses us with a choice. Each of us. Everyday. You have to chose which pieces of your reality you are going to challenge or not. This is what it means to live the “Examined Life.”

Ignorance is something we should not fear. It is the natural state of being a person. Deciding that it is bad is living in denial. There are infinities that exist within larger infinities. We can shrink the infinite. So we can shrink an infinite ignorance. We can find things out. It’s just a choice we make, to engage with the world in an honest way. It is only a sense of  entitlement that holds us back. And maybe a fear of the crowd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self Skepticism

Long time, no see.

Well… one of the challenges I have is that I don’t know how to begin topics.

 

I sat down to write about macroeconomics, because I have been reading a lot about it recently, and thinking about problems in macro. However, I am not good at macro, and never was. The problem I have is that I think macro is difficult because the ideas are not very good, I don’t think it is because I am not smart enough.

One of the biggest challenges for anyone to overcome is the feeling of inadequacy, and there are always people who will use their knowledge against you. However, you need not despair. People who really understand things, should, as a moral principle, try to bring more people into the fold. If they don’t, it is because they are jockeying for some sort of special status in society, whether they do this consciously or not is another matter…we all do it, let’s not get all up our own asses here. The trick is not to take it personally. There is always tomorrow, and people forget the dumb things you say if they are phrased as questions.

Back to macro. If it were in fact good, you would be able to write to the laymen the way that top physicists do. There is nothing comparable to “Brief History of Time” for macroeconomics. But not all of economics is this bad, microeconomics has “Freakonomics” which is pretty good. The ability to communicate is a very important litmus test for whether ideas are good, this is the thinking behind the “Feynman technique“.

But hold up. Let’s be “not wrong” for a minute. For macro, consider this: I may not have encountered good macro. So I reserve judgement at this point. The closest I have encountered to a good breakdown is probably my advanced undergraduate macro class. Credit where credit is due. I had one good teacher, at least, along the way. But even that class required me to master the basics of linear algebra, which is a bit of a barrier for the uninitiated.

As for the the graduate work. It got wayyy too math heavy, to the point that it was not philosophical at all. There is a difference between solving differential equations and understanding economic principles. We didn’t discuss the merits of using certain parameters, etc… it was all about “can you even solve for x, bro?”. Yes. I had adequate algebra to get the degree. Only to never, ever, not once ever use it in any job since.

Ok, math, as a subject is not under fire here. Thinking rigourously has been a useful skill, in every job or every person issue I have ever had. But it’s not economics!

For those who don’t know what I’m getting at: One of the dirty not-so-secrets about economics is that most academic economists only want students who can do the math, they aren’t there to teach so much as to weed-out. I presume they teach economics only to their favourite PhD students, which (I’m guessing) only happens around 2nd or 3rd year of of a PhD. And even then, I didn’t go that far, so I don’t know. But, a sad result is that I learned a lot of math, and how to solve problems, but I didn’t learn about the subject that my degree is for…at least not in macro. For that, I have had to turn to the economics in books after all that schooling to start to piece it together.

Food for thought: I was never required to actually read Adam Smith, I did that on my own. Nor was I required to read Keynes or Hayek. I still haven’t read Keynes. The economist we did read: Samuelson. Anyone heard of him? To be a little balanced here, we did read a lot of later scholars. B/c..that’s the idea of textbooks.

There are no shortage of moments where I read something in a book or The Economist or whatever and curse at my shitty education. Nobody likes to be the last one to get a joke.

But I digress…

Another issue I have is that I am very worried about “confirmation bias“. Which is the issue that you are more likely to accept one-sided explanations for things you already believe.

There is a line in 1984 that goes:

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”

― George Orwell, 1984

So, this works as an emotional truth, but not as a rational truth. The trick is with the word ‘best’. If by best, you mean the books that gives you that ‘rush’ of solving a mystery or whatever, sure…you are going to like things that validate your world view.

So my bias: I don’t like standard macroeconomics. As a student, I was on board with it up until I got to the part where they tried to teach me how to build aggregate demand functions. The models use a universal human being to solve their problem. This is not wrong, though. It’s like trying to simplify the world down to particles in physics. You want to know the “base” of your economy? It’s people, not one person.

The problem is NOT whether this is absolutely true, the problem is whether a model that uses the universal person creates useful predictions.

Does this crazy leap in logic give us a better understanding or not?

I think the jury is still out. But … what do I know?

I think people are diverse as a fundamental reality to confront. So there are population dynamics to consider. It matters what mix of people you have. I don’t think you can model past this. You have to bring it in to the modelling.

BTW: Holding this idea casts me outside of “correct” or “orthodox” economics. Every MACROeconomist (99%) you read in the news has submit to the “expedience” of the representative consumer. To do otherwise is to lose the special privilege of having your ideas taken seriously. I’m pretty sure. This drives me crazy. But I’m not really an expert. I admit I don’t understand the stuff.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to go that far into it today. Instead I wanted to jot down a guide for myself. Some sort of simple tool to help me know if I understand something. Actually, what follows is my attempt to redress the Feynman technique.

The reason is that I am starting to study alternative theories from the orthodox. There are a few, and they seem pretty good. There’s complexity theory, Minsky’s theories of debt cycles, and a few others. They all seem better to me than what is in the textbooks. And I want them to be true. So I need to devise a way to know whether I should buy these ideas where I reject the standard ideas.

It seems to me, I am likely to accept new theories more easily…so I should go back and get better at the classical stuff. But I need to know whether I understand it will enough to be able to choose the better alternative.

It’s probably beyond me to do this, but it’s healthy to have ambitions.

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Self Skepticism

This is a rough guide, and I am open to suggestions. Please do comment.

If you understand an idea you can communicate through or handle these three challenges:

1. Uniqueness: You can precisely separate the idea from more general ideas.
   1. E.G. The sky is different from ‘up’, because there are other concepts like ‘ceiling’ or ‘canopy’ that are also part of ‘up’.
   2. [Optional] you can pinpoint the first utterance of the idea: “This idea was first written down by Plato in ancient Greece”
2. Existence/truth: You can support the idea with appeal to something in the real-world, it will be at least difficult to refute.
   1. I can tell you to go outside, in an open area, and look up.
   2. Where are the clouds? What else would you call that place?
   3. Sometimes people call this the “sniff test” or “common sense”.
   4. [optional] In the special case of scientific concepts, this might be synonymous with ‘reproducibility’.
3. Play: You can bend the rules forwards and backwards with the idea, meaning you can search the for the ways in which an idea breaks down.
   1. You can play devil’s advocate.
   2. You know the common misuse of a concept (you know when other people are wrong).
   3. You can be creative, and enter discovery of new ideas.