Author: Christopher

Agency is not fundamental. Knowledge creation is.

What people call “agency” is a surface manifestation of a deeper capacity: the ability to create explanatory knowledge that expands the space of available actions.

A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others – not by simply taking over another’s opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others

― Karl Popper

To be rational is to try to solve problems by seeking good explanations and actively pursue error correction by creating criticisms of both existing ideas and new proposals.

Links to this note:
Change the Problem Landscape

“The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.”

—Francis Crick

“A free market is a continuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority is free to demonstrate. The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. Those who are unwilling remain unrewarded—as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces. The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters…”

– Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”

― Gilbert K. Chesterton

“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

― Alan Watts

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Don’t centralize the error-correction process. Instead, install a problem that people care about. A genuinely felt problem is the most powerful generator of creative problem-solving that exists. To yearn for the sea is to accept that the destination is not a fixed point but a permanent orientation toward the unknown.

June Huh in an interview said the following:

Q: What drives your passion for math?

June: In practice what motivates us to pursue our goals whatever that may be is the pursuit of beauty. So we usually do not have any practical applications in mind when we are constructing our theory. What motivates us instead is the internal beauty of the things that we create. These are so intricate and so unreal so that some people think that we are not creating these mathematical structures, instead we are discovering it from some sort of nature, and this is what gives us the pure joy, and I think the motivation is very similar to that those of artists.

The pursuit of beauty and the yearning for the vast and endless sea respresent the same thing, a problem so powerful it moves you forward.

“The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears”.
– Karl Popper

See also:
Christopher Alexander – “Which Has More Life?” Questions
True Practice Makes Perfectly Fun
The Most Powerful Ideas For Progress

Links to this note:
Mental Health Depends on Knowing Which Problems to Reject
The Most Relentless Source of Paralysis that Exists

I love this idea of a total random stranger helping people solve their really hard problems and s/he disappears before they can thank him/her.

See: The Good Samaritan

“It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.”

– David Deutsch, 2022, The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 13: Choices