Wittgenstein’s “ladder” is a metaphor for a temporary way of talking or thinking that helps you reach insight, even though, strictly speaking, it isn’t ultimately the right or meaningful way to state what you’ve come to see. You “climb” it to get oriented, then “throw it away” once it has done its job, because taking it as literal truth becomes misleading.
Links to this note:
Brett Hall on Goals
Controlling structure undermines intrinsic motivation; enabling structure supports it
I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.
– Karl Popper
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
Links to this note:
A Genuinely Felt Problem is the Most Powerful Generator of Creative Problem-Solving that Exists
(One of my favorite books)
Adams smiled. “Well,” he said, “since I had that name wished upon me I have given considerable thought to that very question, and I have decided that picking out the obvious thing pre-supposes analysis, and analysis pre-supposes thinking, and I guess Professor Zueblin is right when he says that thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don’t like to do any more of it than they can help. They look for a royal road through some short cut in the form of a clever scheme or stunt, which they call the obvious thing to do; but calling it doesn’t make it so. They don’t gather all the facts and then analyze them before deciding what really is the obvious thing, and thereby they overlook the first and most obvious of all business principles. Nearly always that is the difference between the small business man and the big, successful one.
Robert R. Updegraff, Obvious Adams, 1916
Imagine you’re wearing a pair of glasses with colored lenses, like blue or pink. Everything you see through those glasses looks a bit different because of the color of the lenses. Theory-ladenness is kind of like that, but instead of glasses, it’s about the ideas and beliefs in our minds.
Let’s say you believe that dogs are super friendly. If you see a dog wagging its tail, you might think, “Oh, that dog is happy to see me!” But if someone else is a bit scared of dogs, they might think, “That dog might bite me!” Even though you both see the same dog, what you think about it is different.
This happens because everyone has their own ‘mental glasses’ that change how they see and understand things. It’s like each person has their own set of rules in their head that tells them what things mean. And this is not just for seeing things, but also for understanding them.
So, theory-ladenness means that what we see and think about the world around us is influenced by ideas in our head. It’s like each person has their own special way of seeing things, based on their own experiences and ideas.
Why do we have these rules in our head? What purpose do they serve, and how can we be more aware of them?
Time stamp – 54:18
Chris Anderson:
I just want to ask you this last question David, which is, if you could implant in the minds of the good majority of people on this planet a single idea what would that idea be?
David Deutsch:
I think it’s got to be the idea of optimism, that all evils are due to lack of knowledge.
Chris Anderson:
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait yes you so you just gave a definition of optimism there that is not what most people think of as optimism. Most people think of optimism as a feeling of hope about the future your definition’s different so explain that.
David Deutsch:
Well hope that isn’t based on an explanatory theory is what they call a vain hope. It’s whistling in the dark. Optimism as I define it has to do with knowledge. It’s not a prediction of the future. It’s an explanation of failure. If you explain failure as being inevitable, or due to some insuperable malevolent force, or just the way things are then that’s a recipe for stasis, which is a recipe for failure and eventually death.
Therefore I think that all failure has to be explained in the form: The reason we didn’t succeed is that we didn’t know how to and the knowledge of how to is in principle attainable. We don’t have it now but we could have it in the future if we do the right thing.
In fact it follows from this whole conception of knowledge that we’ve been talking about all this time that optimism has to be true otherwise there would be a limitation which would mean the supernatural and all that stuff. The arguments are watertight all the way from the scientific worldview to optimism in my view.
Chris Anderson:
So here’s here’s how I would distill this David Deutsch world view which I have to say David I find quite an inspiring world view. So here we are this homo sapien you know we’ve had this surprising moment of liftoff where we’re able to create new knowledge, new understanding, but it’s a fragile thing. It’s full of errors, full of mistakes. If we could inspire everyone out there to adopt the mindset that knowledge was precious and that when things go wrong on our planet it’s not because there’s some evil force there that needs punching in the gut and spitting out. It’s just because we’re not understanding something and our job and our duty is to seek to understand, to look for those errors, to correct them, and if we were to adopt that mindset then there’s there’s literally no limit to the journey that we can go on together, a journey of growing knowledge and unlimited creativity. And kind of like lives of wonder and so forth. I mean that’s what I take from you that knowledge is not a thing for schools, libraries, or whatever. It’s this superpower that humans have developed if they’re willing to look at it the right way.
David Deutsch:
Well put. I agree and we must also expect to make lots of mistakes. Knowing that the problem is to create the knowledge doesn’t mean there’s an automatic way of creating it. In fact, it’s conjectural, we’re going to make many mistakes that’s why we have to set up institutions that can correct them.
Chris Anderson:
And so mistakes should be viewed as gifts in a way as long as you learn from them and adjust as a result of them. They’re a gift.
David Deutsch:
John Wheeler said that our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible (without dying of course).
[Laughter]
I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself.
– Stephen Wolfram, Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
See also:
Change the Problem Landscape
They say practice makes perfect but the truth is true practice makes perfectly fun. Mastery isn’t the opposite of novelty. True mastery manufactures novelty by revealing ever-finer distinctions (you literally perceive more). Outward sameness, inward variation. Boredom is often a rational protest against repetition that isn’t actually improving an internal explanation. Repetition only creates knowledge when each pass tests a live conjecture and updates a policy (perception, attention, timing, inhibition). If there is no hypothesis, no feedback, and nothing to compress or discard, your mind correctly predicts no new reach so it generates boredom. When a routine lacks an error signal, novelty seeking is your mind’s way of escaping a no-learning cul-de-sac.
Links to this note:
A Genuinely Felt Problem is the Most Powerful Generator of Creative Problem-Solving that Exists
Free will is the ability to create explanatory knowledge that expands one’s choice space.
See: How to not be an NPC
The Bucket Theory of Mind assets that our knowledge consists either of accumulated perceptions or assimilated, sorted, and classified perceptions. According to this view our mind resembles a container in which perception and knowledge accumulate. This view is false.
Expectations, that is dispositions to react, must precede every observation and every perception. Perceptions and observations play a role in modifying our dispositions to react.
– Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, Appendix I: The Bucket and Searchlight: Two Theories of Knowledge
The world delivers too much stimulation for any organism to register “as experience” in an unfiltered way. So any perceiving system must select: what counts as relevant, what to ignore, what to treat as the “same thing” over time. Selection requires a prior standard i.e. a guess about what matters. That prior standard is an expectation (a disposition to treat some patterns as significant). Therefore, expectations precede perception, because perception-as-experience is already perception through a filter.
Even very simple organisms react selectively to stimuli (approach food cues, withdraw from threats). Those selective reactions depend on innate dispositions, built-in “preparedness” to treat some inputs as triggers for specific actions. A newborn (and a fetus) has functioning sensory pathways only because a lot of structure is already “pre-installed” (feature detectors, reflex arcs, attentional biases). That pre-installed structure is a set of expectations in Popper’s sense: preparations for certain kinds of environments. Therefore, expectations (dispositions) come first; sense experience modifies them later.
Links to this note:
The Mind as an Ecosystem
What is a Memory System?
See Life in Ways that Help You
