An Autodiact's Bible, #15
Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 3c
This is the fifteenth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.
Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14
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Continuing on with our survey of situationally-appropriate learning techniques…
Chapter 3:
The Nitty Gritty (continued)
Tool 2: The Ends Justify the Means
“The ends justify the means.” Classic motto of the tyrannical, the unscrupulous, the mercenary, the grandiose, and those looking for a glib justification for atrocious actions. Most of us are taught from an early age that this kind of thinking is self-serving at best, evil at worst.
“The ends justify the means” is the kind of thing people say when they think that their needs and desires are more important than anyone else’s. It’s the kind of thing nobody really believes (malevolent narcissists aside), but everyone uses as an excuse from time to time. It’s the visa stamp on our passports during our day-tripping tourist excursions to the dark side. Nobody in their right mind would seriously endorse it.
Pity that it happens to be true—at least, when understood as a truism, rather than as a moral pronouncement.
The ends do justify the means, always—just not in quite the way that folks who are tempted to use it as a glib excuse generally mean. They mean that “Because the ends I seek are desirable, I am morally justified in doing whatever I must to bring them about.”
Or, more succinctly, “The intended ends justify the means.”
Reality looks more like this:
“The achieved ends justify the means.” Whatever ends materialize are appropriate consequences of the means employed, given the initial conditions.
We know this is true because even a casual glance-around at the universe tells you that every event is the effect of a preceding cause, with every cause itself being an effect of a previous event. Big fleas and little fleas, and so ad infinitum.
“The ends justify the means.” In other words, you can learn about something by observing its consequences.
The example of inversion I used in the last section (where I reasoned backwards from effect to cause) was a sort of sideways-importation of this tool, but it isn’t the finest use available. The best use of this tool isn’t about determining the cause of something by observing its effects, but of coming to grips with a phenomenon’s nature by observing how it works.
This is particularly useful because many things in the world, especially in the human world, have an ontology (a structure and nature) that does not line up entirely with their teleology (their intended or evolved purpose). This happens more often than you think, because of something that folks in the maker community call “re-purposing” and that evolutionary biologists call “tinkering.”
Think of the Gutenberg Press. Block type had been invented in China in the third century AD and had diffused along trade routes to Egypt, Byzantium, and Europe by the twelfth or thirteenth century. These blocks allowed hand printing and duplication at a healthy clip compared to hand-copying, but the blocks did have to be carved and then wielded by hand (very like today’s rubber ink stamps). As much of an improvement as block print is over manuscript, it’s got nothing on the printing press.
But the printing press...wasn’t a printing press. It was a wine press.
And the wine press, itself, was a re-purposing of the screw-driven pressure pump allegedly invented by Archimedes in ancient Greece.
Johannes Gutenberg took that re-purposed screw in press form, swapped out some bits, added a frame to hold down the paper, and made a second frame to hold the printing blocks, and bam! The telos of the screw and the press were hijacked by the telos of the printing blocks, and their ontos expanded as a result of this hijacking.
This is the essence of engineering (and all creativity): creating new things by combining old things.
But it happens in other ways too. Garden variety ways. Recycling, for example, converts trash into treasure (when the base material is valuable enough). The Roman Coliseum was originally a horse racing and gladiatorial arena, but in the middle ages it became a garbage dump, and in the modern era it’s been repurposed as a tourist attraction. The human appendix used to aid in digestion of heavy plant matter, now it maintains gut health. Makers shop scrapyards and build lamps, sculptures, power tools, and cars out of the detritus they find there.
The world of biology is full of examples of this kind of ontological/teleological swap-and-shift game. Take sex, for example. The telos of sex is to create genetic variety and thus raise the odds of differential survival among the descendants whose re-mixed DNA will be more resistant to existing diseases. But the ontos of sex is that it provides pleasure, recreation, bonding, mediates expressions of dominance, enables social cohesion, and drives achievement, creativity, and competition for attention (among all social species, not just humans). And, in humans, that expanded ontos has created a new layer of telos: sex creates and mediates pair-bonding, which is essential to the long-term survival of our species. It would not be a reductio ad absurdem to say (as Freud did)1 that the essence of civilization is the harnessing and (to some extent) re-purposing of the sex drive.
By bearing in mind that “the ends justify the means” (in a descriptive sense), you will remind yourself that you must examine the consequences of a thing to truly understand its nature. Whether you’re examining an ideology, a ballot initiative, a potential romantic partner, an exciting theory in a field of study, or a complicated piece of machinery, the ends achieved by that thing—its consequences and effects—will tell you a great deal about its nature (its ontos) that you might not otherwise learn except through tripping over them.
This is not just precautionary. If you can sketch enough of the effects of something, you can begin to get an idea about what it is not (via negativa). And, following that logic, you can observe the effects of a phenomenon, treat them as multiple lines of evidence, and follow them back to the place where they converge. You will use inductive reasoning to form a hypothesis about what it must be and how it must function, which you can then (hopefully) find a way to test.
Again, we find that our tools back us into a form of the scientific method and Type-1 learning.
Tool 3: Assume a Boring Reason (Occam’s Razor)
There’s a body in the library. Five minutes ago, the party’s two hosts ere in the library, and the guests out in the parlor heard them shouting. Now one of the hosts is dead, and one is not.
The survivor is the dead man’s wife, who was angry with him for hitting on her sister, and stood to benefit from the insurance. Obviously, she’s the killer.
Not so fast! she says. It’s a frame-up. See the scuffs on the desk? He jumped up on it and then dove head-first onto the fire poker. He wanted me to suffer, to be publicly humiliated and then executed because I wouldn’t let him sleep around!
Witnesses confirm the story about the sister. They also point out that the wife has been publicly berating and emasculating her husband for years, and that he had been severely depressed—even suicidal—for as long as they can remember.
So, Detective, who’s telling the truth? Is this a murder over sex and money? Or is it a Byzantine revenge-suicide plot with a lot of sadism thrown in?
Well, if you’re using this tool, there’s no question at all: It’s a murder.
Not much fun for fans of Hercule Poirot, but a lot easier to solve.
“Assume a Boring Reason” is a heuristic—a rule of thumb—to help out with charting those connections between things you know and things you learn.
One of the problems with the way the mind works is that it loves a narrative. It loves narratives so much it invents them when you’re not looking. Let two facts sit in a room, and the moment you’re not looking straight at them they’re at it like a couple of teenagers in the back seat of a Buick. Next thing you know you’ve got a baby narrative on your hands, and every fiber of your being is bent on protecting the thing so it can grow up to be a beautiful theory.
A “narrative” is a story you tell about how facts are connected to each other, and, unfortunately, your mind doesn’t actually care if the narrative is true so long as it seems to make sense of things. Your mind will actively reject truths that threaten the plausibility of your narratives, and it’ll do it with or without your active consent.
This is why I talk throughout this book about submitting to the “discipline of reality” in one guise or another. Seeking out disconfirmatory evidence is essential to the learning process—it’s hard to learn from trial and error if your errors are invisible to you.
Constructing an accurate narrative, then, is important, and we need a few tools to help us do that. This is one of them, and it belongs in your hand when you’re constructing those narratives.
In the Structural Engineering section (back in Part 2, Chapter 2) we talked about mapping knowledge through looking at the structure of the systems that underlie the things you wish to learn. Part of that process is mapping out cause and effect, and also telos and ontos (Tool 2: The Ends Justify the Means, above). Trouble is, if you’re a curious type, you’re looking for those great kernels of knowledge that make things snap into focus. You get off on the excitement of unfolding discoveries and uncovering secrets, but a lot of things you discover might wind up feeling like coal in your stocking because...well...most of the stuff that happens in the universe is pretty boring.
Even the exciting stuff.
And this can be a problem, because the deeper you get into any particular subject (especially as you find the places where systems interact with one another) the easier it is to get lost in narrative construction. Part of the glory of falling down the rabbit hole is that your interest generates a kind of self-perpetuating enthusiasm—which, unfortunately, can put you at risk of running off the rails under a full head of steam.
Or, to put it another way, the more interested you get in an historical event like, say, the Kennedy Assassination, the more likely you are to blur the lines between a fascination with the mythology around the conspiracy-theory industry and a fascination with what really might have happened in Dealey Plaza. This kind of blinkered fascination with complexes of ideas is wonderful for exploring territory, but less wonderful if you’re concerned about how a given domain connects up to the rest of reality.
It also gets in the way of information triage.