An Autodiact's Bible, #16

Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 3d

This is the fourteenth 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, #15

If your email client chokes on this post, find the whole thing at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

Continuing with our project of populating your autodidact’s tool belt…

Chapter 3:
The Nitty Gritty (continued)

Tool 4: Turn Your Hammer Upside Down

In the movie Mystery Men (1999), a superhero-in-training is receiving martial arts instruction so he can properly wield his signature weapon,¹ and, after getting his lights punched out by his master for the second or third time, his master says:

“You are distracted. How many weapons do you have?”

To which he replies:

“One.” Whereupon he holds up the fork in his hand.

“Wrong,” says the master. “You have six.” Whereupon he points to each of the acolyte’s hands, each of his feet, and then taps his head.

You, also, have more tools at your disposal than you think. It is human nature to accept things in the context in which they’re presented—this is part of what induces us to put knowledge in silos—but each of the tools in this section can be applied in different ways to different problems. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But a hammer isn’t just a hammer. Turn it upside down, and you have a baton. Put the claws in a crack and rock it, it’s a compound lever complete with fulcrum.²

As we saw with Reasoning from First Principles, most tools can be applied in a number of ways. Don’t hesitate to invert the direction of reasoning, approach a puzzle from a different angle, or ask an apparently irrelevant question. All the tools in this book can be used in a manner other than directed—many of them will reveal hidden depths when you try.

In fact, our next tool is a specialized implementation of this very protocol...

Tool 5: Apply Outwards (Domain Transfer)

Once again we touch on a technique that takes “the fundamental inter-contentedness of all things” at face value:

Take an idea or trick or technique and apply it everywhere else, to see where it works.

In matters practical, you might apply the technique for holding a drum stick in marching band to wielding a welding electrode. In matters intellectual, you might allow incidental or seemingly trivial ideas to ripple through a whole thought structure just to see what happens.

This works almost everywhere, and it doesn’t just allow you to maximize your learning and skills—it goes much, much deeper than that. Because where the Hogloroonians (and everyone else in the universe) move out of reality and into something smaller of their own devising out of fear (or cowardice), philosophers and scientists have been using the notion of domain transfer to map reality for thousands of years. Think of it as the reality-based version of the commutative property of addition—you remember that from first grade math class, right?

If:

6+4=10

Then:

4+6=10

You can swap around the addends to your heart’s content and still get the same sum. You can also reverse the operation, subtract either of the addends from the sum, and wind up with a difference equal to the unsubtracted addend: 10-4=6 or 10-6=4.

Now, apply the commutative property of addition to knowledge as a whole, and create from it the tool called “Apply Outwards.”³ That gives you something like this:

1) Phenomenon A happens in context N under conditions XYZ

2) Therefore, if I observe conditions XYZ in context M, I can hazard a guess that phenomenon A will follow.

3) Furthermore, if phenomenon A does follow, then I can attempt to create phenomenon A by inducing conditions XYZ in any context (let’s call the arbitrary context “Q”).

4) Finally, even if phenomenon A does not follow in another context, by observing what does follow—call it phenomenon B—and analyzing the ways in which phenomenon B differs from phenomenon A, I can determine the shape of context Q and better understand the nature of phenomenon A.

When you do this, you’re not just employing a neat trick that allows you to use what you know in different contexts—you’re also learning a tremendous amount about the structure of reality.

Every time you successfully apply something outwards, you discover points of self-similarity in apparently divergent parts of reality. The welding electrode and the drum stick have similar shapes and work by applying energy to the surface they interact with, and both are designed to be held in the hand.

Or consider that if you wind a rope around a stick so that you can raise a bucket from a well, or a fish from a lake, you’re transforming circular motion into linear motion. If you can do that with a stick and a rope, maybe you can put a few small logs under a ship and roll it down a beach. If that works, maybe you can shorten the stick and turn it into a wheel. Or put bumps (i.e. small levers) on the log and turn it into a trip cam, or a gear. Or cut a groove into that log and turn it into a screw pump. All of modern technological civilization rests upon the very simple observation that something turned can become something pulled (or pushed) if you take the motion off at a tangent. One simple observation, applied outwards.

And that outward application doesn’t just give you technologies—it reveals the nature of the world. It shows you the relationships of shapes to lines, and of both to distance (the basis of geometry, itself the basis of much military technology, several religions, all architecture, and perhaps the fabric of the universe itself), it allows you to measure things like weight and horsepower (literally, the amount of weight one draft horse can lift—via being harnessed to a rope passed over a pulley—per minute with an endurance of four hours).

The same thing works with ideas.

We’ve already seen one example of this in the The Universal Acid Test—it’s a tool entirely based on applying a single algorithm onto new domains. What if you happened to notice that, while we’re used to thinking of the world in terms of things that are robust (resistant to damage) and fragile (i.e. breakable), that schema doesn’t fit something like the human skeleton? When astronauts go into space and aren’t subjected to the pounding of gravity, they experience bone loss and degradation very like what happens to people who are bedridden and lose muscle and bone mass. Without stress and adversity, your skeleton withers, and you become as fragile as a twig.

Philosopher Nassim Taleb noticed that we didn’t have a word to describe the fact that some systems benefit from disorder and adversity, so he invented one: antifragile. And, once you are aware of this concept, you not only begin to notice all sorts of antifragility hiding in plain sight around you (due to a perceptual bias called “priming”), but if you take the extra step of applying the concept outwards, you might find it changing your dearly held attitudes about everything from parenting to medicine to politics to investing.

The Universal Acid Test and Antifragility. Two examples of outward application in a universe bursting with them.

Chances are good that any trick or idea that is valid in one domain will have analogs in others. So take the risk, apply outwards…

...and hang on to your hat.