An Autodidact's Bible, #13

Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 3a

This is the thirteenth 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

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

Chapter 3:
The Nitty Gritty

Tools for Crossing the Adaptive Valley

You are standing on a hill. Before you stretches a landscape of peaks and valleys—some peaks are very sharp, others are quite gentle, but all of them are hospitable and teeming with life. Between them, every valley is a baking hot salt-pan desert, devoid of water and inhospitable to all kinds of life.

This landscape is not Pope’s Alps of learning that we’ve been traveling through—it’s an alternate dimension called The Fitness Landscape.¹

The hills in this landscape are ecological niches—situations where nature is very hospitable to particular sorts of organisms. The dry valleys are the space between the niches, where an organism is neither quite one thing or another, and so can’t get a foothold on any of the hills, and goes extinct. A white fox, for example, wouldn’t last long on the green rolling fields of the Great Plains. It’s too obvious to its prey, so can’t find a meal—it’s also too obvious to its predators, and so has poor chances of avoiding becoming one.

In the fitness landscape, there are three ways to survive:²

1) Climb and/or occupy a hill

2) Build your own hill

3) Cross a valley to another hill

When an environment is stable, hill climbing is the best survival strategy. The rule for hill climbers is find a good niche and stay there, and you’ll be safe. The Hogloroonians are perhaps the most trenchant epitome of hill climbers ever devised.

In overcrowded environments, where the obvious niches are all filled, building your own hill is the best strategy. The world doesn’t have a place for me, so I’ll make one. Beavers are pretty damn good builders (because they’re pretty good dam-builders).

In changeable environments—in times of environmental upheaval or other kinds of instability—valley crossing is the best strategy. The grass really is greener on the other side of the valley. Sometimes crossing is the only viable strategy. Rats and raccoons are consummate valley-crossers.

And, as with nature, so too with humans. The fitness landscape exists in any ecological domain, which is any context with limited resources where more than one set of interests exists—geopolitics, economics, any given marketplace, etc. The landscape that predominated in the post-World War 2 West until the late 2010s was extraordinarily stable by any historical measure—economics, geopolitics, availability of food, artistic fecundity, etc.—and in those circumstances, a few things happened that you might expect from the description above.

For one, with a vast landscape of well-defined niches provided by an expansive industrial civilization, society became optimized around hill-climbing in an ultra-efficient manner. As programmer Jordan Hall has spotted, our society is highly structured to encourage hill climbing behavior at every level. There is little incentive to leave a good hill once you’ve found it, and there are punishments for those who do (such as poor job prospects, social ostracism, etc.). Hill builders also haven’t been particularly welcome, except in key moments at the birth of new industries. Civilization thus has come to favor those who will not rock the boat, will not tell inconvenient truths, and will toe the party line.

Looking at things through this lens, the problems with the educational system I discussed in the beginning of this book seem like a foregone conclusion. They are an obvious, perhaps inevitable effect of this long period of stability—and they create a problem:

What happens when the environment goes wobbly? When geopolitics destabilizes? When the economy contracts severely, or shifts? When multiple systemic crises emerge at one time, creating an opportunity for ideological or authoritarian revolution? Most of us have known someone whose job has disappeared out from under them late in their career. When their hill collapses, not many hill-climbers can survive the struggle across the salt plains to another hill.

At the time of this writing, the ground is shaking and a lot of hills look like they might collapse. These things happen from time to time as history rolls along—long periods of stability such as the post-war era are very uncommon. During periods of upheaval, those who aren’t (or can’t become) valley-crossers tend to go extinct. And that’s a problem, because the institutions that were developed to instill resilience in children (rites of passage, ROTC, classical education, pilgrimages, quests, and dangerous play) have, one after another, been eliminated during the long peace in the interests of discouraging any behaviors that might destabilize the hill, as it grows ever-more shaky.

We need valley-crossers. We need them as a species, we need them as a civilization, and we need them in our communities.

The path of the autodidact is the path of the valley-crosser—and brother, are there some vast valleys to cross! Fortunately, climbing Pope’s Alps will give you what you need to cross the adaptive valleys.

So, now that we’ve got you outfitted for your quest with the basics and the universals, let’s get you some solid, general-purpose tools that will serve you well. Unlike the Universals, which truly are useful everywhere, these nitty-gritty tricks are occasional tools. Like a gun or a wrench, they’re very powerful and can do a lot more than it might look like at first glance—but, just like a wrench isn’t terribly useful for hunting and a gun is positively counterproductive for removing spark plugs, the usefulness of the tools in this section vary with context.

So, get your tool belt ready, ’cause we’re about to populate the hell out of it.

Tool 1: First Principles

Working things out from first principles can look like a parlor game when you see it done in movies (or, for that matter, in person), but it’s basically a specific use of deductive reasoning. We’ll go into different kinds of logic later in a little more depth, but for now you need to know that deductive reasoning is a method of conversation by which you discover—literally—things that you already know.

Literally? Yes. To discover something is, lexically speaking, to reveal something that already exists. To dis-cover it.

What is a First Principle?

First Principles are not just any old thing you know, they are the foundations from which the world springs. To work as a First Principle, the concept or fact in question must be something that has knock-on effects that shape a system or a phenomenon.

“You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” is a first principle (relating to human interaction). “Water erodes things” is another (relating to geology).

You discover many first principles through your daily interaction with nature and people, but the more technological your day-to-day life, the less obvious those first principles may be (unless you’re talking about a first principle of how technology works, such as “Electronics malfunction when overheated” or “The Windows operating system is designed to enrich psychiatrists.”).

When attempting to work things out from first principles, look for clues that will tell you what kinds of causes—that you are already familiar with—could have the effects that you’re observing/experiencing.

For example, let’s say you’re an alien, who, by chance, lands in the middle of a New York City a couple years after a neutron bomb has killed everyone.³ You’re surrounded by buildings and streets, but by some unlucky chance the neutron bomb detonated in the middle of a blizzard, so there were very few cars on the street. You, the alien from another galaxy, have landed in Times Square where (bear with me on this) there are no people, no vehicles, and nothing else beyond the bare landscape—the concrete sidewalks, the crackling asphalt, the glass-and-steel buildings, and the derelict disintegrating media screens.

Now imagine it was an emergency landing without any sensors, or you had been asleep while the autopilot landed you. Either way, all you know upon stepping out of the craft is what you’re surrounded by: roads and buildings.

But is that really all you know?

Hardly.

A little back and forth with yourself will allow you to notice the implications of what you know: