Unfolding the World

Unfolding the World

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Unfolding the World
Unfolding the World
An Autodidact's Bible, #6

An Autodidact's Bible, #6

Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 1, Chapter 5b

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J. Daniel Sawyer
Apr 02, 2025
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Unfolding the World
Unfolding the World
An Autodidact's Bible, #6
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This is the sixth 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

If your email client chokes on this post, find the whole thing at http://www.jdsawyer.net

Continuing on through our survey of different types of knowledge fro Part 1, Chapter 5: The Vast Frontier…

Methodological

Let us return to Pope’s Alps for a moment. Looking down from on high, you might see that the different valleys and peaks are all connected by a complex, winding river network.

This river is Method, and it keeps the knowledge landscape alive. Kirk’s admonition to Savvik notwithstanding, learning how things work on a starship is not a fruitless activity. Methodological knowledge—the knowledge of “how to”—is what occupies the bulk of our focus from the moment we learn the best suckling techniques for each of Mom’s breasts.

This is where the foundation of “book larnin’” rests. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are all “how to” fields. Granted, “reading a book” and “understanding the book you read” is different from reading a sign, and writing a book is different from writing your ABCs, and doing vector analysis is not exactly the same as 2+2; all of these sorts of “doing” draw on more areas of knowledge than the strictly methodological, but they are all methodological nonetheless.

The same is true with how to train a horse, play chess, or shoot dice. How to navigate in politics, seduce and beguile, win friends and influence people (or just display the most basic good manners), make brownies, rebuild a car engine, or wage a war. The activity itself is, oddly, immaterial. The methods one uses to break down a problem, the art of ordering operations, of managing logistics, of stepping through an activity, are the heart of methodological knowledge.

Lawyers call this area of knowledge (when in their professional domain), procedure. The order-of-operations in which thing X must be done in order to achieve result Y. To crib an analogy from the classic courtroom comedy My Cousin Vinny, arguing a murder trial is rather like rebuilding a carburetor—if you do things in the wrong order, you’re in for a world of trouble.

Methodology touches everything. It’s the clutch that allows the gears of knowledge to mesh smoothly—and this is not just due to the fact that everything happens in a certain order and derives meaning and significance and shape from that order. It goes far deeper than that:

Every methodology in every field depends upon the same two basic underlying principles:

  • Signal flow, and

  • Selection gates1

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The higher the level of operation in any field, the more the nature of signal flow and selection gates becomes specialized and hard to apprehend at first glance, so let’s look at an example of a group of activities that are structurally (and thus methodologically) nearly identical even though they are, in all other respects, radically different.

If you look deeply enough at (American) football, battlefield strategy, advertising, evangelism, and moving from one house to another, you’ll notice that they all follow the same basic underlying rules:

1) Each actor is defined by their mission or goal

2) They are high-stakes activities which are necessarily...

3) Highly structured

4) Multiple actors are involved, usually with opposing or not-entirely-aligned interests

5) They depend on good supply chains (with all the attendant complications and vulnerabilities)

6) They have a sensitive dependence upon ground conditions and are subject to disruption by unpredictable factors

7) Regardless of #6, they must still accomplish their mission or, pursuant to #2, bad things will happen. The actors must therefore be highly adaptable without being disorderly (pursuant to #3).

8) The available avenues of action are constrained by available resources, which are finite.

9) They are usually zero-sum activities; either you achieve your aim, or you lose something precious—usually to another interested party.

Therefore, you can use the same methodological knowledge base to act successfully in each of the above disciplines—you can learn to run a business from learning how to fight a war, and you can learn to fight a war from knowing how to play football, and you can learn to pack a house from running a revival meeting. Phenomena which share a common structure (in this case, strategic/logistical) share a common set of procedures and best-practices, because their needs for signal flow are similar and their selection gates act as filters on similar things.

This gives us a solid look at one of the most effective tools in the autodidact’s kit: cross-application. When you begin to see common structures, you can apply the rules from one thing onto another. This gives you a shortcut to understanding how the new things works, whether it’s a machine, an animal, an economy, an ecosystem, a person, a religion, or a universe.

The trick, of course, is discernment. How do you tell if similarities you’re seeing are accurate? They won’t always be. You will make mistakes—a mountain of them.

You will have greater success, however, if you manage to correctly divine the level on which the similarities you see are operating.

After all, when viewed on the most basic level, Indiana Jones is very like a cheese sandwich (or would be if he weren’t fictitious): both are nutritious sources of protein, and both are consequences of the laws of organic chemistry.

Indy and the cheese sandwich are also alike in some trivial ways that are unlikely to be useful to anyone:2 both contain a lot of lactic acid, and smell kind of funky if left out in the heat for an afternoon.

On other levels, though, there is very little grounds for comparison between the two. Moreover, some of the ways in which Indiana Jones might be like a cheese sandwich will lead you down a dead-end road. There may be a semantic similarity in how someone describes Indy and how they describe the cheese sandwich, for example:

Indy/that cheese sandwich just smashed that guy’s taste buds and completely wrecked his mouth!

But this similarity is merely an artifact of language, and contains no useful information. Here, the alleged parallel between the two is entirely illusory, and paying it any heed will do nothing but mislead you—and do a terrible injustice to a perfectly good cheese sandwich (assuming it hasn’t spoiled by being left out too long so it would smell like Indiana Jones).

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