I’ve recently become concerned about how little people seem to know about things - in general. Specifically, how infrequently the general public seem to be okay with not understanding things.

Curiosity

This probably dives into the ways I handle things. I’m curious. Whenever I encounter an unfamiliar thing, I like to know how it works to some degree that satisfies me. Some of this knowledge comes from me naturally engaging with concepts out of pure wonder.

Some of my engineering knowledge comes from understanding how engineering in a video game, say Stormworks, functions, and most importantly how it differs from the real world. When sitting in a car, I’ll start to wonder how manual and automatic transmission systems actually work. How engines, wheels, steering, and other components work. I’ll google it a bit until I get an understanding that I’m satisfied with.

For transmission, it is enough for me to know how gears work, the ways they are made reliable within a car system. What a clutch and a gearstick do physically. I don’t need to know the equations or the mathematics related to transmission because, quite frankly, I’ll forget it, but it is enough to know that they are there.

For another example, I recently wondered how vitamin D actually works. I spent an hour or two reading articles and watching educational videos, and for me it is enough to know that there is some compound on the skin that UV radiation breaks down. This compound then moves to the liver, where it is further processed into useful chemicals. Now, I may have forgotten certain specifics like what compounds are involved, or exactly how compounds are broken down by certain events. Maybe in the future I will get curious enough to look this up. But for now, I am satisfied that I know more than “sun exposure lets the body naturally produce vitamin D”.

I suppose, more specifically, I’m satisfied once I know or am aware of a model, causal chain, or a systems level abstraction of how things work. It seems that generally people are enough with instrumental knowledge or a delegated understanding. I understand this, after all I am often faced with the limitations of my own understanding within the depths of my own field. I know well how information is stored in transistors, how it is transferred through busses, and how certain components of the CPU act on these other components. By implementing my own programs in lower level languages like C++ and understanding how compilers work, I understand intricately how computer systems work. But what I don’t know is how exactly the CPU unit uses electronical circuitry to do these things. I am quite curious about this, but coming to understand it would require a lot of work. For now it is enough to know that this is the domain of electronic engineers.

It does make me think that the reason most people are satisfied with knowing how to use a phone or that someone else knows how phones work is because they recognise that it is too much effort for them to come to understand themselves. And, I suppose, this ties into my core ideas of epistemology.

Smart

I don’t believe that intelligence is meaningfully quantifiable. Blatantly, in scientific fields, an individual will know a lot about their own field and nearly nothing about others. My philosophy is that everyone is at least the most intelligent when it comes to their own lives. We gain all sorts of information as we grow up as human beings. If it’s not information about how the world works, or some deep understanding of something, then it is information more generally about one’s environment like their city and the place they live, or their workplace, or the people they know. For this reason, I believe that everyone is as intelligent as everyone else.

The difference in this comes in what that knowledge actually contains. In a modern scientific perspective, we might emphasise the consensus of experts on difficult topics and genuine understanding of the scientific literature and its systems for more readily-available topics. This is knowledge, but to me incorrect knowledge and information is still knowledge. People with misbeliefs aren’t less intelligent, they are rather less informed. My issue with this comes when people are unwilling to accept new information and discard the old.

Take myself for example. I state to strive to understand things, but I accept that in many cases my convictions and beliefs on how certain aspects of the natural world have been incorrect. These beliefs usually came about when I skimmed some poorly written news article or watched some video without actually going to understand the fundamentals, or looking further into the information presented to me. This happens often, and when I’m challenged I get to feel stupidity.

Stupidity to me, that being when my preconceived notions about something are overall incorrect, is actually a little fun. I get to feel a bit bad for a while, knowing that I’m wrong, then I get to play off of my own stupidity and make fun of myself, accepting that at least now I know something that’s probably right.

An example of this is when, upon watching some random YouTube video on the orbits of the earth and the moon, I came out of it believing that the moon was just as meaningfully orbiting the sun directly than it was orbiting the earth. I believe the core of the argument was on how the moon never moves away from the sun, and that if you view the sun, moon, and earth as a three body system regular definitions of “orbit” break down, and you could say that the moon was orbiting the sun but closely to the earth so that their orbits around the sun were heavily skewed by one another.

Since, I have been corrected with some random discussion with a friend who has more education on physics than I do, having studied it for at least a bit at the university level while I only have my A-level in physics taking the astrophysics elective. The moon definitely only orbits the earth.

This is not a solid conviction. It is important to put some weight on your understanding, to know when you should be willing to budge on your preconceived understandings. The trick is to take every new piece of information and add it to the pile. For me, a cursory dismissal of the sun-earth-moon point was not enough, so I pressed it and made sure that this friend understood exactly how I understood it, so that they could then dismiss that. I haven’t looked into the issue further, so my updated belief could be wrong. Although I highly doubt it, I accept that if I were to find some more trustworthy source, or talk to a more acclaimed astrologist on the topic, this belief on the orbits of astral bodies might change again.

It is not enough to only know things. We must be ready to challenge our current beliefs, which are built upon the mountains of our own intelligence, and change the direction of those beliefs and update our understanding should the evidence suggest it.

Unfortunately, this statement is not without controversy. People have different “mind-sets” when it comes to knowledge and beliefs. While I maintain a somewhat scientific ideal, that I at least know nothing and must build my understanding of the world based on trustworthy evidences provided to me by others and understanding based on effective models and theories that are stated to be good by trustworthy sources, this is not the case for everyone. Even the topic of “trustworthy evidences” is disputed.

Generally, I don’t think it’s people’s fault. To me it seems that the human brain acts in a certain way that promotes existing beliefs over adopting new ones. To receive challenges to ones beliefs is mentally painful, and I do not blame those who shy away from the pain and attempt to excuse their notions over confronting the pain and changing their beliefs.

I hope that everyone can agree that we are creatures of contradiction. The contradiction between our logic and our emotion. For one, we as creatures avoid pain. For another, we know that it is an inevitability in our lives. I think this is shown in many philosophies, how we must accept hardships. It seems natural that to feel at all good in our lives, we must have the bad and the mundane to compare it to.

Naturally, we seek to minimise harm. However I would state that we more practically seek to minimise permanent harms. We actively accept harms in our daily life with the understanding that we will feel or get better overall. Anything from suffering to a workout from the mental labour of a job, juxtaposed with the physical and mental gains of a workout and the payout of a job.

As a short side-note, working doesn’t really work anymore. It’s “all pain no gain” so to say. I believe I talk about this more in [[Production]], if you want reference to my beliefs on that topic. But I digress.

To me then this short-term emotional pain of being wrong is met with the payoff of being correct, more-so in evolving my own beliefs to further represent humanity’s best understandings of the world. To me, stupidity is more so a cognitive rigidity. An unwillingness to adapt one’s beliefs when presented with new information.

There are some challenges to this philosophy.

Mistrust

First and foremost, at the core of my understanding of the world is that I know nothing, and I must construct my understanding out of my own observations, and the observations of my peers, and scientific consensus. This is in line with scientific thinking overall. The main challenges to this are differing core beliefs and a mistrust in the scientific process.

To tackle the latter first, the reason why I deem the scientific process trustworthy is because it is ultimately founded in people. As I have probably stated in another part of my works of ideology, society is just a bunch of people doing things. While this might seem self-evident, the statement has more to do with the social contract and authority, alongside an understanding that organisations and processes are not their own thing but rather collections of people performing tasks.

Mistrust of science most often comes with notions that there is some “scientific elite”. The mistrust is founded by a belief of some scientific ivory tower. This is a false conspiracy (unless you believe I am in on it, but I digress). The reality of it is that several institutions host some people, and these people just sort of get on and do some science. They start with this assumption of nothing, think of some wild idea like gravity, then perform rigorous falsifiable and repeatable tests until their wild idea turns out to be a useful model of the world. These ideas are then expanded on, ad infinitum.

This becomes quite clear when you start doing genuine scientific research for yourself. As part of a module, I was required to produce a literature review. If you’re unfamiliar, this is the process of reading and understanding all scientific literature and summarising it. My topic of choice was automatic train operation, with a focus on the differing approaches. It quickly became clear that these papers were written literally by some person who had an idea, tested it, and then wrote about it.

To get into specifics, some guy in the 70s thought up of some mathematical / computational model that could be informative to decision making. He then applied this to control systems, and this was then picked up by several people interested in its applications to automatic train operation. They wrote papers on it, developed the field. Eventually, A.I. got thrown into the mix and improved the models even further. Even later on in the years, I found a paper that was essentially re-iterating the conclusions of an older paper, as if it were unaware of the wider developments in the field. Eventually, this all culminates in highly technical papers that I will never hope to understand the details of, that takes models and methods from older ATO papers and other methods to produce what can only be described as mathematical wizardry.

This is how science works. It is not built on trust. It is built on distrust. If someone publishes a paper, it is not accepted until enough other random and independent people verify its claims. They might reject its claims just as well. The only trust involved is the trust that you as an individual have on the places you get your information from. The trust is that they are relaying the body of scientific work accurately. The alternative is that you distrust every scientist working in a field. To me, this level of distrust in your fellow human is harmful to oneself. To believe that everyone is lying promotes living an unfulfilling life, where your interactions with others are skewed by your harmful beliefs.

Mistrust in science needs to be addressed for this very reason. Everyone needs to understand that science is all of humanity’s best efforts to understand the world from the assumption that we know nothing. Once someone knows this, they must then understand that to continue to mistrust science means mistrusting humanity. While, if this is you, you are perfectly entitled to your beliefs, but you are not living a life with a good approach to other people.

There are large aspects of this idea that I desperately want challenged and developed. To the best of my own ability, this is how I present mistrust in science.

My god loves gay people

The second challenge to my philosophy is that many people don’t start with the assumption that they know nothing and build from there. Frequently people will put some belief in a god, diety, or some spirituality of some kind, and often put trust in them for the things they do not understand. This belief is fine. It is not as harmful as mistrust in science on its own, instead its potential for harm and good depends on the god and/or spirituality that you follow.

One thing I’d hope that everyone religious or spiritual would understand is that they follow their own god. Everyone, in their mind, has their own unique instance of what and who their god is. This is why we have different religions. Think, protestants and Catholics, two wildly conflicting ideas of who god is within the same overarching Christian religion. Both protestants and Catholics read the same holy book, but have wildly different conceptions of God.

I hope by mere virtue of pointing out this macrocosmic difference between two groups of Christians, anyone could understand how this might, and ultimately does, apply to individuals within those groups. Someone’s catholic god might be accepting of the gays while another’s might not. And if you are Christian, I need you to understand that the god described in the bible is not a god worth worshiping. I understand that you have your own reasons for dismissing the more genocidal “beliefs” of the god of the bible, but these reasons are your own, and someone else will have different reasons and beliefs even with a similar core approach.

If you are reading this as a Christian, my understanding of the bible comes from YouTubers who are primarily ex-Christians, usually American denominations, who left the religion upon actually reading and digesting the bible critically. I have reason to believe that my information on the contents of the bible is largely correct due to the number of individuals that have brought these things up. Plus, they directly quote the bible. I have read a little bit of the bible, and I’m quite dismissive of it because it’s actually quite poorly written and it isn’t a very engaging text. I would rather believe in a more interesting and engaging story, and so I do.

My own little heretical religion is based on Morrowind’s portrayal of the Elder Scrolls lore and its gods. I do it for fun, and I don’t let it actually mean much to me.

This might seem like an attack on religious folk. It kind of is, but I’m only attacking people who put a lot of conviction behind their belief in god. To me, the best forms of belief in god and spiritual beliefs are those that hold little conviction to their beliefs. To me, the best beliefs in gods and spiritualities are those that do not let these aspects of their belief reject other sources of information.

For example, it is fine for me if you believe that your phone works because god wills it. It is not fine for me if you, upon becoming informed about how your phone works you continue to believe that it actually only works because god wills it, and crucially that you then go on to insist to others that phones only work because god wills them to.

to apply this example to a more familiar term. Denial of evolution on grounds of biblical beliefs will often look at the overwhelming body of scientific evidence and the rigour and predictive capabilities of evolution as a model and reject it, and then ask others to reject science too. This is an interplay with a mistrust in science. It is someone putting their own belief in their god above their trust in others. And as I’ve said, it’s fine to do this in private understanding that your own beliefs aren’t really all that useful.

While I generally take pride in my ability to construct my own ideology from the fragments of others I engage with, my views on religion are very heavily informed by the types of videos I watch which are overwhelmingly from “one side of the argument”. I believe that the proponents of this “side” do a pretty good job at representing their opponents, but I accept that as I haven’t actually watched the other “side’s” videos outside of their representation within their opposition’s video, I have not performed an in-depth analysis of this situation.

Regardless, those are my beliefs around religion and ultimately spirituality, as it pertains to the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive rigidity.

Conclusion

I would suppose a third challenge to my ideas, although this is more of a challenge to my ideology as a whole as it pertains to my epistemological approach. Another core of my philosophy is that we should ultimately seek to reduce senseless harm. I have made my case for how some harm is acceptable, but this case is often expanded in a way that fails to see nuance.

Across the world, everywhere, people are being harmed in ways unjustified, in ways that will not have a juxtaposed happiness. The decisions of autocrats and fascists (two terms hand-in-hand) result in the deaths of the innocent, those with nothing to gain from the conflict. These people will only hurt. Perhaps they will gain - but it will be at the expense of sacrificing a life.

If these ideas are part of someone’s own core ideas, then I might see why my conclusions on epistemology do not make sense. If someone is not compassionate, if they wish against avoiding the large permanent harms I have described. If someone’s core philosophy is that Humanity is naturally ill-willed, and that most people are malicious at heart. If someone does not trust the scientific community, perhaps on these grounds or out of misconceptions in authority, then I see why my views on epistemology might not make sense.

That is to say, my ideology is a complex puzzle whose complete picture is only seen once you have acquired and assembled at least a good portion of its parts.

Anyway, to disrupt a nicely put conclusion, I’d like to say that I’m dumb. Yes! Me! I view it as a bad thing that I use words like macrocosmic to describe my point. It just limits the language and means it can be understood to less people. I speak a different language to you. In fact, I don’t speak English at all. The three and a bit thousand words you’ve just read are actually a highly specialised form of Wenglish, but where I lean heavily on the English side of the hybrid language.