Being precisely right is overrated
Being “right for good reason” is overrated
Just being right gets the job done
This is the magic of just DOING, vs overthinking
Once you start doing it, playing with it, tinkering, solving problems — you find solutions
Sometimes you even find solutions you don’t even understand
This is also the magic of OPEN SYSTEMS
They self-correct in ways we don’t even understand
Democracy will elect you an idiot or an arsonist,
and yet he may even just be what was needed for the system
A dumb idea will spread through an open system unimpeded,
but it forces an emergence of a far superior idea, refutation, to destroy it, and nip in the bud any new dumb ideas
Wise man probably knows this principle, that:
ACTIONS speak louder than WORDS,
that RESULTS speak louder than words,
That good theory still loses to a mediocre theory but superior results,
That sounding smart and DOING SMART are two different things,
A wiser man still understands that:
There are things which make NO SENSE on the surface, ESCAPE our common sense and understanding…
…and yet have been TESTED BY TIME — which is a better PROOF than all the opinions and ideas of all the philosophers and academics and billionaires and mensa fucking members combined
He understands “lindy effect”, he understands the profound lessons from history, he understands the scale and how impossible it is to deal with it’s complexity,
and how the greater the scale the more it matters what’s been ACTUALLY TESTED BY TIME, shown to ACTUALLY WORK, not in theory, in practice, and again and again
And the wisest man, perhaps…
Can look even deeper,
And reconcile various modes in which something is just effective,
He is not only able of admitting of something working DESPITE not understanding HOW it works — he is able to discover MANY such phenomena,
both in the present and historically,
And combine them to create COHERENT UNDERSTANDING of what is going on,
EVEN THOUGH he is fully cognisant of NOT UNDERSTANDING the specific details of those constituent phenomena in isolation,
Arrive in a kind of COHERENT META-understanding, corroborated by keen observation and keen study of history,
BUT WITHOUT the ever-present desire to EXPLAIN EVERYTHING,
JUST explaining the parts which are necessary for the creation of coherent system, coherent understanding
I think this is the hardest,
It’s hard enough to create GOOD explanations of anything, =coherent
Then it’s harder to ABANDON THEM, when faced with conflicting observations
Harder still to accept REALITIES which we nevertheless can’t explain. Accept that something works, DESPITE not knowing HOW it works. Resisting temptation of PRETENDING THAT WE DO, in fact, KNOW how it works
And then the final leap,
Taking those things we know to WORK DESPITE NOT KNOWING HOW, taking all those things we KNOW to be TRUE despite not being able to explain — and AGAIN taking upon ourselves the monumental challenge of creating a logical structure from them