Friday, November 25, 2022

Cumulative Knowledge

First, step back. Get an overview of the market. Understand the players. Understand the environment. Gain a bigger sense of yourself than just the current role or task. Always have your eyes open. Pay attention to problems. Be curious. Be interested. Fascinated by the world and connected to what is happening. That is your mind. That is where you are going to dig for problems to solve. By caring about and understanding others. People like people who like them. 

It takes the generous gift of attention to genuinely see people. To understand someone’s problems, you need to reflect the problem back. In a way that they feel you see them. Perhaps better than they see themselves. Because you are not them. Because you are paying attention. That comes through the human skills of caring and empathy. Through seeing yourself in them. Because the minute you spend time with someone, these boundaries, these containers, start dissolving. You get a sense of why that problem matters. How you can develop the skills and knowledge to be able to solve it. 

Even though we are all connected, we end up having different paths. Our lives are path dependent and come down to a series of choices of left or right, left or right, left or right. We do not all get, or make, the same choices. But we all make decisions. I am a big believer in empowering decision making from the bottom up. We want to make sure that everyone has the capacity and the ability to make their decisions. 

In “The Future and its Enemies”, Virginia Postrel talks about tacit knowledge. The stuff you understand in your body, in your heart, in your soul. Learnt through what you have done in life. But you cannot explain it. Explaining is hard. There is a lot we do automatically. 

Yoga talks about consciousness being three parts. The Om symbol has three semi-circles that represent subconscious, conscious, and the dream state. These are the ways we connect with reality. They are different for each of us, because we have all had these different experiences. 

When we are making decisions, if we must communicate with words, and cannot just say yes or no, it ends up requiring a lot more information. 

With artificial intelligence, deep machine learning can be summarised into impenetrable strings of ones and zeros. The machine goes through loops. Beginning again, and trying various things. The outputs might just be yes or no. But each output might have an input that could be another string of 30 ones and zeros. Or 1,000. There are a vast variety of combinations of those digits. But the computer just bumps the output. Bumps it, bumps it, bumps it and eventually, when you finally get that string of 30 digits that provides the best answer. That is not something you can access. It is not something you can consciously understand. That string is experience. It is something that the computer “knows”, but the computer does not know why it knows. It has just gone through various iterations of bumping trial and error, trial and error, until it comes up with a solution. 

That is a very human way of learning. We are not always conscious of why we know things. Often, we learn the most when we are very relaxed, and no longer trying. When we allow our body to learn, without our anxiety creating boundaries. The results can seem magical. Intuition is cumulative knowledge that is embodied. The result of having drawn breath repeatedly and ventured into the world. It is the reward for engaging with the chaos. We gain knowledge we do not necessarily understand. It might be wrong. It is often wrong. We need to create the capacity to be wrong to explore confidently. 

The willingness to say, “based on what I have done, this is what I am going to do” and just do it in the face of all the uncertainty in the world. Be able to make decisions. One of the things that drives me nuts is decisive indecision. Getting stuck in “I don't know what to do, and I don't know if I am going to get it wrong.” Closing any possible action. 

Sometimes you just need to make a call. Deal with the consequences. Make sure that it is not going to blow you out of the water. But it nudges you forward. Tim Minchin talks of micro-ambition. Small achievable steps that you can unwind. There are often unintended consequences. We want to do stuff, but we do not understand the world. This world is crazy complicated, ambiguous, uncertain, and random. We will never understand. No one human being will ever understand. We exist beyond ourselves and our limits.

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