EPISTEMIC TRAPS
Our pursuit of knowledge is shaped by universal psychological constraints. In “Consciousness Explained”, Daniel Dennett notes that “in a second or two of hefting, scratching, ringing, tasting” a coin, humans consume more bits of information than a supercomputer can organize in a year. In an attempt to deal with the staggering complexity of external reality, we consequently employ simple, coherent and manipulable cognitive constructs of the surrounding world, popularly known as mental models.
In this post, I examine some conventional mental pathways that have been built up to help people avoid spend cognitive effort, and suggest that they should be rexamined, and at least partially constituted, to more reliably acquire knowledge. The epistemic traps that follow systematically feature in and dilute the quality of my decision making.
Unexamined Pragamtism
Chesterton’s Fence is an adage named after English writer G. K. Chesterton, described by Chesterton himself as follows:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
The aphorism implies that a new plan for the future requires strong historical perspective. That is, one must develop a deep understanding of the history of a system and understanding the rationale behind previous decisions before intervening to evolve it. For instance, understanding Coase’s theory of the firm, which answers the question “if markets are so good at directing resources, why do companies exist?”, can help you understand the impact blockchain-based smart contracts might have on the nature of work. The ability to look at the past through many disciplinary lenses, including political, economic, social and philosophical, and make assessments about the future is underappreciated.
The Blind Men and the Elephant
The parable is a story of a group of blind men who learn and conceptualize what an elephant is like by touching it. Each man feels a different part of the elephant's body and draws an assumption about the animal's essence based on based on their limited experience. The story suggests that one should develop a systemic perspective, instead of merely concentrating on a single facet of an idea.
In mathematical terms, we might regards concepts as vectors, not scalars. That is, instead of reducing abstract ideas to singular properties, one should acknowledge that other people's limited, subjective experiences may be equally true. For instance, much ink has been spilled over the importance, or lack thereof, of college. Some argue that the sole function of universities is signaling, and that a generation of talented students educated by the internet can starve the current education system, which they believe to be a relic of the industrial age. While there may be merit to that argument, positing that colleges are modern-day Agraharams that grant special privileges to particular classes of people by their merely being physically present is ludicrous. Colleges are also preeminent filters of talent and aggregators of ambition, where one can find people with similar interests and shared notions of what constitutes meaningful work.
Limits of Language
Language, and more specifically words, compresses a high-dimensional input into a low-dimensional representation, which permits people with shared context to exchange complex abstract information. For instance, two computer scientists are able to engage in a conversation about the intricacies of the P versus NP problem without having to wrestle with the specificities of Boolean satisfiability. That is, a shared context implies that each can assume that the other’s arguments are built on the same scaffolding. Unfortunately, however, relying on language to discuss concepts at a high level of abstraction could induce confusion if those party to the conversation are not reasoning from a shared set of axioms.
The pernicious effects of the limits of language are particularly felt in political discourse, where arguments are laden with references to labels whose definitions debaters might not agree with. Naipaul once poignantly noted the following in reference to Peronism in Argentina:
When jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends up competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies; only the enemies are real.
Evidently, it is unfortunate how disgruntlement against kleptocracy is seen as an indictment of laissez-faire capitalism. The world’s poorest places are not characterized by the trapping of a capitalist system, but instead by self-employment and the absence of capitalist firms: these are small peasants and farmers or owners of small shops. However, some participants in the political marketplace exploit this dissatisfaction by conflating rent-seeking and wealth formation.
The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized
Bastiat’s parable of the broken window examines how opportunity costs affect economic activity in ways that are unseen or ignored. While one might appreciate the first-order consequences of a certain decision, such as mandatory industrial licensing to serve the needs of strategically important sectors in a newly independent nation, it might be difficult to anticipate its nth order consequences, such as an eight-year-long waiting list for telephones.
One would be able to design superior mechanisms if they were to appreciate the value of activities that would not actualize if a particular policy were in place. For instance, Quora is an effective website precisely because it incentivizes well-informed people to write about things that would have otherwise been unwritten, or written in some obscure corner of the Internet, but unread and lost to the world. The presence of online publishing platforms help discover people who are erudite enough to be worth reading but who do not have the time to publish work that warrants the scope and complexity of a standalone book, such as Ben Thompson. In a similar vein, people fail to appreciate the importance of regulatory arbitrage in the context of human capital. A system of governance conducive to the private sector can single-handedly attract top technical talent. The United States is the greatest example of jurisdictional arbitrage in the 20th century, perhaps in the history of the world.
Reflexive Contrarianism
Some people deliberately hold heterodox positions to signal their intelligence. They unwittingly fall prey to the pattern of thought that presumes that contrarian beliefs merit examination by virtue of their diminished space in the public sphere. The fallacy here is that of treating the orthodoxy as a monolith, and attempting to find insights by straightforwardly inverting the mainstream position. On account of this, they merely align themselves with orthodox beliefs of the heterodoxy. Instead, one should conceive of a viewpoint not as singular position, but as a combination of multiple, coherent beliefs, some which merit categorical rejection, others which merit incremental refinement, and yet others which merit no change. People hoping to discover unique insights about how the world works must strive to reason from first principles, instead of merely holding the orthogonal view from the mainstream.