A Question of Inquiry: Politics, Heuristics, and Knowledge [Requested Video]
Where does one go to receive accurate information? To answer this, one needs to select their heuristic.
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So the topic of this video is a question of inquiry, the nature of inquiry.
Nick writes in asking, how do I find accurate information about the world, about politics, about life in general, really?
He then goes on to cite a popular news personality, whom I'm not going to name by name.
You know who he is.
You can probably guess whom I'm speaking of.
But it doesn't really matter.
He says that, you know, about a year ago, he started to get really into this guy's stuff.
But then he realized that as much as he was opening his eyes to many of the things that are going on in the world, at the same time, this guy was primarily creating a cult of personality, providing endless questions and never a reasonable course of action, never a solution.
The purpose was the question itself.
And this winds up with you spinning into these vortexes, these vortices of endless questioning with no purpose.
You constantly feel like you're learning something new without actually changing your situation or changing your life.
So the question is, how do we engage in productive inquiry?
And I'd like to break it down into three segments.
Number one is purpose.
What is the purpose of your inquiry?
What is your goal of inquiry?
What do you hope to do by asking these questions?
Number two is heuristic.
Which heuristic are you using?
Do you know that there's different heuristics?
And number three is objective measurement.
How do you qualify your inquiry as a success or a failure?
How do you validate it in a scientific manner?
So let's start with the first one.
And this is a very fundamental question.
So many people fail to ask why they're doing anything, and they get wrapped up in somebody else's plans.
I've made the joke before that there's so many people out there that they have a job so that they can pay the mortgage.
And the reason they have a mortgage is because it forces them to have a job and thus they never have to confront the existential angst of their abyssal existence.
They know how to get a black credit card.
They don't know why they're doing it.
So what is the purpose of your inquiry?
And Let's not do politics, okay, because that's a little bit too big.
I mean, if it was as simple as finding the one person speaking the truth, the one compendium of absolute wisdom, life would be much simpler.
It's not that simple.
So you need to ask why you're getting into this in the first place.
So let's discuss game.
Because, again, in retrospect, it's no surprise that game is what led to the eye-opening on so many other layers of what's going on.
So, with game, what do you want?
Why are you studying game?
Well, you want to get with women.
Well, you want to get with women who are consenting.
You don't want to go around raping.
You don't want to hire prostitutes.
You want to get with good quality women.
Well, this now begs the question: what is a quality woman?
You want to get with women who are fun and interesting and kind and sweet.
The further you go down that trail, the more you refine the goal, the more you understand what it is you're seeking out.
And so, to achieve that goal, now we come to heuristics.
You need to understand what women are.
Now, let's say to try and understand women, you only read books written during the 1980s.
If you restricted your field of view to all of the assumptions and norms and tropes that would appear in 1980s fiction, you'd learn a lot about the 1980s, but without anything to contrast it to, it wouldn't be very useful.
Because you'd only have that heuristic of the 1980s.
Maybe after reading all of these books, watching all of these films, you'd have a sense of how to dress like a cool guy from the 80s, how to say the witty one-liners that would have worked in the 80s.
But if that's your entire grounding of knowledge, is the 1980s decade and the women therein, you have nothing to contrast it to.
Instead, if you want to understand women, you need to read books from the 1980s.
You need to read books from the 1880s.
You need to read romance novels written originally in Mandarin.
You need to see all these different systems, and you need to have a sense, an appreciation of all these different systems of knowledge.
All of these categorization systems, all of these generalizations, these simplifications.
Because everyone, every culture, tropes, narrative, culture, these are just simplified heuristics.
Rules of thumb.
More than that, a heuristic is a system that determines what you consider valid information and what you consider invalid information.
For instance, if you only read those 1980s books, you know, set in presumably America, Miami or California, the characters are going to be white women, maybe black women sometimes.
But you're not going to be dealing with any Japanese girls, any Indian girls, any African girls.
You'll have black Americans, but not Africans.
It's a very narrow view.
So, in this view, if you're only dealing with white women, race and ethnicity won't come into play at all.
You will be completely colorblind because skin color is utterly irrelevant.
If you're trying to pick up girls in the punk scene, skin color is pretty irrelevant within the punk scene.
Probably won't have too many black punk girls, but you'll have a few of them.
But you still approach them the same way you'd approach a white punk girl.
So, your heuristic there says don't consider race, assume everybody speaks your language, assume everybody shares a common culture.
So, you can completely ignore those questions.
You put those on the back burner.
We already have the answers.
We're not going to spend resources calculating those things.
We're going to focus on these variables which are significant.
So, that's what a heuristic is.
It tells you what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to.
You know, if you're trying to buy a fast car, the paint job doesn't matter.
If you're trying to find somebody who speeds, red cars probably do speed more often than slate gray cars.
Cars with racing stripes tend to speed more often than cars that don't have them, even though the racing stripes don't actually make the car a faster car.
So, again, two different heuristics.
Are you trying to find a fast car?
Are you trying to find speeders?
So, by educating yourself in these different approaches to the dance of the sexes, between how men and women related, to what the variations and similarities in the roles that men and women occupied in societies, now you have things to compare it to.
And the same thing goes for politics, for civilization, for history.
If you try and understand American politics having only been educated in American politics, you know, it's like asking a fish about water.
You're going to see the left, and you're going to see the right, and you won't see anything else.
You will be beholden to all of the assumptions that all of your fellow Americans are subjected to, and you won't even realize you got them.
You need to learn different heuristics.
You need to familiarize yourself with different heuristics.
And at that point, you can start to determine which is the best heuristic for me to employ here.
And finally, you need an objective standard to hold all of this to.
You need a right or wrong.
Did my predictions come true?
And if they didn't, why didn't they?
A failure is an opportunity to grow and learn.
So, to reiterate, first, you need to know why you're asking the question in the first place.
What does it mean to understand the world, to understand contemporary events?
What does that mean for you?
Why do you want to understand this?
See, if you want to understand it so you can be a political commentator, then you have a very direct reason why you want to understand this.
Makes perfect sense.
If you want to understand this to predict shifts in the economy, well, that's an entirely different question.
If it's political responsibility, many reasons to understand this, but you need to know why you want to understand it.
Then you need to move on to the heuristic you're using to understand it.
Are you using a Marxist understanding of history where you have different social classes struggling against one another?
Are you using a spiritual understanding of history where each generation has a character, a virtue and a vice?
Are you using a moral interpretation of history?
Depending on what questions you're asking and why you're asking them, all of these different heuristics apply.
And finally, you need that objective standard.
You know, and this comes from your purpose.
Did you succeed or fail in understanding the world?
If you're trying to make investments, well, if they paid off, then you probably understood the world, or maybe you were lucky, but probably understood the world.
If you're trying to make predictions, you know, well, there you've got that objective standard.
This is the interesting thing about humans, is that as soon as you isolate a person, as soon as you define a person, or a civilization, or an era, or a generation,
as soon as you put that into a box and you define it, it's like going up to somebody that's sitting down on the sofa and enjoying themselves and saying, hey, you, keep sitting on the sofa.
They'll jump up and say, no, you can't tell me to sit on the sofa.
I'm going to go sit in the chair.
Iterations upon iterations.
It's always, always more complex.
And this is why you need a purpose.
You know, completely unfiltered information.
Information with no heuristic is nothing but data.
Reams upon reams of data.
And it's meaningless.
So understand what you're seeking.
Understand the different heuristics, the different ways of analyzing what's going on.
And have an objective standard.
Have a measurable result that you can achieve.
And keep searching because Trying to understand the world and trying to understand the self, it's the never-ending journey.
