Ludic fallacy and Nonlinearity

Monday Map

Hello reader, welcome to this week’s Monday Map.

Last week was intense for me (philosophically). I had some interesting discussions on Postmodernism, Critical Race Theory, Conservatism, and humility. It felt good to be engaged and I bring that bustling energy into today’s Map.

I want to remind you that the benefits you get from Busyminds newsletter are some of my proven methods and theories for pursuing your curiosity. If you are curious about any subject, following this map (every Monday) will help you go about it. And my own curiosity remains human nature (and its many derivatives).

LUDIC FALLACY

If you ever find a professional martial artist who died in a street fight, he may have been the victim of this fallacy I named above (and of course the fatal blow). The Ludic Fallacy is the act of using neatly organized game models to model and interpret real-life events. The summary is that real-life is not as smooth as organised games. You can read the whole thing here.

NONLINEARITY AND SERENDIPITY 

As a kid, I had my life planned out. I ‘knew’ just the linear, straight path that would lead me to my destination. I knew all the bus stops and the time/age to arrive there. Of course, this was with the caveat: Ceteris paribus (all other things being equal). Unfortunately, the deal about life lies in the domain of the caveat. In other words, all other things were not equal.

Life is not linear. The earlier you know this, the better. Life has its twists and turns. To reject this fact is to be fragile all your life and to be heartbroken when you don’t get the things you want precisely how you want them and when you want them. You will break like glass and still be left with the responsibility of picking up the shards lest they injure someone else.

As life is non-linear, so is knowledge. Knowledge is non-linear. To set your mind only on what certain knowledge can get you is the opposite of curiosity. It is a faulty teleology. You must first of all value knowledge for itself- which is the spirit of curiosity. Then you must remain flexible enough to follow it through its evolutionary twists and turns without getting mangled like a carcass. Curiosity is antifragile and it can deliver this same property to your personality.

When you are fragile with knowledge, you cannot go the Thomas Edison way- the way of the 9,999 failed experiments before the 10,000th  success. Even worse, you cannot be an entrepreneur. Antifragility is the skeleton of risk-taking.

To embrace the spirit of curiosity is to embrace serendipity. To flourish with learning is to flow and benefit from the unintended, the accidental, the unplanned, and the undesigned. It is to go where the knowledge leads. Only then can you find the true worth of what you know.

The true worth of knowledge is in its utter conclusion. And there is no utter conclusion except the knowledge itself drives you, not the other way round. Enjoy the process.

I conclude today’s letter with a long quote from the great philosopher Roger Scruton. He wrote in his book “How To Be A Conservative” that:

“Although knowledge is useful, it comes about because we value it, whether or not we have a use for it, as people valued the study of the classical languages and ancient history, the study of logic and set theory, the study of probability and statistical inference. Nobody would have guessed that ten years of Latin and Greek was exactly the preparation required by those British civil servants, as they travelled around the globe to administer a multicultural empire; nobody would have foreseen that the abstruse workings of Boole’s algebra and Frege’s logic would lead to the era of digital technology; nobody, least of all the Rev. Thomas Bayes, had any idea of what Bayes’ theorem in the calculus of probability would mean for our understanding of statistics. All such knowledge arises because people pursue it for its own sake, in the context of institutions that are maintained by our curiosity and not by our goals.”

I hope this helps. Of course before you go, hold this picture and wise insight from Naval:

Good luck and have a nice day.

Jegdy.