Thought For The Day

 Embrace empiricism. Be zen acting in the stochastic present.

This to me is a quintessential pillar of critical thinking. Or. Be smart, be effective. To me it also seems super obvious. Duh. But then. Recognise. How many people don't do this. Are dismissive of scientific method. Learning. Modelling. Anyway.

Embrace empiricism -

so. Observe. Record. Learn. Read your history. Understand all the things that have come before and how they happened and why they happened. From the result of a particle smash at the super collider. To the slip into dictatorship of the weimar republic. All those things. Are measureable. You can study them. Science ! Learn the facts. Learn to test. Do not ignore this, or dismiss it, or just rely on "belief" ( anti intellectualism ). Do the work.

But. Critical.

If you only live in that space. Where you have to have all the facts. All the things. Before ever wondering what to do. You will fail. You cannot live entirely in that academic space. ( Academics love this space. Only facts. Can't be wrong. Passive. Wait. Always fucking surprised in the moment. Supremely wise in hindsight. IE Useful as an academic. Horseshit as a leader )

Consider an oncoming tsunami. If you're a perfect information empiricist. The only way you are 100% sure the tsunami has hit, is that you have taken an inland water measurement. And peak flooding got up to X feet of water.

If you're standing on the bloody beach with this approach. Empirically correct. Factually dead. I can confirm that right now. There is no oxygen in my lungs. And I am drowning. Brilliant.

Measurement and studying of metrics is a backward looking endeavour. In so much as. You can only measure something once it has already happened.

Next bit.

Be zen acting in the stochastic present.

To avoid that tsunami. You need to be able to take what you know. And project it into the future. A prediction. Just about every prediction is stochastic. Which is to say. Not guaranteed. Imperfect. Probabilistic.

You see the tide retreat. Empirically. You know this is a precursor to a tsunami. But you do not have the data for this time, this location, this event. Stochastically, RUN. A prediction model says, yeah, you should probably run, right now. It's also a cost versus risk excercise.

If you run, and the tsunami dribbles in no threat. You've had to have a nice jog and expended energy that you didn't need to.

If you don't run, and the tsnami rolls in, drowns you and crushes you. You're dead.

Ok. The zen bit.

A person needs to be zen. They need to be ok, at peace, understanding. That living in a stochastic space means that sometimes - you will get it wrong. That sometimes you need to act before you know categorically. And there can be consequences to that. But that you cannot let indecision or doubt interfere with that. Be zen with it. And act.

Which isn't to say you act like an idiot. You use every bit of learning and understanding you have, you project it forward, model it, balance probabilities, risks of failure, risks of inaction. And act accordingly. And you accept there will be consequences. And you are making the best call you can at that time.

In hindsight you may look terrible. An awful mistake. But that's ok. That's the reality of living in that stochastic present. Do your best. Be zen with it. Understand the full spectrum of what is going on. And operate at your best. Which isn't perfect. It's your best - anyones best.

The actual challenge here - once you grasp both bits. Is in accumulating ever more information in the empirical backwards looking bit. So that you can apply all that data into your forward projection model. And. Refine ever better models. So there's the work. Information capture. Modelling outcomes. And both of those things, for a human, are always going to be unfinished and imperfect. Also be aware of that. And risk assess your own capabilities.