The Cost of Clarity and Conclusion
A humble suggestion: Most of what I am talking about is drawn from intellectual conversations with Mr books and hence I would humbly suggest you guys to talk to one. Preferably non fiction.
Clarity and why we need it so badly:
Clarity comes from understanding one’s nature. So imagine you are out there in the forest finding your way for food and trying to survive every minute. So you don’t actually know where Mr death is waiting to pound on you. So suppose you hear a “lion’s roar” kind of a sound and you decide to run as fast as you can. After a lot of running you realize there wasn't any lion and it was just a false alarm. Meaning you jumped to a conclusion without really analyzing the situation. Well out there in the forest if you really start doing math and analyse the probability of that sound coming from a lion’s mouth, by the time you find your result you might be in the lion’s stomach. So your mind said “Shashank fuck your analysis and skepticism. Lets together jump to conclusion alias safety”. So that’s how we started jumping to conclusion when there is an ambiguous situation. Plus your mental energy is not spent. Currency saved.
Fast forward a few 1000 years and you realize this jumping to conclusion thing is not that suitable for this present context. So undoing years of biological learning takes a lot of time and training. That’s how skepticism is developed as a practice.
Wait what the fuck am i talking about ? …
CAUSE : Jumping to conclusion and forming patterns where there is none is a SIN done by system 1 ( A term for Automatic thinking )
It is a bad byproduct of accurate guessing and quick thinking. We are right most of the times but sometimes the mistakes are really costly. And its really important to discuss those costly mistakes and develops techniques to avoid them by developing skeptical mind which is taken care by system 2 (Deliberate thinking )
Most of our faith, belief, seeing things where there aren’t, biases, illusions, logical fallacies come from one source, Wanting to draw conclusions and create an image of the world. But little does system 1 know of its short coming.
COST : All of this has created wars between countries, religion and schools of thought. Unwillingness to truly analyse the essence of their belief systems. Or to say, trapped in the passionate love affair with our own illusions. The problems of pursuing clarity is that often the system 1 doesn’t really care if it is true / cooked up clarity. It constructs its own reality based on previous available data and biases. So to really come out of your own traps of thinking is fairly difficult. Yet it is worth the pursuit. Because the mistakes have proven to be disastrous.
Wisdom: keep questioning your belief systems or your “truth” systems as they might not be in line with the actual truth. And develop an appetite for healthy skepticism and science.
Coming up next “Cost of skepticism” …
Adios Amigos !!!
