The most powerful influences are unconscious in a way, as they can be known without being articulated. Articulation is powerful for self-improvement, but many concepts have been passed down that are not articulated, they are trained and imitated, culturally or otherwise.
I say this to say that while I think, at times, that while my own agency may be so small that it may as well not be there, I also firmly believe that what I do matters much more than what I think about it.
A concept of agency is practicable by many without any understanding or even any belief of the term, much less a deep one. In practice there seems to be the capability for this to be enacted without a granular concept.
So, as long as I do the thing I would do, if I did believe in such a concept, or make a habit of doing so, that matters a lot more than what my idiot self believed in the first place.
A right pattern of thinking then, is not as important as a right pattern of action, which I may have acquired by my upbringing, exposure to cultural influences, or habit and routine. I believe that encoded in upbringing, in observation of cultural forces, are ingrained the sum of a chain of the habits and routines of our forbears, they are the shortcut from caveman to astrophysicist, so to speak, that each person need not re-invent the entire system from first principles within their own lifetime (a daunting task). We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and not just in the realm of math and science. While perhaps less formal and articulated, surely as much knowledge must be codified within them, or we would not have progressed as we had to this point.
I think all this falls underneath the maxim: do the right thing all the time, even when you don't know what that is.
That's how you game the statistics. All you have to do is be better than random, and many small, correct actions make that more favorable for you. IIRC the house edge on the odds of a lot of casino card games are not much better than 51 or so percent, but in the aggregate, we know, and can prove mathematically that the house always wins in the end. If we are small in this world then subdivision of actions into small, consistently right ones seems to work, even when our concept of why it was right is off or unknown.
The what beats the why, though the why is the edge by which we can sometimes discover the what at a faster rate than cultural aggregation.
pwm /
npub18w…2dnvc
2023-03-16 05:54:59
in reply to nevent1q…796l
Author Public Key
npub18w4tungqseyt2sutlcccpc75g09uxerclw4mv5q8pxdfdgw9dy3qr2dnvcPublished at
2023-03-16 05:54:59Event JSON
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"content": "The most powerful influences are unconscious in a way, as they can be known without being articulated. Articulation is powerful for self-improvement, but many concepts have been passed down that are not articulated, they are trained and imitated, culturally or otherwise. \nI say this to say that while I think, at times, that while my own agency may be so small that it may as well not be there, I also firmly believe that what I do matters much more than what I think about it. \nA concept of agency is practicable by many without any understanding or even any belief of the term, much less a deep one. In practice there seems to be the capability for this to be enacted without a granular concept.\nSo, as long as I do the thing I would do, if I did believe in such a concept, or make a habit of doing so, that matters a lot more than what my idiot self believed in the first place.\nA right pattern of thinking then, is not as important as a right pattern of action, which I may have acquired by my upbringing, exposure to cultural influences, or habit and routine. I believe that encoded in upbringing, in observation of cultural forces, are ingrained the sum of a chain of the habits and routines of our forbears, they are the shortcut from caveman to astrophysicist, so to speak, that each person need not re-invent the entire system from first principles within their own lifetime (a daunting task). We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and not just in the realm of math and science. While perhaps less formal and articulated, surely as much knowledge must be codified within them, or we would not have progressed as we had to this point.\nI think all this falls underneath the maxim: do the right thing all the time, even when you don't know what that is.\nThat's how you game the statistics. All you have to do is be better than random, and many small, correct actions make that more favorable for you. IIRC the house edge on the odds of a lot of casino card games are not much better than 51 or so percent, but in the aggregate, we know, and can prove mathematically that the house always wins in the end. If we are small in this world then subdivision of actions into small, consistently right ones seems to work, even when our concept of why it was right is off or unknown. \nThe what beats the why, though the why is the edge by which we can sometimes discover the what at a faster rate than cultural aggregation.",
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