Sense-making: insights and advice for future-me

[Epistemic status: I have different levels of confidence about different points I’m making. Overall though, they are all mostly based on observations and some introspection, thus take with a couple of grains of salt.
I’m writing this with my future-self as the primary target audience. This might mean that in some instances, I’m using references I’m confident will make sense to my future-self, but that might not necessarily make sense to other people. Where it was particularly cheap, I tried to avoid this, but there are still some instances where I did not bother to provide a whole lot.

Preamble: A pandemic - “is this real?”

Early March 2020: Watching the unfolding of a global outbreak of covid-19 has taught me a bunch of things. Things I think are meaningful insights about how the world and how our society works. Things I think are meaningful to my personal growth. 

Trying to make sense of the covid-19 pandemic has offered me a real-world learning environment of an intensity I don’t think I had before. Here, I aim to capture some insights such that my future-self can remember and build up upon them. Note that these aren’t insights about object-level questions of how the world works, but insights that mostly concern the functioning of cognition and epistemics processes, which I hope will improve my general capacity of ‘making sense of the world’.

To most readers, I expect the below ‘insights’ will mostly sound obvious at first sight. And they are in a sense. What I’m trying to capture for my future-self is a tacit understanding of those insights. I want to be able to do these things, all the time, perfectly. 

Part 1. Prepare your mind to accept the evidence

>> Watch your ‘emotional brain’. It might not like what the evidence suggests. It might very much like coming to certain conclusions, and not to others. No, your emotional brain is not dumb, it’s not a ‘bad actor’. But it might be… scared.

There are a bunch of things that help with aligning your emotional brain with whatever evidence suggests. Personally, I think the most valuable approach is to be thinking in the framework of ‘long-term relationship-building with yourself’. 

By ‘relationship building’, I mean things like a) setting up high-bandwidth communication channels with your emotional brain, b) building trust between different parts of your mind, c) building trust, coherence and consistency between different temporal versions of yourself. 

While building this sort of relationship to yourself (and different ‘parts’ of your mind) is extremely valuable, it does require you to start early.

This is why, next to the encouragement for long-term relationship building with yourself, I also want to list a couple of more immediately actionable techniques that are helpful. (Note that some of these are techniques with a lot of pedagogical depth, which I am not intending to give justice to here. For anyone who isn’t familiar with these techniques/concepts, the links provided should make for a good starting point.)

The point is: engage with the worries, objections and rationalizations your emotional brain presents to you - instead of either i) running with whatever your emotional brain wants, or ii) inconsiderately denying their realness, legitimacy and informational content. I like the analogy of how I think good parents engage with their children. Namely, by taking them seriously, by taking them as a whole, entire person - while engaging with them in a way that is appropriate and the child can understand. 


Part 2. Intellectual agency

>> Develop your intellectual agency. You can figure stuff out through reasoning. You can actually make progress through using your cognition. Some more granular breakdown of this lesson includes:

  1. This is not a school exam. You won’t find the platonic The-Correct-Answer, and even if you did, no one will put a checkmark behind your answer so you know you got it right. More importantly, you don’t have to know the-correct-answer in order to be allowed to engage in the sense-making and problem-solving process. Another way to say this: There are no adults in the room. Not a single one. Nihil supernum.

  2. Good object-level information and understanding matter. Collect your facts, identify your sources, compare them, understand their epistemic status, let yourself be moved by evidence, don’t over-update on speculations, consider alternative hypothesis, think about how these factors interact, think at different levels of abstraction, use different lenses to look at the world (e.g. economics, sociological, psychological, …), reason, use your cognition, etc.

    1. Information is the link through which you engage with Reality (as opposed to with phantoms that only live in your or others’ heads). Seek real-world feedback loops. Make sure you stay in touch with reality, make sure you stay grounded. 

    2. Build informational self-efficacy. Strengthening your information base empowers you. You will be less vulnerable to random speculation you get exposed to, you will be better equipped to integrate new pieces of evidence, you will be better prepared to defend your groundedness against denial and panic. 

    3. Information is the fuel your ability to reason depends on. Read that sentence again.

  3. You can make progress. 

    1. You can make progress. One piece of information builds on the other one. When you just started the jigsaw puzzle, it feels hopeless trying to guess what picture it will show at the end. But if you keep going, at some point, contours start to show, shapes start to appear, patterns start emerging. Be a builder, and have the patience and trust to start building, one puzzle piece at the time. 

    2. You can make progress, often faster than you think. It is astonishing how much headway you can make in just a day of reading and sense-making. 

  4. There is a skill to dealing with uncertainty and risk. I have only just started really getting some gears on what it means to appropriately think about and deal with uncertainty and risk, and to build tacit knowledge for how to do so. Part of this, yet worth mentioning explicitly is the skill of dealing with uncertainty and risk while staying grounded. While staying in touch with Reality. 

    1. Focus your uncertainty. I’ve observed that people often like to indulge in what I like to call ‘arbitrary amounts of precision’. This comes up particularly often in relation to forecasting. People seem to love to tweak parts of their model that, relative to other sources of uncertainty, amounts to pure ‘intellectual manicure’. Always ask yourself, what are the biggest sources of my uncertainty and where/how can I reduce that uncertainty more.   

  5. Letting your mind go wherever the evidence leads you, too, is a skill and can be trained. You might want to remember drawing ’intellectual lines of retreat’. Some truths are hard to swallow for the unprepared mind. This might be ‘a failure of flesh’ - but it’s the flesh we all share. Hence, not much to bemoan, though much to learn about how to work with our human irrationalities. 

  6. Finally, build strong experiential snapshots/phenomenological memories of what it means to be grounded and of what it means to be intellectually agentic (and other ‘virtues’), and install TAPs to remember to embody these virtues while engaging with the messy reality. To me, those function as anchors and signposts. 

Overall, there is an important cognitive shift happening if you start ‘taking the world seriously’ as well as ‘taking yourself seriously'. I like to call it intellectual agency. Note that progress on this dimension is continuous, not discrete.  


Part 3. Other people as means to sense-making

>> Talk to people while keeping in mind that talking to people has different purposes. 

  1. Some people you talk to to get data.

    1. I often use people as a source of data. I think this is often ludicrously cheap compared to digging up all of that information yourself. That said, don’t forget to build informational self-sufficiency. (Which, however, I claim has more to do with how you process the data you receive, than where you get it from.) In particular, there are meaningful things you can ~only get by talking to people : their models. People don’t ever give you raw data. The data they give you has already gone through their sensemaking apparatus and is now embedded in a web made of assumptions and prior beliefs. Remember, data from other people can be both, a gold mine as well as a major source of epistemic blunder. 

  2. Some people you talk to to get perspectives. 

    1. People will have different views on many aspects of the issue: what are the risks, what are the crucial considerations, what does an ‘adequate response’ look like, should we be more worried or less, …? Some people, you will learn, have more groundedness than others; some people might be scope insensitive or rely too heavily on pragmatism. Other people are epistemic hypochondriacs or secretly seek a video-game-like thrill in their lives, a sense of being important or having important things to day. Expose yourself to different such perspectives, all the while remembering that most likely none of these are the exactly-true perspective to be held. Especially early-on in your own sense-making process, before you have started to build your own, substantiated working model of the situation, it’s in fact likely that, at some point in the future, you will talk to a different person, with a different perspective,  and that their perspective, too, will sound pretty convincing to you (at least on the face of it). 

    2. Ideally, develop strong internal models of people whose judgement you respect and who represent prime examples of certain virtues (e.g. scepticism, groundedness, alertness, inside-view reasoning, wisdom, perspective-taking…) so you can consult shoulder-versions of those people when in need.

  3. Some people will be your co-puzzlers/co-sense-makers.

    1. Especially early on, especially while still building the skills of intellectual agency, taking the world seriously, groundedness, etc - get a good and reasonable person to be your figuring-things-out buddy. Most things just are much better when you do them with the right people. 


Part 4. Communicating beliefs effectively

[None of this post aims to be exhaustive, but for this part in particular, I feel some urge to reiterate this fact.]

Sense-making is important. But if you want to be a good epistemic citizen, you will also have to learn how to communicate your current understanding effectively to other people. This matters both for the epistemic process itself (e.g. to compare your own model to others, to disagree constructively, etc.) as well as for coordinating with other people to take collective action.

>> Start to build models about how to communicate your model/beliefs effectively (e.g. assessment regarding risk levels and adequate responses) to different people. 

  1. While communicating with other people about your current beliefs, always remember to stay grounded and truthful. I believe it, often, it is correct to start by trying to understand where the other person is at, in order to tailor one’s communication strategy to that. However, I think people often end up doing this badly. If you are overly worried about tailoring your message to your audience, you risk skewing its content so much that it becomes ungrounded, which, in the worst case, may result in epistemically unsound information-cascade-like dynamics. 

  2. When, for example, your goal is to convince people you care about (say, your parents) that covid-19 is a bigger risk (especially but not only given its tails) than they realize - be careful. This is tricky territory. 

    1. Try to understand first what their self-alignment technology is shaped like, and why it is there. Don’t just tear it down.
      In most cases, people will just bounce (i.e. homoeostasis). And that’s a good outcome here. In other cases, they won’t bounce but incorporate the information, however in ways that might be really, really bad for them (i.e. chaos). Minds are delicate!

    2. Then, try to understand which words (i.e. pieces of data, presented in what way) will get through to them (without causing harm, see above). For example, the person in question might be concerned most of all with their personal health and risk of fatality. Then, give them the data and also help them to interpret what these numbers mean for them. Or, they might not be concerned about their personal risks, but they might really care about being a good, responsible citizen. In this case, you might want to tell them the story about how it is important to take the issue seriously in order to prevent things from getting real bad, and many more people dying that would have needed to. While doing that, make sure to always keep true to the facts.

  3. Communicate your arguments in order of their importance (let’s call it ‘load-bearing-ness’). I’m under the impression that, in discussions, we sometimes tend to give reasons for our beliefs that aren't our true reasons for believing a thing, and often they aren’t the ‘best’ (as in, most convincing) reasons either. This seems to be increasingly true as the discussion becomes more engaged/heated. I don’t understand why this is - it doesn’t seem to make much sense, really. When I listen to debates/discussions, the times I feel impressed by a speaker's ability reasoning abilities is when the reasons they lay forth are the most important reasons for taking X seriously, without getting distracted by their opponents' rhetoric games or strawman representation of the argument.
    It seems plausible to me that what in fact is happening here is that some people have cleaner, more wells-structured belief-webs than others. It takes cognitive work to identify which of your arguments are load-bearing. In comparison, making long lists of reasons in favour of X, irrespective of whether these reasons are important reasons or not, is easy. Thus, it’s a sign of clarity of thought/clarity of reasoning, which in turn makes it less surprising that, by default, most people suck at putting forth the most important reasons for their beliefs. 

Oxford, Jan 2020

Oxford, Jan 2020