Nine Types of Knowledge
How I Try to Emotionally Sort New Information. Buried Treasure Truth. Then Another Nine Types. So Eighteen Types but that Didn’t Sound as Good.
The hardest obstacle to knowing what is true is getting your own feelings out of the way. For the first part of the assessment, anyhow. There are lots of ways that people go about this, but mine is to give myself a gut-check that I have something like a bell-curve distribution over the above categories.
More specifically, in the image above, I ask myself:
“Am I able to identify things in my own beliefs that fall into each of these categories? Because if I am approaching the universe honestly, with awareness of my own feelings, then it stands to reason that truth should be distributed more or less randomly around my perceptions of the truth.”
The universe was not built for me, or for you, specifically. So why would everything that is true feel true to you? In fact, shouldn’t some true things feel like they’re pretty dumb? When Elon Musk was describing his reusable rocket company idea people were openly laughing at him. People who worked in aerospace mocked him at length for having a stupid idea. Each time a rocket blew up he was hounded. The ideas he expressed felt dumb to everyone around him but were nevertheless actually true.
I call this kind of truth “Buried Treasure Truth” because it’s something that is incredibly valuable that people are epistemically unable to approach. Inside of you, there is probably some piece of Buried Treasure Truth, because all the barriers you encounter in life push so hard against it coming forward.
“How can you ask that I believe that thing? Why, I would have to betray all that I am!”
Another way to think about this is that if the universe wasn’t built specifically for you or me, why should everything that I want to know be knowable?
The the things that you reject like a cat being given a bath is where a lot of the knowable secrets of the universe reside, I think. And it’s why I do a bad job of filtering out noise because what if the crank who comes to you with a great idea actually has a great idea? On the flip side of this, a lot of the things that feel dumb probably are dumb and that’s why they got sorted into that category. So I have to still be able to point to things and say “Nah.”
The point isn’t to shove everything into one single category. The point is to make sure you have a distribution across categories. If you push everything into the “Is Dumb, Feels Dumb” category well, you’ve pretty much sunken into Insufferable Nihilism. If you shove everything into the category of unknowable you’ve become Hopelessly Mystic. If you think every wild-eyed idea that sound dumb is actually smart you’ve become Blindly Optimistic.
Another useful lens for this kind of thinking is to assess your own desire.
Again, this is something where if you’re honest and the universe wasn’t built for you, you should be able to put things in all of these boxes.
Do you realize what a profoundly arrogant statement you’re making if you suggest that everything that is true is something you want to be true? You’re either a paragon of moral virtue, devoted to God, some weird slavish naturalist, or willfully deluded. My guess is the last one.
“Oh yes, everything I want to be true is the way that the world works,” has never been said by anyone you could stand to talk to for more than five minutes.
I think we live in an age where we have a broad social overcorrection. We came out of a period of blind optimism and when we witnessed the things we had broken on the way we had to figure out some kind of course correction. But at the population scale, our species is really bad at nuance. So now, there are many people who inappropriately sort things into “I want this to be true” and “Is false” as a sort of heuristic to sound intelligent. I call this the “Hardcore Atheist Fallacy.” I could probably choose a better word than atheist, but this is my substack and I’ll be as deliberately provocative as I want.
Or: “This makes me feel good, therefore it is bad.”
I find this useful to examine, only because I suspect that in certain political ideologies prevalent today that this mindset is as common as “This makes me feel good, therefore it is good” was in previous ages.
I tend to really only trust myself in certain domains where I can very easily sort things into all of these different boxes and the amount of things I have in each box seems to be about right. This all goes to support my general heuristic that the truth, generally speaking because again you’d expect this to be on a bell curve of abundance, doesn’t make you say “Fuck yeah!” or “Hell no!” nearly so often as it makes you say “Oh. Huh.”
My son will be awakening from his nap probably in the next ten minutes, so I will have to be satisfied with leaving this here for everyone as a provocative thought.
I'm so glad I found your substack!