Happy Pi Day! I plan on celebrating with a slice of pie this evening, although I'm still undecided as to what kind of pie. Truly, life is filled with difficult questions. Turns out that today is Albert Einstein's birthday as well.
So, since this is such a huge day for many geeks, nerds, intellectuals, scientists, and their brainy ilk, today makes me think of certain words of wisdom passed to me by... well, I don't remember who gave me these wise words, to be honest. Nevertheless, these sayings have stayed with me for years, and influence how I think and react to the big questions of life...
"Always work to make your reservoir of knowledge a little deeper each day".
Thinking of my knowledge as a reservoir helps give me perspective and keep me humble (both of which my ego needs). When I was younger, my reservoir wasn't that deep. It was pretty shallow; moreover, it wasn't filled with just knowledge. My reservoir got quite polluted with nonsense at times.
We should put effort into deepening our reservoir. It gets deeper through study, reflection, discussion, and experience. The deeper it gets, the more we can put into it. Here is where we must do the hard work of trying to fill it with only knowledge, while doing our best to filter out anything false, irrational, or nonsensical.
"Shrink the borders of your bias."
If we imagine our paradigm of beliefs and convictions as a garden upon which these ideas exist and grow, then we can imagine a fence around them that protects them, like a fence around a garden that keeps the rabbits from eating all the vegetables.
We fence up the borders of this land to protect that which is inside. We all have beliefs or ideas that we prefer or like or enjoy, and we really want these beliefs to be true. This is called being biased. Most people work very hard to protect - defend, support, argue for - their preferred ideologies. Metaphorically, they put fences up around their beliefs to protect them from the hungry bunnies of logic and reason.
Removing our fences completely is impossible. We will always wrestle with bias for as long as we have emotions. But we can work to shrink the borders around which we put up our fences. As we pull back our borders, we will find ourselves fencing up fewer and fewer of our beliefs, thus leaving more of our ideas and thoughts exposed for the logic bunnies. Only then will we see which ideas can withstand the teeth of reason.
And much like filtering the nonsense and the irrational from our reservoirs, the goal is to only have ideas in our garden that represent the truth as closely as possible. This takes work. A lot of work. And the job never ends.
Logic Bunnies!
— Dead-Logic
Shrink Your Borders, Deepen Your Reservoir
Shrink Your Borders, Deepen Your Reservoir
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