- Clarity Drops
- Posts
- Faith in Scientific Explanations & More
Reading time: 4 min
Today’s high-signal drops:
• Makes-You-Think Tweet: Wrappers
• Mind-Expanding Concept: Faith in Scientific Explanations
• Cool Quote or Question: Downsides of systems
• High-Signal Content: Books don’t work
Makes-You-Think Tweet
Has anybody ever pejoratively described the airlines as a "Boeing wrapper"
— Will Robbins (@whrobbins)
5:00 PM • Aug 22, 2023
Mind-Expanding Concept
Faith in Scientific Explanations
Generated by Midjourney | subconscious mind trying to fix itself
I don't see or feel the benefits of many things I do on a regular basis. You're probably the same.
Things like meditation, fasting, avoiding bright lights at night, and not eating seed oils. I can't make the cause-and-effect connection. I don't consciously experience the benefits. So why keep doing them? In short, because I believe the benefits are there.
If I can see or feel the benefits of a behavior, it's easy to stick to it
Physical exercise is one of them. When I lift weights I get energized. I'm less reactive when problems pop up. And after a while, I can see that my body looks better. Another one, from a different realm, is multitasking. More precisely avoiding it. When I batch tasks like replying to emails or I block 90-minute chunks to crack problems, I get more done. No doubt about it.
Because the benefits are salient, I have no problem sticking to these things. I do slip here and there, but I notice it and can course-correct.
It's much harder to stick to behaviors when the benefits are not visible
Somehow and in a sneaky way, my brain ends up deciding by itself that it's fine not to fast because what are the fucking benefits anyway? It's harder to stick to meditation than exercise. Harder to avoid bright lights at night than to avoid multitasking. Cause and effect are not obvious.
But even for these behaviors, there's a way in. I've noticed that I'm more likely to stick to something if I understand the mechanism behind it. If I learn how things (supposedly) work physiologically, biochemically, and behaviorally, and it makes sense to me, I tend to stick to it. For instance, I don't feel the benefits of avoiding seed oils. But I understand how they are arguably detrimental to our health. And the logic holds water. So I just avoid them.
Once I buy into the mechanism, I suspect my brain internalizes that I should probably do it. Maybe by rationally understanding it, we give ourselves permission to automatically execute it.
Many important things in life have a longer feedback loop and require a leap of faith
If we only did things for which we had immediate feedback, we would act like a dog (or a child for that matter).
Sleeping well, educating ourselves, and spending time with our kids pay off in decades. Despite knowing it, it's still often hard to cultivate the right behaviors and habits today. We work late instead of playing with little Ben. We watch another Netflix episode instead of sleeping that 7th or 8th hour.
Learning and marinating on the mechanism whereby today's actions will lead to outcomes tomorrow can help us make the right resource allocation.
In summary, if you want to trick your brain and increase the likelihood of doing what you know you should be doing, understand the mechanism behind it. And once you do, have faith in it.
Cool Quote
Systems Are Seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete. You have become absorbed. You are now a systems person.
High-Signal Content
“Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.”
See you next week,
Filipe