I don’t have to have solid true/false answers to everything. Nor do I need to pretend such answers don’t exist. I can approach what I know directly with high probability and lower it with each step beyond experience.
Author: Isaac Morehouse
Isaac Morehouse is the founder and CEO of Praxis, an awesome startup apprenticeship program. He is dedicated to the relentless pursuit of freedom. He’s written some books, done some podcasting, and is always experimenting with self-directed living and learning. When he’s not with his wife and kids or building his company, he can be found smoking cigars, playing guitars, singing, reading, writing, getting angry watching sports teams from his home state of Michigan, or enjoying the beach.
Diet Pills and Persistent Error in Health and Science
Earlier this year, I was doing a deep dive into virology. Coincidentally, this was before Covid, in effort to solve my own health-related problems and mysteries. I had the same experience I’ve had when I went deeper into any field. A realization that nobody in the field knows what the hell is going on.
What’s It All For?
Whenever there’s a lot of hysteria around dangers to “public health” (a phrase invented to control people), you see escalating calls for more and more dehumanizing mandates. You have to stop at some point and ask, why are people destroying all the things that make life good? What do they hope to achieve?
School is Weird
My nine-year old daughter started attending some once a week homeschool classes. After the first week, I asked how she liked it. She said, “It’s OK. It’s fun to see people and I like lunch and recess. But the rest is weird.”
Billionaires in a Free Market
Someone else having a billion dollars does no harm to you. Fight for freedom, not against others having arbitrary amounts of money.
All News is Fake News
There is infinite information in the universe. Any time you select a tiny slice of info and focus on it, you are creating a story that is different from reality itself. News is a specific view of reality. It’s always wrong.
Antagonism and Action
One of the most useful methods I’ve found to get closer to actionable truth is by creating (non-hostile) antagonism.
Thought Experiments
The claim I heard from some economists was that you can’t have trade without inequality. While I believe inequality is inescapable, natural, not undesirable, and an inevitable outcome of freedom and prosperity, I don’t think it is logically necessary in order for mutually beneficial trade to occur.
Stories Open Doors
When someone tells you, “I’m an engineer”, instead of filing this as a fact in your mental Rolodex, you immediately want to know the story. How did they end up an engineer? Is this the end of a long journey, the beginning of a new story, or the middle? Curiosity drives you to ask good questions, good questions make connections, and connections lead to opportunities.
Keeping Focus Without Retreatism
I wrote yesterday about the information war. We’re bombarded with so much information if we are tuned in it’s impossible to think. But I don’t think the long-term solution is total retreat from the world at large, or what Venkatesh Rao calls Waldenponding.