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Always be improving the quality of your rules of thumb
Wednesday, 7 March 2007
When I was at university, I remember attending a really interesting lecture about maps and what they tell us about how we think. Maps are something I'd never spent a lot of time thinking about before. After all, they just seemed like a type of tool - useful but boring.
Basically, the lecturer said that maps are a simplified model of reality. We use them to communicate and understand something about our world. We can look at a map and see that this road connects to that road which leads to this beach and so on. They provide us with information we need when travelling, but it's a limited subset of the information that could be provided about the thing they represent.
Take for example, a map of London. You can buy a map of London which fills about 150 pages of a book and has every road on it. But this doesn't tell you anywhere near everything there is to know about London. It doesn't tell you that a street is lined with oak trees, for example, or that a restaurant near a train station serves spaghetti. It doesn't show you the bumps in the road, or the individual houses. It doesn't let you know that a particular traffic light is broken at the moment.
Of all the almost infinite amount of information that could be provided about the landscape of London, the authors of the map have cut it down to the bare essentials you need to get around. They've left out a lot of information that they believe is probably irrelevant to your needs, but they've also neglected providing information that could be useful. Because their space is limited, they must be ruthless in deciding what to include and what not to.
This is a good demonstration of how human beings think. The world we live in is infinitely complex. We are bombarded with so much information from our senses at all times that it's impossible to process it all. Concentrate, for example, on how your left foot feels at this time. You are almost certainly receiving some kind of information from the nerves in that foot that you're now aware of, but were ignoring only a moment ago.
Just by being citizens of the world, we have to deal with all sorts of forces and systems that have a big effect on our lives. We have to negotiate the legal system, social expectations, work, leisure, our health and our relationships. Each one of these is so ridiculously complex that there's no way we could ever know everything about them. You could dedicate your life to understanding just one of these, and still be ignorant about large parts of it.
This is the basic problem facing us all as humans. We have to deal with the world even though the information and understanding we have about it is far from perfect. The only solution is to rely on rules of thumb.
Here are some examples of the types of beliefs I'm talking about:
- The best way to get a job is searching on the internet.
- Pot-plants should only be watered once a week.
- Other people are usually dangerous on the road.
- If I smile at somebody, they'll probably smile back.
The point is not necessarily that the above beliefs are true or false. Instead, they're examples of the rules of thumb somebody may use when dealing with certain aspects of reality.
Many people develop such rules for themselves that they think are good enough, then spend the rest of their lives following them. Such people are often frustrated and have difficulty dealing well with the world. This is because they ignore a basic reality.
Your rules of thumb will never, ever be perfect. They can always be improved. That's because, like a simple map, they're just a basic model of reality. They will always be missing some information or knowledge that's important no matter how hard you work on them.
However, some people will develop better rules of thumb than others. They'll have rules that more accurately reflect reality. Because of that, they'll generally lead better and more satisfying lives. The decisions they make will be based more in reality, and so are more likely to lead to good outcomes.
Become one of those people by taking the time to always be refining the rules you keep in your head you keep about reality. The rewards for doing so can be immense.
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