In the post it was hinted at several times that there is another way of thinking:
Are there Laws of optimal thought governing the optimal way to contextualize and caveat, which might be helpful for finding good executable recipes? The naturally Lawful thinker will immediately suspect so, even if they don’t know what those Laws are. Not knowing these Laws won’t panic a healthy Lawful thinker. Instead they’ll proceed to look around for useful yet chaotic-seeming prescriptions to use now instead of later—without mistaking those chaotic prescriptions for Laws, or treating the chaos of their current recipes as proof that there’s no good normative ideals to be had.
Indeed, it can sometimes be useful to contemplate, in detail, that there are probably Laws you don’t know.
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The idea that there’s a shortest path through the maze isn’t a “normative ideal” instead of a “prescriptive ideal”, it’s just true. Once you define distance there is in fact a shortest path through the maze.
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If you’re allergic to normative ideals, maybe a helpful course would be to discard the view of whatever-it-is as a normative ideal and try to understand it as a fact.
Let’s call this “Fact-thinking”. I’m not sure if it’s just me seeing this distinction, so feel free to comment.
Fact-thinking relies on the assumtion that there is such a thing as ‘true underlying reality’.
It doesn’t really matter if the whole of this ‘reality’ can be expressed in a bunch of single true sentences (facts), or just parts of it. (Presuming that you are an omniscient being that knows everything there is to know about this ‘reality’.) Either way, there is a (presumably) bounded amount of distinct facts which describe as much of reality as is possible, given its nature. Wether you are aware of all these facts or not is irrelevant to their existence.
Assuming that there are processes which can distinguish truths from falsehood given enough time; and assuming that there are hypothesis-producing processes that generate enough hypothesis to cover the whole of ‘reality that can be expressed as facts’; then it is possible to distinguish the whole package of these facts after some finite amount of time, dependend on the efficiency of the processes.
These facts can be used to describe literally anything that you can do in reality, because they describe the whole of reality, which you are a part of. Therefore, they can describe all laws that you can come up with to approximate or describe some process; they can describe any tool and any box of tools; etc.
Given some problem or situation to puzzle through, the Factual thinker doesn’t dither over wether or not the knowledge they’re using to solve this relates to some approach called ‘Law-thinking’ or ‘Toolbox-thinking’. It doesn’t really matter if you use the left-hand-method to find your way out of a maze, or your knowledge of there being a shortest path to build a cellphone app which finds a way for you, or if you burrow underneath the maze, or teleport to the other side. What matters is that, whichever approach you use, it depends on your knowledge of the situation at the time; and this knowledge is either correct in some approximate fashion to the facts that literally describe the situation in every possible way, at every possible time, or it is not. That is, you should be aware that your knowledge and ideas of how to conquer the maze is only a subset of all possible ways to conquer the maze; and, within this subset or outside of it, there may or may not be a better approach to how you can get to the other side, given the parameters you care about (wheelchair-accessability, fastest time of all possible times, balancing a red triangle made of jelly on your head while singing to the tune of your favorite childhood song, …).
Factual thinking seems to be alreay hinted at in the post. I just wanted to point to it, because I have seen examples of ‘Law-thinking’ and ‘Toolbox-thinking’ in people, but if I was pressed to categorize my way of thinking into something slightly idealised, I favor what I would call the ‘Fact-thinking’ approach, which, if I haven’t misunderstood something greatly, is distinct from the other two.
In the post it was hinted at several times that there is another way of thinking:
[...]
[...]
Let’s call this “Fact-thinking”. I’m not sure if it’s just me seeing this distinction, so feel free to comment.
Fact-thinking relies on the assumtion that there is such a thing as ‘true underlying reality’.
It doesn’t really matter if the whole of this ‘reality’ can be expressed in a bunch of single true sentences (facts), or just parts of it. (Presuming that you are an omniscient being that knows everything there is to know about this ‘reality’.) Either way, there is a (presumably) bounded amount of distinct facts which describe as much of reality as is possible, given its nature. Wether you are aware of all these facts or not is irrelevant to their existence.
Assuming that there are processes which can distinguish truths from falsehood given enough time; and assuming that there are hypothesis-producing processes that generate enough hypothesis to cover the whole of ‘reality that can be expressed as facts’; then it is possible to distinguish the whole package of these facts after some finite amount of time, dependend on the efficiency of the processes.
These facts can be used to describe literally anything that you can do in reality, because they describe the whole of reality, which you are a part of. Therefore, they can describe all laws that you can come up with to approximate or describe some process; they can describe any tool and any box of tools; etc.
Given some problem or situation to puzzle through, the Factual thinker doesn’t dither over wether or not the knowledge they’re using to solve this relates to some approach called ‘Law-thinking’ or ‘Toolbox-thinking’. It doesn’t really matter if you use the left-hand-method to find your way out of a maze, or your knowledge of there being a shortest path to build a cellphone app which finds a way for you, or if you burrow underneath the maze, or teleport to the other side. What matters is that, whichever approach you use, it depends on your knowledge of the situation at the time; and this knowledge is either correct in some approximate fashion to the facts that literally describe the situation in every possible way, at every possible time, or it is not. That is, you should be aware that your knowledge and ideas of how to conquer the maze is only a subset of all possible ways to conquer the maze; and, within this subset or outside of it, there may or may not be a better approach to how you can get to the other side, given the parameters you care about (wheelchair-accessability, fastest time of all possible times, balancing a red triangle made of jelly on your head while singing to the tune of your favorite childhood song, …).
Factual thinking seems to be alreay hinted at in the post. I just wanted to point to it, because I have seen examples of ‘Law-thinking’ and ‘Toolbox-thinking’ in people, but if I was pressed to categorize my way of thinking into something slightly idealised, I favor what I would call the ‘Fact-thinking’ approach, which, if I haven’t misunderstood something greatly, is distinct from the other two.