“God works in mysterious ways” isn’t just a cope, it’s also a necessary fact about any wisdom generating process operating on a level above yours; for if its ways weren’t mysterious, you’d be on that level too.
Maybe. I think it’s common for someone smarter than you to come up with ideas or solutions that you don’t think you could or would have come up with yourself (in any reasonable time, at least), but which, once you’ve seen the answer, its merits are clear to you. Metaphorically: nondeterministic polynomial problems.
If the merits are not clear to you, then the first explanation that comes to mind is “That person has knowledge you don’t”; chemical recipes are an obvious category where I wouldn’t understand why a recipe worked even after being told the recipe.
But I feel like the phrase “wisdom generating process operating on a level above yours” has to refer to a deeper difference than just “they have some knowledge you don’t”. But I suppose, in this context, with parents vs children, it really just is “they have a lot of knowledge you don’t, and much more practice at reasoning, and results therefrom”.
But I feel like the phrase “wisdom generating process operating on a level above yours” has to refer to a deeper difference than just “they have some knowledge you don’t”
For sure. And sometimes morons work in mysterious ways too, so a mysterious appearance doesn’t necessarily mean that they have any serious wisdom or even knowledge that you don’t—just that you have no idea how they’re generating their beliefs.
Maybe. I think it’s common for someone smarter than you to come up with ideas or solutions that you don’t think you could or would have come up with yourself (in any reasonable time, at least), but which, once you’ve seen the answer, its merits are clear to you.
For small enough steps, yes. Verifying solutions is generally easier than generating them.
But easy verification strikes me as the exception rather than the rule, with sufficiently large gaps in understanding. For example, you could verify whether the chemical recipe produces food safe almond flavoring or cyanide gas by just following the recipe, but finding out that way requires a bit of a leap of faith. And finding out ahead of time requires understanding some chemistry.
When someone gets sufficiently far ahead of you in any given domain, it’s likely that they not only know things you don’t know, but also know things where you think you know and are wrong. Relativity violates our idea that simultaneity means anything except locally. QM violates our idea that things have to be in one place at a time. At levels above ours, we can no longer “just verify”, because the beliefs have have to verify against are less reliable than the source of the thing we’re trying to verify—and waiting until the results are unambiguous requires acting on the belief that it will probably work out even though we don’t understand how.
The less we’re bound to immediate, easy, and safe verification, the more we can convey and the more we can learn. I aimed to make the vasoconstriction example something that people could start to verify themselves by asking themselves how they would respond in a series of situations sharing similarities, but figuring out how to even attempt a verifiable explanation was a lot harder than figuring out how to help my wife constrict her blood vessels in the first place. When I told my friend she could choose to not swell her injuries, she was able to verify that, but not until after she expected her injuries to not swell just because I said so. If I had to make it verifiable to her ahead of time, I wouldn’t have been able to convey a solution.
Or, putting myself in the dummy shoes, it took me years to learn some things that Feynman learned in minutes, because he was willing to temporarily take silly things like “You can’t open your eyes” and “You won’t feel this burn” on faith and verify only after the fact. In contrast, I insisted on building a framework that allowed me to make sense of things before I dared believe them, which is why it took me so much longer. There’s obviously value in building an understanding, but that’s better done after updating on the fact that your current understanding is completely untrustworthy and the “mysterious” answer is probably true. Sometimes it’s important to be right faster, and keeping known-wrong beliefs around just because we don’t know how to navigate with the correct ones can cause us to lose hard.
Maybe. I think it’s common for someone smarter than you to come up with ideas or solutions that you don’t think you could or would have come up with yourself (in any reasonable time, at least), but which, once you’ve seen the answer, its merits are clear to you. Metaphorically: nondeterministic polynomial problems.
If the merits are not clear to you, then the first explanation that comes to mind is “That person has knowledge you don’t”; chemical recipes are an obvious category where I wouldn’t understand why a recipe worked even after being told the recipe.
But I feel like the phrase “wisdom generating process operating on a level above yours” has to refer to a deeper difference than just “they have some knowledge you don’t”. But I suppose, in this context, with parents vs children, it really just is “they have a lot of knowledge you don’t, and much more practice at reasoning, and results therefrom”.
For sure. And sometimes morons work in mysterious ways too, so a mysterious appearance doesn’t necessarily mean that they have any serious wisdom or even knowledge that you don’t—just that you have no idea how they’re generating their beliefs.
For small enough steps, yes. Verifying solutions is generally easier than generating them.
But easy verification strikes me as the exception rather than the rule, with sufficiently large gaps in understanding. For example, you could verify whether the chemical recipe produces food safe almond flavoring or cyanide gas by just following the recipe, but finding out that way requires a bit of a leap of faith. And finding out ahead of time requires understanding some chemistry.
When someone gets sufficiently far ahead of you in any given domain, it’s likely that they not only know things you don’t know, but also know things where you think you know and are wrong. Relativity violates our idea that simultaneity means anything except locally. QM violates our idea that things have to be in one place at a time. At levels above ours, we can no longer “just verify”, because the beliefs have have to verify against are less reliable than the source of the thing we’re trying to verify—and waiting until the results are unambiguous requires acting on the belief that it will probably work out even though we don’t understand how.
The less we’re bound to immediate, easy, and safe verification, the more we can convey and the more we can learn. I aimed to make the vasoconstriction example something that people could start to verify themselves by asking themselves how they would respond in a series of situations sharing similarities, but figuring out how to even attempt a verifiable explanation was a lot harder than figuring out how to help my wife constrict her blood vessels in the first place. When I told my friend she could choose to not swell her injuries, she was able to verify that, but not until after she expected her injuries to not swell just because I said so. If I had to make it verifiable to her ahead of time, I wouldn’t have been able to convey a solution.
Or, putting myself in the dummy shoes, it took me years to learn some things that Feynman learned in minutes, because he was willing to temporarily take silly things like “You can’t open your eyes” and “You won’t feel this burn” on faith and verify only after the fact. In contrast, I insisted on building a framework that allowed me to make sense of things before I dared believe them, which is why it took me so much longer. There’s obviously value in building an understanding, but that’s better done after updating on the fact that your current understanding is completely untrustworthy and the “mysterious” answer is probably true. Sometimes it’s important to be right faster, and keeping known-wrong beliefs around just because we don’t know how to navigate with the correct ones can cause us to lose hard.