Positivism

I think about a lot of things that I learnt from Snowy Hill and I'm wondering how much of it is really useful. There is this strain of thought, which is “positivism”. It says that there are a lot of things that we can know about this world through the application of logic and science. A lot of what I learnt had to do with the boundary of knowledge. What we could know, and what we could not know.

I learnt about constructivism, which posited that a lot of what we think we know about the world are based on shared understandings, and many times, those shared understandings have very little basis in reality. The most famous example is that the value of a $1 bill is a figment of our imagination, but it is a very powerful figment because it's also a notion that's shared across many people.

I learnt about the Godel Incompleteness theorem, which states that there are logical statements that are true or false, but cannot be proven.

I learnt about chaos theory, which showed that there were certain systems where the future state of these systems were unproveable.

I learnt about a class of problems, NP completeness. These problems probably cannot be solved.

I learnt about systematic racism and marxism and a dozen totally creative ways you can spin something innocuous that somebody said into something that's insidiously bigoted. 

They were very fun ideas to learn and to grapple with, and to a young man, it was really fun to be able to walk around and poke holes in a lot of our common understandings about things, to talk about the extent of knowledge, and to talk about what can and cannot be known.

Now, those things I learnt are true, and they contain wisdom that I can still go back to over and over again, but sometimes I wonder if this knowledge is just a little too ivory-towerish. What is the practicality of knowing the extent of what you could possibly know? Is this intellectual sophistry for the purpose of intellectual sophistry? Does it contribute to the progress of your life? You could be the kid who points out that the emperor has no clothes, and be famous for 15 minutes, but then you'd be a one trick pony, unless you found something else to do with the rest of your life (which is a long time presumably unless you got executed on the spot). You can't be that guy. You can't build your life around being a naysayer. Or maybe you can, in which case you're be one of those techno-dystopia cassandras like Timnit Gebru or Evgeny Morosov or whatever.

But it would be so much better – even if you were some kind of a cassandra, to also have built something and achieved something else.

One of the main strains in my life at Snowy Hill is that I avoided the engineering school. I think it was a mistake, but I knew that my brain wasn't really oriented towards building things. It was better at tearing things down rather than building them up. And much later in life, I'm realising that it's a pretty big problem. For example, it's not easy to build things up. You could come into a debate between a builder and a destroyer, and find that the destroyer has the better arguments. The destroyer could point out a lot of flaws in the system, and he'd be absolutely right about a lot of what he says. But that's mainly because the destroyer has the easier job. It's really easy to point out flaws. It's extremely difficult to build a flawless system.

So it might seem as though the destroyer is more glib and is winning the argument, but the world relies on the builder of systems to move forwards. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it seems like the destroyers are winning. You can't say anything on the internet anymore because somebody will find something wrong with what you're saying and shoot it down. It used to be just the conservative bigots who came up with these complaints, but increasingly, most of us are thinking that way. It's become really annoying dealing with people who aren't arguing in good faith but who are just trying to find some angle with which whatever you say can be turned against you. These days, you don't need a good argument – what you need is a glib argument.

So I used to not like taking engineering classes – I preferred writing the essays, where all you had to do was the critique the texts, and find something clever to write about those things. It taught me something, and towards the end, it was pretty easy to do. But I'm not sure, thinking back, that I got the best kind of education when I was going through all that. I'm not sure if only saying things like “you can't know this” or “you can't know that” is all that helpful. You have to go out on a limb, and put some ideas out into the world, and risk getting battered. That's more worthy than just sitting back and being the guy who's throwing all the spanners.