Archives for category: alternative ways of acquring knowledge
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The Starting Point

August 23, 2025 //
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“Our measures do not tell us whether philosophy majors
go on to apply their newfound abilities in the service of truth and justice
or, conversely, for personal gain and glory.
Settling that question would require gathering a different kind of evidence.”

Reading it, https://theconversation.com/studying-philosophy-does-make-people-better-thinkers-according-to-new-research-on-more-than-600-000-college-grads-262681, brought back to memory another research subject. Linking a ‘reasonable consumption of alcohol’ to various health benefits.
A quick google search produced this:

The paper I found now, https://www.phcc.org.nz/briefing/glass-half-full-alcohols-health-benefits-cardiovascular-disease-still-controversial-and, is quite thorough.
More importantly, for me, it raises the points which bothered me when I first found out about the claim. On FB, more than five years ago.
I’ll put it in my own words.

Being able to drink for a relatively long time means one had a fairly strong health at the start of the whole process. And at least some degree of self-control.
Otherwise the drinker would have very soon become ill, an alcoholic, suffered some accidents… or any combination thereof.

Same thing regarding the findings of the first study.
Take a number of smart people. One has to be smart in order to be interested in philosophy! And able to graduate…
Train those people’s abilities. Help them develop whatever they’re good at. And like doing…
Then wonder about the good results you’ve achieved!

Writing this post made me realize that it goes far deeper than this.
No, this is not a self-congratulatory study. Far from it.
It’s stark warning!

“Public trust in higher education has hit record lows in recent years, according to polling by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup. Meanwhile, the rapid advance of generative AI has threatened the perceived value of a traditional college degree, as many previously vaunted white-collar skills are at risk of being automated.
Yet now more than ever, students must learn to think clearly and critically. AI promises efficiency, but its algorithms are only as good as the people who steer them and scrutinize their output.
The stakes are more than personal. Without citizens who can reason through complex issues and discern good information from bad, democracy and civic life are at risk.”

This paper is not about the virtues of learning!
It’s about us.
So many of us still have so much more to learn about the virtues of learning…

One possible explanation for what’s going on is that not enough of the learned people “go on to apply their newfound abilities in the service of truth and justice“.
Me starting this post with the distinct feeling that this was a self-congratulatory study is yet another confirmation of the generalized distrust which permeates the whole society.
We’ve reached that stage where we primarily look for reasons to refute.
Some say a little paranoia is good for you. That it keeps you safe.
I’m afraid we’ve reached exactly where ‘they’ want us to be.
Distrusting, paranoiac people cannot do anything together.

Constantly looking over your shoulder will never lead you forward.
Will only make you, us, susceptible to manipulation.
Remember, in this context, how many reasonable posts we get from people supporting various horrendous ideas.
How many ‘think with your own head’ messages we get from those ‘also’ promoting MAGA. How many times Putin says he only makes ‘reasonable’ demands.

How can we build trust?
I don’t know how but I do know we don’t have any alternative.

We either learn to respect each-other, and build trust together, or become subjects.
And I’ve already been a subject. To a communist regime. Don’t want to repeat the experience.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, In English, skin in the game, Trust

AI

August 21, 2025 //
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Each situation comes with possibilities.
Which of them happen, and in which order, determine the ‘future’.

As of now, AI – plain vanilla, generative and even agentic – is nothing but a tool.

A tool used by us to peruse what ever information it has access to. Information already ‘generated’ by us…
A tool used to organize, and present, said information according to algorithms. Algorithms learned from us…
A tool used to solve tasks we have set for it. According to our needs, whims and, above all, our ability to relate with the surrounding reality.

And now we’re scratching our collective head.
Wondering why the result isn’t that different from the one we get when using our own heads…

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/generative_ai_zero_return_95_percent

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/19/us_government_ai_procurement

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

What?

August 4, 2025 //
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And God saw every thing that he had made,
and,
behold, it was very good.

Our fore-fore fathers believed that the birth of gods was what had transformed the primordial chaos into a more orderly cosmos. A place where man could live, as long as he didn’t fall on the bad side of the local gods.

Our fore fathers, those who had invented monotheism, had condensed the previous generation of gods into a single one. Thus unifying the space and the time. Transforming Cosmos into the Universe.

We’ve given up god altogether.
We no longer believe in a unifying God. Some of us have given up religious belief while others continue to have faith in a personal god. Often times shared with the other members of their particular religious community.

But even though we no longer believe in a unifying god, we still consider that we all share the same world. The same Universe. Even if some of us consider the Earth to be flat…

So.
Our fore-fore fathers used common sense and hired human-like gods to make sense of and to bring order in their particular portions of the world. In those times, each region – or each piece of the world – was a cosmos in itself. Governed by a specific set of arrangements between those who lived there and the gods they believed in. And the people who had to move to another cosmos, or were conquered by people coming from another cosmos, usually changed their belief accordingly. Simply because faith came with the territory.
Our fore – fathers used philosophy to understand there was, and continues to be, only one world. Only one Nature. And changed their belief accordingly. After all, and after learning enough, one world and one god makes more sense than a plethora of gods running wild and doing as they please… One world… one God… obvious enough… but which God to believe in? Particularly when ‘I’m a jealous God’.

Since then, God no longer comes with the territory… but comes with those who believe in him.

It’s no longer god who makes sense of the world.
It’s the believers who choose their belief. Choose what to make of their world.

Of the one, otherwise known as ‘single’, world we have at our disposal.
“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Time

August 2, 2025 //
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Logos continuously chiseling
new Reality
out of whatever Opportunity is at hand….

At the beginning there was nothing but Chaos.
Then Gods were born. One way or another.

The birth of Gods sowed order into Chaos.
Thus Cosmos was born.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Belonging

July 20, 2025 //
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For a proposition to be ‘true’
it is not enough for it to be logically valid.
It also has to make sense. Epistemologically speaking.
Oscar Hoffman

“This house belongs to me”.
“I own this house”.

Logically, these two propositions are equivalent. Both state the same thing.
But which one makes real sense?

Where do you belong?
Where do you feel at home?

What can your house do for you?
What have you done to your house?

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Managing

July 18, 2025 //
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“Terror management theory is the idea that we create culture
and aspects of our lives that will “outlive” us
because of our knowledge of our own mortality
which is innately terrifying to us.“

Self awareness doesn’t come cheap…

Collectively, species-wise, we’ve done OK. We’ve become the dominant species on Earth.
For good and/or for worse…

Individually, on the other hand…

Doubts!
Self-awareness comes with plenty of them:
Will I be able to find enough food tomorrow? For me and for my family?
When will it start to rain?
Will the sun rise again?

The way I see it, ‘The Stonehenge’ has been built for one thing only.
To assuage fear.

According to scientists researching the phenomenon, ‘The Stonehenge’ had been built by the immigrants who brought agriculture into Britain.
Solving the food problem wasn’t enough. Enough to bring peace of mind…
Now, that full bellied people had enough time on their hands, they started to think about ‘the future’:

‘OK, tomorrow will come. The sun will rise. We’ll be able to sow our crops for the next year. But is there an order in all this? How can we be sure?’
‘Let’s build something which will prove “order”. If we could demonstrate that year after year the summer solstice ‘falls’ under the same ‘parameters’ then there’s indeed an ‘order’. Things don’t just happen, they follow a ‘script’ ‘.

And they did exactly that. Built the first scientific instrument. Proved that the sun not only rises each day but also follows a precise path.

Quite a management feat.
And no, I don’t mean the stone stacking part. However remarkable that was…
Their real success was to convince themselves to keep toiling into the future!

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

Paradoxically

July 16, 2025 //
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“Give us today our daily bread”

We’ve been around for a while.
300 millennia, according to some. 70 millennia, according to others. Who use a more stringent set of criteria.
Anyway. Homo Sapiens is considered to be 300 000 years old while his nephew, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is a little younger. Only 70 000 years…

Regardless of age, for most of this time we have been foragers.
OK, even our ancestors had tools. We’ve been around for 300ky while tools have predated us by more than 1my. Yes, our hominin predecessors were the ones to invent tools…

Then what is our contribution? Why are we the ones who are still around?

According to Ernst Mayr – if I interpret correctly – we’ve simply been lucky!
Nothing happened.
No catastrophic event bad enough to extinguish us. And no freshly minted ‘superman’ to take our place.
That question, regarding our contribution, speaks volumes about our infatuation with ourselves.

Hence the paradox.

Very recently, we’ve done something. Used agriculture on a large enough scale to change our way of life.

As foragers, we used to live in a certain way.
As homo economicus, who actively, agentically, produces food – and everything else we need, we’ve crossed yet another barrier. Benchmark? Anyway, we live completely different lives from those experienced by our foraging (fore)fathers. Despite the fact that there’s no biological or psychological difference between us.
Don’t believe me? Take a small child from the African or South American bush, lovingly raise them in a functional family and tell me if you find any difference. Between any of those children and their ‘already civilized’ school-mates. The key concepts here being ‘lovingly raise them in a functional family’ and ‘school mates’. If you understand what I mean…

‘Completely different lives’.
‘OK, I get it. They, the lives, are different. But are they better? Or worse?!?’

Your question, your very pertinent question, is extremely eloquent.
It fully expresses the paradox haunting us.

As foragers, we’ve learned to speak. To carve. To make beautiful tools. To paint…
As foragers, we’ve become human.

As agriculturalists, we live way longer lives. And accomplish way many more things.
Yes, ‘things’.
We speak the same. We paint the same. We carve the same. We even eat more or less the same things. Less of them but there’s nothing really new in our diet. Less diverse, heavily processed in too many instances, but no really new ingredients…
The only two differences between us and our fore-fathers is the length of our lives and the amount of things we end up owning.

So. Are our lives better?

Longer, for certain!
Less painful? Probably. Considering the physical pain…
Happier?

Then what? Give up agriculture? Go back to bare-back foraging?

How about learning from agriculture?
Digesting the concept, not only the produce…

As foragers, we were ‘expandable’. Each of us could do everything. Statistically, speaking… Gathering, hunting, fetching water and wood, you name it. We depended on each other, of course, but none of us was irreplaceable.
As homo economicus we also depend on each other. But differently!
Just remember what happened last week. When nobody knows how/why, yet, the fuel lines of an airplane taking off somewhere in India were switched off.
Or think about what happens when one of your colleagues calls in sick.

Smith, Adam ‘Free Market’ Smith, taught us about ‘the baker, the butcher and the brewer’.
We still have to digest his teachings.

Our daily bread demands a lot of cooperation.
We’re no longer capable to accomplish much individually.
Our longer and way more bountiful lives depend on our ability, and willingness, to cooperate.
Respectfully….

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, Economy, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

X-periment

July 11, 2025 //
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Where there’s a way
There will be a will!

An open wound will be ‘colonized’ by various organisms.
A mixture of water and flour will develop a ‘froth’.
A naive person will be swindled.

A healthy immune system will, eventually, take care of the infection. Successfully or not…
If in the hands of an experienced baker, the mixture of water and flour will – eventually – become the starting point for a delicious sour-bread loaf.
The previously naive person, once swindled, might learn something from the experience.

Life is nothing but an added layer of opportunity.
The pre-animated world is about strict rules. No variation, except for that brought about by happenstance.

Life is also about rules. But way laxer than those governing the pre-animated world.
While the pre-animated world is about nothing more than mere existence, life is about surviving in the given conditions. About evolution. About change.

And here’s the catch.
Pre-conscious change is also mainly about happenstance.
Darwin’s evolution is driven by minute changes at the DNA level. Those which are helpful are perpetuated while those which are harmful either kill out-rightly the organism where they have appeared or restrict its ability to ‘give birth’.
Nota bene. Darwin’s evolution was about “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection“
In his understanding, and in the real world, evolving – biology wise – is done by the species. Not by individual organisms!

Conscious change, on the other hand… is driven by individuals!
Happenstance continues to be involved, heavily, but the main drive comes from ‘want’. From individuals willing/wishing to ‘make a difference’.

Is this a good or a bad thing?!?
It is a fact. Neither necessarily good or bad. Just a fact.
The outcome, evolution wise, depends on how the social organism – the cultural species – digests the experience.

For a while, I was convinced we were living in a virtual reality.
In a reality of our own making. As I mentioned earlier, ‘vir‘ is a Latin word. “Man”. “Hero”.
Hence ‘virtual’ literally means ‘man-made’. ‘Manufactured’.

Now I’ve realized we live inside an experiment.
We are both the objects and the agents of the intersecting experiments currently active.

We call them ‘lives’. Our lives…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Blunt sociology

July 5, 2025 //
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Deeds?
Or individuals?
What do you see first?

Most of you are more likely than not to be familiar with the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ metaphor.
My straw borrowed the shape of a book. Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Aggression.
At some point, when discussing the differences between Skinner and Freud, Fromm asks more or less the same question. His point of interest being different from mine… his thoughts follow a different path from mine…

So? What do you you reckon?

I feel the need to remind you a few things.
Fromm, a famous psychologist, had a PhD in sociology.
I, an engineer, have a BSc, in sociology.
Skinner, the entire behaviorist school of thinking, was contemporary with the dissolution of ‘God’.

Once the camel’s back had given way, things have started to fall into place.
Those who see ‘individuals’ first are psychologists, at heart, and those who see ‘deeds’ are sociologists.

‘So Skinner should have been a sociologist?!?’

I would never go as far as telling people what any of them should be doing!
I leave that to Marx’s followers. To all those, in general, who are confident enough to do it. I’m sure this is a wrong thing to do but I’m not here to judge. Only to express a few considerations.

‘You don’t tell people what to do, only what to NOT do! Semantics…’

There is an old story which sheds some light on this problem.

A teacher gave an after school assignment:
‘Do a good deed. Come back tomorrow and share the experience.’
John:
‘At a traffic light, sounding the right kind of beep, a blind person was already halfway across. A runaway truck was fast approaching without a sound. I pulled the person out of the danger. They was very grateful.’
Kevin:
‘An elderly lady was approaching a traffic light which was about to change. There was no chance in hell that she could have made it. I hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her across. She screamed and kicked like hell. She had no business on that side of the road. I felt ashamed and I left her there.’

Skinner, the behaviorists in general, do not care about ‘intent’. ‘I have no clue about what’s going on inside people’s heads. All I know, and can ‘measure’, is what they do. How they behave. In any given circumstances after whatever conditioning had been exerted upon them’.

Which makes a lot of sense, right? Specially for an engineer…

Freud, on the other hand, puts the onus on the manner in which each individual ‘digests’ – ‘internalizes’, according to the lingo – the whole history of interactions (conditioning?!?) they have experienced on the road towards their present state.

For Freud, behavior is something to be studied in order to understand the individual while for Skinner behavior is something to be fine-tuned.

Not so different, from my perspective.
Both Freud and Skinner somehow forget about the elephant in the room.
Who studies the individual? Who makes the (psycho)analysis? Who attempts to fine-tune ‘the behavior’?
I’m not going to go any further. And ask ‘why?’. What’s the end goal of any of those individual ‘experimenters’. ‘Motives’…
I’m no psychologist.

Being an engineer, I’m more interested in consequences. In what comes out…

In what we, ordinary people, have to survive in!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Language

June 29, 2025 //
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Living organisms constantly exchange information with their environment.

Then where is the difference between ‘us’ and the rest of the living creatures?
Information-wise, of course!

Language…

As far as we know, humans are the only critters currently living on Earth which are interested in how other creatures learn. Or teach…

“An individual actor A can be said to teach if it modifies its behavior only in the presence of a naive observer, B, at some cost or at least without obtaining an immediate benefit for itself. A’ behavior thereby encourages or punishes B’s behavior, or provide B with experience, or sets an example for B. As a result, B acquires knowledge or learns a skill earlier in life or more rapidly or efficiently that might otherwise do, or that it would not learn at all.” Caro and Hauser, 1992

In the 20 odd years since Caro and Hauser have set the bar for what teaching means quite a number of species have been found to do it. To fully or at least suggestively cross all the necessary t-s. From ants to primates.

Interestingly enough, all of those species have a clear ‘collective’ behavior.
All individuals belonging to a species collaborate, of sorts, towards the survival of that species. This goes without saying.
But in some species this collaboration is more intense than in others.
Ants and bees versus most other insects.
Elephants versus cheetahs. Or leopards.
Even chimpanzees versus orangutans…

OK, for some species hand to hand collaboration between generations is impossible. Most parent insects are dead when their offspring hatch. Orangutans live in forests where food is too scarce for more than 1 individual to forage.
Others have found their niches. Where the individual approach is good enough for them to survive. Cheetahs, leopards. Bears, even…

Charles Darwin taught us about evolution. Merging individual lives into the survival of the species those individuals belong to.

Life, as I see it from a “functional and mechanistic perspective“, is yet another manner in which matter is organized. Yet another ‘state of matter‘.
For life to be present, three conditions have to be met.
– Individual organisms have to be exchanging, in a controlled manner, substances with their environment. To ingest nutrients and to excrete the by-products of their metabolism.
– Individual organisms have to be exchanging information with their environment. And with their interior. Otherwise the exchange of substances would no longer be controlled by the individuals.
– Individual organisms have be passing to the next generation the pertinent information needed for the species to survive. In the kind of life we are familiar with, that would be ‘the genetic information’.

Considering the above, I dare to make a difference between what Caro and Hauser consider to be teaching and what we, humans, do.
Intent!

I doubt that any of the ‘animal teachers’ do it under their own volition.
After all, nobody has yet identified an animal con-artist who cons the members of their own species… as we do!
As far as we currently know, ‘teaching behavior’ is displayed inside species which collaborate more closely than other species. Which suggests that that kind of behavior is somehow innate to those species. A ‘habit’, not a choice. As it is with us.

What makes it possible? This difference?
Our special kind of conscience and our use of language.
The fact that we are the only species – as far as we know – capable of building a ‘virtual image’ of the surrounding reality. Capable to select certain aspects of what surrounds us and codify them using various forms of ‘notation’.
And to do this according to our own, individual, interests!
Sometimes even against the interests of the community/species to which we belong.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, Cu pielea la bataie, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, man as a measure for all things
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