Most People’s Software

You always hear facts about human development and how so much of who you become is determined by your experiences during your formative years. A newborn’s brain is a malleable ball of hardware clay, and its job upon being born is to quickly learn about whatever environment it’s been born into and start shaping itself into the optimal tool for survival in those circumstances. That’s why it’s so easy for young children to learn new skills.

As people age, the clay begins to harden and it becomes more difficult to change the way the brain operates. My grandmother has been using a computer as long as I have, but I use mine comfortably and easily because my malleable childhood brain easily wrapped itself around basic computer skills, while she has the same face on when she uses her computer that my tortoise does when I put him on top of a glass table and he thinks he’s inexplicably hovering two feet above the ground. She’ll use a computer when she needs to, but it’s not her friend.

So when it comes to our brain software—our values, perceptions, belief systems, reasoning techniques—what are we learning during those key early years?

Everyone’s raised differently, but for most people I know, it went something like this:

We were taught all kinds of things by our parents and teachers—what’s right and wrong, what’s safe and dangerous, the kind of person you should and shouldn’t be. But the idea was: I’m an adult so I know much more about this than you, it’s not up for debate, don’t argue, just obey. That’s when the cliché “Why?” game comes in (what MuskSpeak calls “the chained why”).

A child’s instinct isn’t just to know what to do and not to do, she wants to understand the rules of her environment. And to understand something, you have to have a sense of how that thing was built. When parents and teachers tell a kid to do XYZ and to simply obey, it’s like installing a piece of already-designed software in the kid’s head. When kids ask Why? and then Why? and then Why?, they’re trying to deconstruct that software to see how it was built—to get down to the first principles underneath so they can weigh how much they should actually care about what the adults seem so insistent upon.

The first few times a kid plays the Why game, parents think it’s cute. But many parents, and most teachers, soon come up with a way to cut the game off:

Because I said so.

“Because I said so” inserts a concrete floor into the child’s deconstruction effort below which no further Why’s may pass. It says, “You want first principles? There. There’s your floor. No more Why’s necessary. Now fucking put your boots on because I said so and let’s go.”

Imagine how this would play out in the science world.

In fairness, parents’ lives suck. They have to do all the shit they used to have to do, except now on top of that there are these self-obsessed, drippy little creatures they have to upkeep, who think parents exist to serve them. On a busy day, in a bad mood, with 80 things to do, the Why game is a nightmare.

But it might be a nightmare worth enduring. A command or a lesson or a word of wisdom that comes without any insight into the steps of logic it was built upon is feeding a kid a fish instead of teaching them to reason. And when that’s the way we’re brought up, we end up with a bucket of fish and no rod—a piece of installed software that we’ve learned how to use, but no ability to code anything ourselves.

School makes things worse. One of my favorite thinkers, writer Seth Godin (whose blog, https://seths.blog/, is bursting with first principles reasoning wisdom), explains in a TED Talk about school that the current education system is a product of the Industrial Age, a time that catapulted productivity and the standard of living. But along with many more factories came the need for many more factory workers, so our education system was redesigned around that goal. He explains:

The deal was: universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow—we had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. “We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people because factories are based on interchangeable parts.”

Couple that concept with what another favorite writer of mine, James Clear, explained recently on his blog( https://jamesclear.com/creative-thinking) :

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”

It makes sense, right? Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways. People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it’s actually much more of a way of thinking—it’s the thinking version of painting onto a blank canvas. But to do that requires brain software that’s skilled and practiced at coming up with new things, and school trains us on the exact opposite concept—to follow the leader, single-file, and to get really good at taking tests. Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines.4

What this all amounts to is that during our brain’s most malleable years, parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and squeezing it tightly into a preset shape.

And when we grow up, without having learned how to build our own style of reasoning and having gone through the early soul-searching that independent thinking requires, we end up needing to rely on whatever software was installed in us for everything—software that, coming from parents and teachers, was probably itself designed 30 years ago.

30 years, if we’re lucky. Let’s think about this for a second.

Just say you have an overbearing mother who insists you grow up with her values, her worldview, her fears, and her ambitions—because she knows best, because it’s a scary world out there, because XYZ is respectable, because she said so.

Your head might end up running your whole life on “because mom says so” software. If you play the Why? game with something like the reason you’re in your current job, it may take a few Why’s to get there, but you’ll most likely end up hitting a concrete floor that says some version of “because mom says so.”

But why does mom say so?

Mom says so because her mom said so—after growing up in Poland in 1932, where she was from a home where her dad said so because his dad—a minister from a small town outside Krakow—said so after his grandfather, who saw some terrible shit go down during the Siberian Uprising of 1866, ingrained in his children’s heads the critical life lesson to never associate with blacksmiths.

Through a long game of telephone, your mother now looks down upon office jobs and you find yourself feeling strongly about the only truly respectable career being in publishing. And you can list off a bunch of reasons why you feel that way—but if someone really grilled you on your reasons and on the reasoning beneath them, you end up in a confusing place. It gets confusing way down there because the first principles foundation at the bottom is a mishmash of the values and beliefs of a bunch of people from different generations and countries—a bunch of people who aren’t you.

When old software is installed on new computers, people end up with a set of values not necessarily based on their own deep thinking, a set of beliefs about the world not necessarily based on the reality of the world they live in, and a bunch of opinions they might have a hard time defending with an honest heart.

In other words, a whole lot of convictions not really based on actual data. We have a word for that.

Dogma

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! —Richard Feynman

Dogma is everywhere and comes in a thousand different varieties—but the format is generally the same:

X is true because [authority] says so. The authority can be many things.

Dogma, unlike first principles reasoning, isn’t customized to the believer or her environment and isn’t meant to be critiqued and adjusted as things change. It’s not software to be coded—it’s a printed rulebook. Its rules may be originally based on reasoning by a certain kind of thinker in a certain set of circumstances, at a time far in the past or a place far away, or it may be based on no reasoning at all. But that doesn’t matter because you’re not supposed to dig too deep under the surface anyway—you’re just supposed to accept it, embrace it, and live by it. No evidence needed.

You may not like living by someone else’s dogma, but you’re left without much choice. When your childhood attempts at understanding are met with “Because I said so,” and you absorb the implicit message “Your own reasoning capability is shit, don’t even try, just follow these rules so you don’t fuck your life up,” you grow up with little confidence in your own reasoning process. When you’re never forced to build your own reasoning pathways, you’re able to skip the hard process of digging deep to discover your own values and the sometimes painful experience of testing those values in the real world and learning you want to adjust them—and so you grow up a total reasoning amateur.

Only strong reasoning skills can carve a unique life path, and without them, dogma will quickly have you living someone else’s life. Dogma doesn’t know you or care about you and is often completely wrong for you—it’ll have a would-be happy painter spending their life as a lawyer and a would-be happy lawyer spending their life as a painter.

But when you don’t know how to reason, you don’t know how to evolve or adapt. If the dogma you grew up with isn’t working for you, you can reject it, but as a reasoning amateur, going it alone usually ends with you finding another dogma lifeboat to jump onto—another rulebook to follow and another authority to obey. You don’t know how to code your own software, so you install someone else’s.

People don’t do any of this intentionally—usually if we reject a type of dogma, our intention is to break free of a life of dogmatic thinking altogether and brave the cold winds of independent reasoning. But dogmatic thinking is a hard habit to break, especially when it’s all you know. I have a friend who just had a baby, and she told me that she was so much more open-minded than her parents, because they wanted her to have a prestigious career, but she’d be open to her daughter doing anything. After a minute, she thought about it, and said, “Well actually, no, what I mean by that is if she wanted to go do something like spend her life on a farm in Montana, I’d be fine with that and my parents never would have been—but if she said she wanted to go work at a hedge fund, I’d kill her.” She realized mid-sentence that she wasn’t free of the rigid dogmatic thinking of her parents, she had just changed dogma brands.

This is the dogma trap, and it’s hard to escape from. Especially since dogma has a powerful ally—the group.

Source: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html