https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ubsl-SWZgdk
So, I had a request to talk about sort of the difference between information and knowledge and how that relates to utility. So I wanted to see if I could address this. I took some quick notes. We’ll see how it goes. And hopefully this will make some sense and help you make sense of the world. In the models that I use, and they’re on the channel, they’re all over the place, the knowledge engine model in particular is very useful. If you haven’t seen that, you’ll probably want to take a look at it. It takes a while to understand for some people maybe, but I think it’s super important. We have signals. And signals are basically all around us. We get signals through language, we get signals through watching other people, that’s embodied knowledge, right, or exemplification, right. We get signals from nature, right, to your birds, right. There’s all sorts of sounds going on. There’s all sorts of feelings that you get, like, you know, your passions are signals. You get hungry, right. You get thirsty. Those are signals. All kinds of signals, your pain, all kinds of signals everywhere. What we do with those signals is that our perspective filters them out to some extent and also helps us to form them. Now, when a signal gets formed, it becomes information. That’s how it works. And again, look, this is the model that I use. It’s the model that I’ve helped develop with a bunch of people, right, to help them understand sort of what I’m doing and how I think about these things, help them sense make the world, right. So not making universal claims, not getting crazy here. I’m just telling you how this works in sort of for me to make sense of the world. So when you have signals that get informed and become information, they are stored in your memory. And we’ve got four types of information. Again, that’s in the Knowledge Engine model. You can watch that video. It’s great. Then that gets formed in the knowledge. And knowledge involves not just the information, but also the connections between the pieces of information. That’s what makes it knowledge, that additional data, if you will, right, that relationship data, that quality of this information and how it relates to that information. So relationship is a quality. And so that’s how knowledge works. Now, look, it’s fair to say, well, but perspective isn’t everything and our perspective changes. You know, you can say it changes based on our knowledge, but I don’t think it does. I think our perspective changes based on information. So these signals come up, they modify their perspective, right, because they fill it up or they, you know, rub up against it or it can’t filter all the stuff, right. Like eventually you get so hungry that you have to eat. That happens. You get overwhelmed by signals sometimes. So that changes your perspective on, well, now I want food. That’s a shift in perspective. So there is a reciprocal relationship going on here between signals and the information, because once information is formed, that goes back down to your perspective. And then maybe your perspective changes based on set of signals that you formed and bang. Now all of a sudden you have an insight. That’s what an insight is, I think. Right. And then bang, something occurs to you. That happens. And then with knowledge, the knowledge gets updated on the lower level, basically, from the information or from the richness of the sort of the relationship. So your perspective can change such that now new relationships in the world are available to you. Right. And suddenly you can see, say, how when you interact with somebody, they’re responding to you at the same time that they’re asserting themselves. Right. So they have to assert themselves based on something. And sometimes that’s actually your initial position to them or something that’s occurred to them in their past. Right. Their memories, whatever. And that’s where the utility comes in. So information up to knowledge. Right. And then there’s a utility. And that utility is wrapped up in your action. Whatever your action is, something’s going to happen. Right. And that thing that happens is towards some end. Now, because we’re the creatures we are and we don’t just have a conscious mind, we also have an unconscious mind. A lot of people talk about consciousness. It’s like, well, what about the unconscious? Have you even thought about that? You have a definition of consciousness that includes both? Probably not. Nobody has a definition of consciousness so far. Fair enough. But you’re not accounting for the unconscious stuff, the stuff that’s lurking below the surface that you’re not able to rationalize in the moment. And maybe you rationalize it after the fact and tell yourself you’re a rational creature, but there’s no evidence to support that in the science. There’s a lot of science to them on this. Just none of it supports rationality. Not to say that we’re never rational about anything ever. Just to say that what the science actually says experimentally is that we’re almost never rational about anything for any length of time that’s reasonable. We have little tiny sparks of bits of rationality, and it’s not very much, even if you add it all up. And this is important because what it says is the way to understand things is through their utility. Well, what effect did this have? Maybe that’s what you intended unconsciously, not consciously. A lot of people self-sabotage. What do you think self-sabotage is? Self-sabotage is your unconscious mind not wanting to succeed because maybe success means, oh, I could have done this sooner and been more successful. Or maybe success means a bunch of trade-offs you’re not willing to make because when you’re successful, things change and people don’t like change. Some people love change. Some people don’t like change. You can love change too much. It goes both ways. And that’s the problem. Staying in the middle is hard. So the utility tells you a lot about what’s going on. But also, here’s the interesting thing. This also goes in reverse, right? Because there are four causes, according to Aristotle. He’s probably correct about this, by the way. If you think there’s a single cause for something, I’m skeptical. I don’t think that’s possible. What happens is we want to do something, right? So there’s a projected utility into the future. And what sometimes happens is we go, all right, well, I want this thing. We’ll say, I want a good career in the computer industry. And a good career in the computer industry might involve, I don’t know, software engineering. Something I’m rather familiar with. So what do I do? Well, I need the knowledge. And I need the certified knowledge. In some cases, you don’t need certified knowledge. I never had any. In order to get that. And then in order to get the knowledge, I need to seek the information. So it goes completely in reverse, right? And then that utility of having a good job in the software industry, where you’re pretty easy enough to do much, right? To the desk and type some code and bang, you get money. That drives the knowledge and the information and the perspective. The perspective changes because now your perspective is, say, oh, I don’t want to work at a grocery store for the rest of my life. I actually want to be able to have a really nice career and make, you know, six-figure salary or whatever. Whatever you think you’re going to make in software, probably not going to be a six-figure salary anymore. Get into DevOps. That’s driving your seeking and exploration for the information to give you the knowledge, to give you the confidence to implement the utility that you predicted you wanted, right? The goal. And that’s why the Telos, and I’ve talked about that in a previous live stream. It’s pretty good. Look, you just check out the monologues. You don’t have to watch however long because I can do eight-hour live streams somehow. You don’t have to watch the fun stuff that’s at the end. You can just watch the monologues. That’s first in intent and last in implementation or action, right, is Telos. It’s your goal. So you intend the goal, do a bunch of things, get to the goal, then the goal is achieved, right? Then you need new Telos, by the way. So don’t be thinking that’s an answer. It’s certainly needed. It’s temporary, though, so don’t get used to it. That’s how successful people end up killing themselves. Don’t be one of those, please. Not good. No need. No need. Needless. You can just get new Telos as new goals. Not a problem. There’s plenty of things to do in the world and you can’t do even a fraction of them. You’re not going to climb Everest, be a basketball star, a baseball star, a football star, a hockey star, all at the same time. It’s not going to happen in the same life. There’s lots of things like that. Just not enough time. There’s not enough skill or it requires just too much training or whatever. Plus you have limitations. You were born with a bunch of limitations. I still can’t draw. Yeah, I can write really well. I can’t draw. That whole idea that sometimes you seek knowledge and you’re not going to be able to do it, that whole idea that sometimes you seek knowledge and information in this exploratory mode is very important because one of the ways we get caught up is that we keep putting on these false binaries. Of course, of course, I have a video on binaries. You should check it out if you haven’t seen it. It’s pretty good. I think it’s pretty good. It’s not good. Tell me. Comments. What that leads us to is crazy ways of thinking about the world. One crazy way we think about the world is, well, obviously, psychologically speaking, we move towards pleasure and away from pain. No, we don’t. That’s observably false. It’s absurd. It’s so observably false, it’s absurd. It doesn’t make sense in an evolutionary framework that that’s what would happen. It just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no framework where such a ridiculous thing makes any sense. There is an exploratory mode where we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we like surprise in the same way we like surprise through psychedelics. I mean, it’s the same mechanism in your brain as anybody can tell. Actually, oh, we’re going to get surprised. OK, we like surprises. So maybe we’ll get drunk and see what happens. All right. Maybe we’ll drop some acid and see what happens. People do this all the time. You don’t need to do that. You just go, you know what? I’m going to go outside and I’m going to poke around in the brush and see what happens. And sometimes you have bad outcomes from that, just like with drugs or drinking or any number of things. Sometimes you just want to go for a drive. You don’t want to go anywhere in particular. You should go for a drive. That’s the exploratory mode. It’s really important. We’re not always looking for utility and we’re not always casting utility in the future and going towards that utility. And we’re not always getting information and that’s causing us to go after a goal. No, sometimes we’re just kind of hanging out and poking around, seeing what’s going on. A lot of times that’s why you watch a movie. You want to see what’s the premise of the movie, what’s going on, how are they putting together the story, right? You just want to relax because that’s another mode. We have lots of modes. It’s not just move towards pleasure and away from pain. No, and neither of those makes any sense unless there’s contrast to them. I’m going to talk to a contrast quite a bit in the past. You need contrast to see technically. You can’t physically see your eyes don’t work if they don’t move. And the reason why is because movement provides contrast and your eyes actually just wiggle a lot in the middle, quite a bit, several times a second. I forget what the number is. It’s insane. And they know this experimentally, by the way. And so you need that contrast because it helps you to actually see the world, to sense make the world and see it in more than one sense, more than just the physical sense. You need to watch failure and success. The middle ground from which you do that, where you’re neither failing nor succeeding, but just sort of taking in information, is a neutral ground. It’s not moving in a direction. And you can do that. You do it all the time without even realizing it. Probably this goes back to the unconscious, what unconsciously is inhabiting your mind and informing you. I don’t know. Could be lots of things. And maybe they’re good. Maybe some of them are bad. Maybe you don’t know about the bad ones. That would be trauma. Again, don’t like the trauma frame, but can be useful. It’s certainly not useless any more than the economics frame is useless. It’s not useless. Maybe we over use it. Different problem. That’s the important part though about information, knowledge and utility is that they are tied together. They’re dependent upon things like perspective. They’re dependent upon things like our passions and desires, which drives us from within. They’re dependent upon our constraints from nature, from our conditions. If you’re in an apartment, maybe you can’t have a pet. You might want a pet. Might do you some good to have a pet, but maybe you can’t because you’re constrained. And so your utility is frustrated. Your actions are just not arbitrary. They can’t be made arbitrary. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. You need constraints. You need that contrast in order to know your own limits, to know the limits of the people and things around you. Limits are good because if the world came flooding at you all at once and it would be a flood, then you would just get overwhelmed. This happens to people all the time. Their utility gets frustrated. They get overwhelmed with information and they can’t function. Sometimes that’s called a nervous breakdown. It can manifest in any number of ways. It can manifest in schizophrenia. It can manifest in paranoia. Paranoia is just like, wow, you’re just flooded with information and it’s all connected to you in a negative way. That’s not good. And that’s sort of the dark side of information. You have too much information. You can put it together into bad knowledge. Some of those might be conspiracy theories. By the way, I have videos and conspiracy theories. I’ll link one of them here. You should check it out. Pretty cool stuff. These are sorts of things we have to be mindful of is that it’s information, knowledge, and there’s this telos, this utility to this, but it also can go in the other direction. And that’s why we go to school. We seek knowledge. And we get informed by the process of learning. And hopefully we’re learning something useful. And if we’re learning well, we’re not just being trained, but we’re also being educated, which reminds me, I have a video on that. Training versus education. It’s video link day, I guess. A lot of this stuff now is going to start to come together because I have two years of videos and sometimes I actually remember which ones have recorded and what they say. And so I can link them. And probably I’m missing a bunch. And if you notice that, comment. I love to interact. So I wanted to cover that because I thought it was important. And my friend Danny also was like, oh, do more tie together videos. And so this is a topic that came up. Jesse suggested it. I said, oh, this is a tie together video. Let’s try it out and see how it goes. And to that end, please let me know. How did it go? Did I do a good job? Are these clear? What can I change? How can I make this more clear? And look, I’m just still reeling from all these wonderful subscribers and sudden views that I’m getting. I’m really happy about that. And it’s really humbling and it’s great. And it just shows that it pays to really care about that thing that I value the most, which is everyone else’s time and attention.