https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6cf8-15Tb7I
Now, right now I’m on about principles. I’m thinking about what are principles? Why should we care about principles? What is it about principles that are important? And I don’t know if I can pull this off, but I’m gonna try to explain this in a way that you’ll understand. So hopefully, you know, you can you can follow along with me on this little journey through my attempt to explain this to you as a way of making sense of it for myself, but also works for you. Principles are like processes rather than like objects. And this is important because effectively I want to propose that a principle is a pattern that you can follow or that is followed, that is intelligible, right? So intelligible means you kind of understand it. And while the specific results are not predictable, the fact that you’ll get a reliable result is predictable. So that’s a little confusing. Like, what do you mean by that? So what I actually mean is if you go into a lawsuit, you can reliably predict that you’ll get a judgment eventually and that the judgment will have some form and or some limited number of forms, right? Like it could be not guilty, it could be guilty, it could be guilty not guilty by reason of insanity, right? There’s two types of insanity, right? So, right, that’s not a reliable result because there’s a number of results, there’s probably more than that, but it is a reliable process to get a result. So it’s reliably going to give you a result, you don’t know what the result is. That’s a principle that’s being followed in that case. And so, and maybe that’s not the only type of principle, but let’s deal with that one. So why is it that this is important, that there’s a principle or a process that can be followed to get a reliable result? Well, it’s important because usually with a principle, it’s specifying an input or an interaction or a way of cohering to it. And then it’s also specifying the output or the result or, you know, whatever. And again, it’s intelligible, if not also reliable. So this is important. And people talk about having principles, for example, I have a principle. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that you can reliably predict what they’re going to do based on the situation they’re in. So if you say something like, well, my principle is to always tell the truth. Well, that’s a principle, always telling the truth. Then when you ask them a question, they might give you an answer. Now, they may not give you a concrete answer. They may not say yes or no. But when you ask them a question, they should give you an answer. And that answer should cohere to the principle. Right. And so I don’t know is a valid answer, but they might say yes, they might say no, they might say it’s a nuanced issue. They might say it depends. That’s a reasonable answer for a principled, truthful answer. Right. If your principle is being honest, always to answer honest questions honestly, then that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do is to say, I don’t know, or I don’t have enough information, or it depends. That’s reasonable because the framing of the question may prevent an actual concrete answer. And so there’s all this give and take going on. Right. We can’t count on principles to give us exactly what we want, but we can count on them to give us something important. And then if somebody says the principle is equality for everybody, fine, fair enough. You know, you know what that means. That means that the rules are going to be applied equally. Right. And when they don’t do that, it’s very clear. But I can’t trust you if you are not cohereing to principles. Right. Why? Well, because what you’re going to cohere to is any old charismatic person that comes along. So I can say, you know, all people should get free medical care. And then if somebody comes along and says, yeah, but these people are bad. These people are bad because they don’t believe what you believe, whatever that may be. Or these people are bad because you know what? They gave themselves diabetes by going to fast food restaurants and having the double sized drinks. Now, that’s not a silly example because New York City tried to ban double sized drinks. I don’t know. I think they succeeded actually, but it’s largely irrelevant. They basically said these people are bad and we can extend that to free health care. You say, oh well, they don’t deserve free health care because they’re not taking care of themselves. Now that’s actually a fairly reasonable argument. The problem is that if your principle is equality or equity or something like that and you apply it to health care, which you should because it’s a principle, but you don’t follow that pattern. Right. You don’t follow the reliable results from that, which would be, well, everybody would get it equally. Then you’re not predictable anymore. Right. Your predictability isn’t true. You’re not holding to the principle. Why did you do this? Because this person came along and gave me an argument for why I should abandon my principle. I like that argument. Fair enough. Maybe it’s even a good argument. The problem is that principles need to be basically fortified against argumentation because any principle can be argued for or against. So it’s not interesting to me that people can argue against a principle being upheld. What might be interesting is when a principle doesn’t apply, that’s a whole different argument. It might even change the principle. So the principle would then not be equality in health care. Right. That principle would go out the window if you wanted to exclude somebody from the formulation. Right. You’d have to come up with a new formulation. That’s a perfectly valid thing to discuss. It might not be a perfectly valid thing to do. It might be a perfectly valid thing to do. You’ve got to discuss it. But not holding to a principle really means that you’re unreliable because what’s going to happen is exceptions are going to come up. Right. You’re going to go with the exception rather than the rule, rather than the principle. Charismatic people are going to hijack your attention and tell you, no, no, no, there’s a reason not to do this even when it’s not a valid reason. Right. The other thing that may happen is that principles could get misapplied. So it’s easy to say, well, my principle is total honesty with everyone. Right. But that might be not applicable in certain situations. Right. So, for example, if I have an experience and I convey that experience, say, over some medium like YouTube to a lot of people, do you think there’s a way that my conveyance of that experience can be honest and correct in the minds of every single person watching? Because I don’t think so. Not to say, you know, that that can never happen. It can happen, but it’s more likely not to happen. So if I say, for example, while I saw an angel and angel flew down from the sky. Okay. There’s a bunch of people that aren’t going to believe that. And so the principle of being honest, you know, no matter what, is not necessarily helpful in that frame because you can’t convey the sincerity and honesty of your message one way to a bunch of people and have it heard in the same way. And then was I being honest? This is where it gets crazy. Like, well, maybe I was being honest, but if you don’t have a way to measure my honesty, how do you know if I followed the principle? So that’s why you have to pick the right principles and the principles have to apply. The principle can’t be applied in that case because there’s no reliable way for the outcome to be assured. You know, my honesty can’t be properly conveyed to a bunch of different people that I don’t know personally. Right. And maybe I’d tailor my message to each one of them to help them understand because maybe the point isn’t I saw an angel. Maybe the point is I saw something I can’t explain. Well, that, you know, if somebody believes in, you know, UFOs, maybe I can couch it in UFO terms. It must have been an alien. Right. Maybe for some church person, it’s easier to say angel. Maybe for some other church person doesn’t believe in angels or doesn’t believe people have encounters with them. It’s not easier. Right. So the principle is not well-formed and it’s not helpful. And it can be, and principles can also be misused. And just because somebody states something as a principle, again, doesn’t mean it’s a valid principle. There’s lots of principles you can state that have no utility in the world. And we have to watch out for these things. But the important part is to understand the thing we can know pretty reliably is if somebody states a principle and they’re not following the principle, that’s a red flag. Does it mean they’re a bad person and we need to murder them immediately? Probably not. But it means you need to take extra care. And that’s really what this is about. Sense making is really about knowing when to start paying more attention and how much baseline attention to pay to things in general. And so at some point, I’ll do a baseline attention thing. But basically this is meant to highlight when to pay attention more. When principles are being violated, that should shake your trust immediately. That should shake your trust immediately until you get information otherwise. And you should always default that way. You shouldn’t just trust somebody you’ve been trusting just because, especially when they violate a principle, a stated principle of theirs or a principle of yours that you’d like to see upheld. So having a general principle of honesty when talking about important issues, and that’s maybe a little hard to follow, but when people violate that, you get to watch out for that. And you’ve got to watch out that, at least in that situation, maybe they’re not trustworthy. You don’t have to shake their whole trust foundation. I have a video on trust. But maybe they’re not trustworthy. And so that’s where you have to pay attention and take these things seriously. And again, the importance is if you’re not coherent to a principle, what are you coherent to? The odds that it’s better than a principle are pretty small, maybe zero. And again, you’ve got to leave a little leeway because sometimes don’t pay attention to principles. But it’s a red flag. It’s something to watch out for. It tells you, oh, I have to be careful here. I don’t want to default to trust. I want to default to caution. And I think trust and caution are maybe on the opposite sides, right? Trust is the lack of caution. You don’t need it. You’ve got full trust. And caution is some lack of trust because you’re being careful. And you don’t need to be careful if you’re fully trusting of something. So that’s hopefully a way for you to understand principle and why it’s important to understand what principles are. Principles are going to be based on axioms, right? Principles are going to be process driven, right? They’re not going to be about objects or specific events. They’re going to be generalized and applicable in multiple spheres. Maybe they can be over applied. So you always have to look for that. You just can’t apply principles universally in all cases forever. That doesn’t make any sense. Then they wouldn’t be, you know, they wouldn’t be distinguishable, right? So hopefully that that gives you some idea of what I’m on about. And then I’d just like to sort of cap it off by saying when things happen that violate your trust or make you feel bad or like your trust has been violated, listen carefully to them because this is valuable intuitive information that you have that you can use. It’s not reliable, right? You can’t reliably say, well, every time I get a pit in the stomach feeling that means someone’s lied to me, but it is reliable in that it means you need to do more investigation to figure out whether or not to listen to it. So that’s sort of important. And the other important thing, at least to me, is that when people are not following their principles, you shouldn’t spend your time and attention on them. You should instead value your time and attention and spend it on important things. Like hopefully, hopefully one of those important things, at least in this case, is one of my videos. So thank you very much.