What's the goal?

Allow me to think aloud for a minute.

This is, apparently, a newsletter about epistemology.

What does successfully improving our day-to-day epistemology look like? What’s the goal?

It seems like there are a few basic ingredients here:

• Being right often — i.e., not being deceived

• Being right easily — i.e., without needing to stress or work too hard

• Being right about important things — i.e., things that affect your actions, not niche Twitter arguments

You could say the goal is maximize these 3 things.

Could also arrange these in cost/benefit form, and say the goal is reduce cost, increase benefit:

• Costs (effort, time, pain)

• Benefits (right more often, right more easily, right about important things)

The holy grail seems to be: Be right about everything without knowing anything.

By ‘knowing’ here, I am referring to a pain in the ass.

Knowing requires becoming an expert, and extruding the truth from a complex machinery of rigor and analysis. BARF.

Seems very inefficient, and those people are still frequently wrong.

Are there things which, if we learn them, we don’t have to learn anything else?

What are they?

What’s the easiest way to learn them?

These are questions.

Tim Ferriss recommends finding the one decision that removes 100 decisions.

This newsletter might be about finding the one piece of knowledge that removes the need to learn 100 other things, and then making that piece of knowledge as simple and easy to learn as possible.