TL;DR
The essay explores the balance between critical thinking and taking action, likening philosophers to those who lack conviction. It argues that while philosophers may hesitate due to their awareness of uncertainty, building conviction through iterative learning and action is essential. Referencing W.B. Yeats and Karl Popper, it suggests actively seeking opportunities to test and refine one’s beliefs, ultimately advocating for a proactive approach to building conviction and seizing opportunities.
The point I tried to communicate in “The One Thing & Why You Should Fear Some Philosophers”, and “Builders & Architects” was that to achieve anything meaningful there needed to be a symbiotic relationship between critical thinking and a bias to action; a yin-yang relationship of sorts between the philosopher and the mafia boss.
As one who is often impelled to be the philosopher, I have been thinking of how to use the things that come almost naturally to me in pursuit of the things that tend to elude me.
To that end I have a hypothesis; the philosopher-types find it hard to act because they are short on conviction. Mind you, conviction is diametrically opposed to knowledge. Consider, for example, that it is a known concept about programmers that the more one knows about programming the more likely they are to suffer imposter syndrome. People who know anything often know what they don’t know; and the spectre of their unknown cloud looms mercilessly over them. How can such people have any sort of conviction?
I found a close enough answer in the great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, in his poem, The Second Coming. Here is the first stanza.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, came so close to saying the same thing but with less polite words: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
Do the best really lack conviction? Why do they need conviction to start with? What can they do about it?
Very knowledgeable people (philosophers as I will call them) often lack conviction. Armed with the capacity to see all the shadows an object can cast and how dependent these shadows are on the nature of illumination, they mock the assertion that any shadow can be used as a substitute for the object in question. When asked if they are sure or hedged, they chose to hedge by explaining “both sides of the equation”. Such people are often not too hard to find; their speech is marked with words like: maybe, perhaps, probably, it could be the case, one way of looking at X, Y, Z and many more that you have come across. The best do indeed lack conviction, because they know precisely what is wrong with conviction.
However, we do need conviction; how can we do anything meaningful without it? From a totally selfish point of view, I think we need more conviction. Think of the numerous instances when after considering all facts available to you, you predicted with almost total certainty the outcome of an event. The philosopher-type in you probably shared those insights with a very humble addition of uncertainty and a monologue about why your prediction may very well be wrong. When the game is done and the outcome certain, the only other certain thing is that you can take credit for nothing. Was your prediction right? Well, you can’t ask for a ceremony to crown you king/queen of predictors; everyone knows you weren’t sure. Very much the same can be said for a prediction that went wrong.
While there seems to be no obvious cost of not having conviction in trivial events such as predicting the outcome of a football game, if we transfer the same thinking to identifying once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, the lack of conviction can easily become very costly if we are right. It goes without saying that such a conviction could also be costly if we are wrong. Shouldn’t it, however, be the case that the philosopher-types who understand the world with more accuracy already have the odds in their favour from the start? Yes, there is risk, but a very rational and thoughtful philosopher has such a huge upside that the cost of opportunities missed as a result of little conviction outweighs the risks created by excess conviction.
How do we use that to our advantage? The secret is in greatly minimising the chances of being wrong, and acting infrequently but with conviction.
That leads us directly into another question; given that although it is important to have conviction, and that the philosopher-types have a predilection to lack it, how can they build the capacity for more conviction? As established in my previously referenced essays, we cannot have correct models of the world (we cannot be totally right), we can only be less wrong models (less likely to be wrong). So our answer lies in the exploration of how we must seek to build conviction by being less wrong (less wrong frequency wise, and less wrong probabilistically speaking in a given situation).
Enter one of the early philosophers I fell in love with from my Encyclopedia Britannica days; Karl Popper.
Popper is credited for the great idea of science by falsification. Simply put, we want to only make statements that can be falsified, and then go out there to find out a million ways in which we can be wrong. With such an approach, everything we know is just waiting to be replaced with something that has proven to be better; keep trying to be less wrong.
That is easy to state, but I think the devil lies in how to live it.
To progressively adopt a bias to action without losing our predilection for philosophy, we have to constantly pursue falsification: progressively moving from the low-risk realms and then to the high-risk realms as we get better at philosophising. The world has to become a huge laboratory for our models, and we must be proactive in quickly developing and testing models in low-stakes situations in anticipation of the high stakes situations.
Consider the art of public speaking. If we wait to become president of the fraternity before we give a speech then it may be too late. Assuming we actually become president without knowing how to give a speech, the cost of boring listeners to death becomes so high as president. That is why it is important to give speeches when you are younger, or at simulated events; so that you make mistakes and update your model on giving public speeches before it becomes very expensive to make mistakes.
Simply put; consciously seek inexpensive situations that falsify your positions (philosophical ideas) in anticipation for the high-stakes situations in which the accuracy of your positions can be life-changing. It is precisely this idea that is at the centre of the proposed response to the innovator’s dilemma; that you create inexpensive environments to experiment on the various possible futures in preparation for when they may in fact become a reality.
Yes, we need more conviction; conviction that is built iteratively with a profound appreciation for the risks that may stem thereof, and in anticipation for the day on which decisive action wins the day. I believe that you can build such practices into your life to improve your conviction, and I hope that you actually do it.