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Probaway – Life Hacks

~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully.

Tag Archives: Evolution of wisdom

Search all ideas for their potential wisdom.

06 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by probaway in Condensed thoughts, diary, Epigrams, habits, policy, psychology, survival

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Tags

Ancient Greek wisdom, Antifragile, Evolution of wisdom, Slack, Wisdom strategies

Every moment of our lives there is the potential to observe what is available to our consciousness and to relate that observation to what we know to be true. Love Your Life — adapted from The Wisdom of the 7 Sages of Greece, #32 — generalizes that thought to, “Search all ideas for their potential wisdom.” When we cultivate our observations that might be linked to the probable future, we are making it more likely that our future actions will bring about desirable results. A person who intentionally develops mental habits that will be useful in their probable future can then develop the physical skills that will automatically function to create intended outcomes.

Wisdom isn’t the same as science, which predicts future actions based on proven experience with physical reality, nor is it prophesy, which is based on receiving personal information from sources unknowable to normal people. Wisdom is based on careful observation of one’s personal experience and pondering over that experience to the point where one can see the future and prepare for the various eventualities.

Wisdom has some embedded concepts that have recently acquired new names. One useful new term is antifragile. It means to design your plans in such a way that your ambitions are fulfilled come rain or shine. A similar concept and word is slack. That means to have enough of a buffer of time, energy, money and whatever else is needed so that you can cope with all the possible problems that might arise. Slack is having resilience and the power to accomplish what needs doing, whereas antifragile implies more prearranged flexibility of alternate but functional actions.

Antifragile and slack are examples of the wisdom of preadapting to future possibilities.

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A searchable system of knowledge is needed which goes beyond facts and accumulates wisdom.

03 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by probaway in evolution

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Cataloging wisdom, Evolution of wisdom, Humanities development

The Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress system (LOC) for cataloging books works reasonably well for most clearly delineated facts and standardized knowledge. Google and Bing search engines work well for narrowing searches for particular information if the user submits several unusual cross-grained search words into the query box. Unfortunately, all of these methods of gaining facts, knowledge and wisdom require background knowledge of what is being sought for and some reasonable terms, preferably in English, which apply to that subject, before progress can be made. Perhaps Wolfram Alpha after decades of development will offer wisdom instead of facts; time may tell or it may not.

A new alternative to those systems was discussed as – Dewey decimal system, Library of Congress LOC index and JulianA. The JulianA system has the potential to catalog every physical thing on Earth based on the exact location of the item at any exact time. Universal coordinates and Universal standard time are already cross indexed to the widely used astronomical Julian day calendar. Using these already existing systems everything is precisely located and disambiguated from everything else and all that is required is an electronic database linking every item of interest to its locations. The initial identification tag is based on its time and place of creation. Later tags can be linked to this initial tag identifying the items’ later locations and specified times. Because JulianA is decimal based it can be made into an infinitely fine-grained index system. Forty numbers will give a good time and location, and sixty numbers will give a precise location.

All of these information indexing systems are data based, and what is needed now and is potentially available for humans is a new system which is wisdom based. This system would permit individuals to find and apply to real world situations the best wisdom, based on the refined experience of knowledgeable people. This system would permit continuous refinement, like Wikipedia, and thus all activities performed by humans could be improved as experience accumulates over time.

This knowledge system wouldn’t be just for locating data, or knowledge or wisdom but rather for locating experimentally tested applications of various approaches to solving previous problems. As a simple physical application of this concept, postulate the baking of a cake. Usually there is a recipe, with specific amounts of the various ingredients and the procedures for putting these together and other specific things that need to be done and the temporal order in which to do them. That is what could be thought of as a knowledge base, but it isn’t a wisdom base. Wisdom has more input as to what to do with various aspects of ingredients when factors are varied. For example, what is different in the result when baking at a slightly higher temperature for a shorter period of time (with a given recipe) compared to a lower temperature for a longer period? And how does that compare to baking it at the stated temperature, but having the container relatively flat compared to compact? What is the difference when the top is sealed, or semi-sealed as in many fruit pies? How does the different container, glass or metal or porcelain, affect the results? And what is the difference in texture between the smooth-sided containers and the ribbed ones?

The little details could go on at great length and every one of them has an effect. But what is the effect, and how do you know which way your baked cake deviated from the ideal if you don’t know how each of the variations affect the final outcome? These are questions of wisdom based on experience and there needs to be a codified index which can guide you through the process and help you avoid the worst of problems and help you adjust to missing your ideal mark for later renditions of the recipe. Wisdom is in knowing how to vary the numerous inputs in order to achieve an intended result. That is far more sophisticated and subtle than simply following a recipe.

I have some materials but I need a source of wisdom to use them properly.

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