People know so much about everything - politics, sports, relationships, life, etc. In my "Center of the Universe" post I talked about knowing and how understanding what you know can improve almost every aspect of your life. But how do you DO that? Well here is a good first step.
Whenever someone says anything you don't agree with, you have a conflict of knowledge. How do you begin to sort it out? Try asking these questions of this person AND yourself.
Where did you learn that? Who said or reported it? How reliable are they? How do you know that they're reliable?
Is GMO (genetically modified) food safe? good? bad? harmful? helpful? Hordes of scientists, politicians, and citizens around the world know the answer to these questions. Although I've read probably 100's of pages and have an opinion (assessment) I can't say I know the answers. From my particular way of observing I also assess that no one knows. The complexities of the situation may take generations before reliable facts are available. For the most part, in these types of questions, parties on each side of the questions have an agenda. Perhaps one of the more important pieces of research you can do to come to a reasonable conclusion (opinion - not knowing) is to look for the agenda, the background of who is supplying information.
Let me give you an example of how this works:
I recently read a report about the European Crisis and how the Euro was going to disintegrate and everyone in Euros was going to loose everything. The report was quite thorough, detailed and believable. It left me with the thought people should sell Euros. Before becoming familiar with how "Knowing" works I would have now "known" a lot of new things about the ongoing Euro crisis, probably shared it with others and maybe even acted on it. I could easily have started "Tweeting", emailing, FB'ing etc and gotten friends to act on my new "Knowledge". Fortunately this one got resolved for me quite easily. While I knew the reporting agency, I was unfamiliar with the reporter. A Google search on the author's name quickly found an article where he was already under investigation for another article about the fate of the Euro while he was shorting Euros. That one little fact cancelled out all he purported to know about the situation.What actually plays out with the Euro is not the point. It's confusing what knowledge is. Even the best, most informed and practiced assessment of a situation is still an opinion, not a fact.
Everyday we are learning. Understand that much of what we know was learned far in the past and we have no idea where we learned it. Who told us, where did they learn it, and how accurate and unbiased were they? The reality is that everything you know, you learned somewhere and it may be time to recognize that some of what you know may not be true. Here's a simple way to understand how our knowledge can undermine us. You may know that it's a nice day - 75 degrees, sunny, and 49% humidity. This is NOT a nice day - Sorry, what it is, is 75 degrees, sunny, and 49% humidity. Everything else is an opinion, an assessment. In Greenland it might be hot, in the Amazon, chilly. All of us have many "Nice day" bits of knowledge. Nothing wrong with that when you are aware of the difference.
I'll have lot's more on this in upcoming posts. For now it would be a great exercise if you just keep questioning your knowledge. Most of it is probably solid and well grounded, but it often takes uncovering only one, taken for granted, "nice day" piece to be found wrong, to change your whole view of the world.
BTW. On the GMO questions... I haven't heard anyone claim the GMO foods are better (more nutritious), and there is a lot of money on the "it's OK side", so while they're arguing about the safety, I find it personally prudent to avoid them as much as possible. My assessments, NOT facts :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment