I believe you can’t know something until you teach it. Therefore, I believe the most durable and time-resistant form of understanding comes through the ability to teach something to a 12-year-old.
These are my attempts at first principles to provide certainty about reality and are the foundation for all my other essays and understanding.
For answers that apply to everything, other philosophers far smarter than me have aimed for precision and thoroughness. However, what we perceive is very wobbly and uncertain, and they’ve written very large books that nobody wants to read. So, I figured I’d have a better chance at making something accessible by throwing out precision and thoroughness and replacing it with brevity and simplicity.
I’m likely very different from most philosophers, and that’s why I don’t usually like to assert myself as one. They often enjoy exploring vast swathes of understanding. While I believe the effects of philosophical inquiry are very rewarding to those who seek it, the entire experience is boring to me without a meaningful output. I’d rather devote my life to producing something practical. I prefer that all my understanding is useful for determining the best action. Since I only pursue truths to the degree they’re useful, I’m not a particularly good philosopher.
Living the good life on this planet for a few decades will glean most of the wisdom this life has to offer by intuition alone, and typically with great stories to show for it. These essays, therefore, are only for the curious who want a boring shortcut.
If you find abstract philosophical ideas entirely useless, you can jump to the Application section at the end of each of my essays. Those are my conclusions that arise in light of the abstractions, and they’re probably as useful as I can make them.
Like every other human ever, I don’t believe my ideas are wrong, but I’m always open to the possibility. Every philosopher will want to gain or spread wisdom, which means they’ll naturally want people to disagree with them. In the spirit of not bloating my essays, I’ve neglected to place the following in front of every assertion I make:
- “I believe…”
- “I don’t entirely know 100%, but…”
- “I’m convinced of this, but I can’t prove entirely that…”
- “From what I understand…”
- “I’ve read something that said…”
If you disagree with me about something on this website, please let me know: dave@stucky.tech. You’ll probably be added to my attribution page.
However, I do have a few ground rules, which I unquestionably believe:
- There’s no “absolute” right and wrong, at least not in a human perception sense. We’re all just perceiving the truth with a sliding scale of accuracy, even if it’s 99.999999999% certainty.
- An objective truth does exist, even if it’s elusive. Reality is far too consistent, too painful, and far too elaborate to be some woo-woo vaguesauce imaginary dreamyland wisp of illusory transcendental nebula-fart. We can never precisely specify what it is, but it does exist, and we are in it.
- I want to make things useful, and my personality has a very low threshold for uncertainty, so I find it better to be certain about something today and change it later once I’ve tested it. There’s no reason to live fearing unknowable information along the critical path of getting something done.