Application: Primary knowledge vs secondary knowledge

Here's something you can do the next time you are overwhelmed by the thought of making an important decision.

Take a piece of paper and fold it in half vertically. On one side, put down everything you know from experience. On the other side, put down the facts and figures you've been told.

Then do this: Tear the page in half (vertically) and toss all those facts and figures in the garbage. You'll then have everything you need to know to make the right decision.

Will you ever miss out on a great opportunity? Possibly. But my experience tells me you'll go broke a hundred times before you succeed at something you have no experience in.

With the increase in knowledge and access to it, we tend to be overwhelmed by information gotten from others, some of which is not reliable. This technique should reduce the mistakes somewhat

Note that if you have access to reliable research, you will not be overwhelmed. So this is important as in finding out who can best be trusted in the research they have done. An extreme example: Anyone who claims that rocks, when released, move upward (unless they are on the equator of an asteroid with a high enough rotation rate) should get skepticism as to reliability. It is harder with other things, since we can't have personal experience in everything. But obvious errors can be avoided.

Experience (not always our own) should always be used to test theory - this is the basic point of both the historical/judicial method, and the scientific one. And we should start with our own experience.

Philosopher, quit arguing about how many teeth a horse should have, and go do some counting

I note that the paleontologist who discovered remnants of organic material in non-mineralized dinosaur fossils (and others) are still trying to find something, anything, that will explain how organics can last as long as standard theory dating indicates.

So what you're saying is that we should never do research if we get a hint that something may not be as we assume it to be, and instead stick with what we are convinced is true.

Yeah, no. That seems like really terrible advice. Why not try to learn how to do research instead? Seems to me that knowing how to separate the chaff from the wheat is a more useful skill than just assuming that what you'll get will always be wheat.

So to manufacture complex modern equipment you shouldn't start until you have personally done primary research into all aspects of all parts of it?

Even when the medieval village blacksmith made an axe he didn't work out how to smelt iron first, just bought pig iron from a trader.