Your IQ doesn't matter: If you want to know how the world works you got to take in new information

There was a time when we didn't knew that the weight of an object doesn't impact how fast it falls. If you've been in school, you probably know that - provided you're in a vacuum or both objects are heavy enough that we can ignore air drag - on earth's surface, everything falls with 9.81m/s^2, no matter how heavy or light it is. And you don't even have to be particularly smart to understand it, it's actually quite intuitive when you think about it.

Now, back in the 4th century BC, the great philosopher and scientist Aristotle believed that the speed at which objects fall down to earth is directly proportional to their weight, meaning something that weighs 100 pounds falls twice as fast as something that weighs 50 pounds. And you got to admit, it does sound intuitive, after all, all his life he's seen light things, like paper, fall slowly, while heavy things like rocks have fallen quickly. So it stands to assume that heavy things must fall quicker than light ones, right?

What he didn't do though, was to actually test this hypothesis. He could have easily taken a sphere of lead and a spherical rock, and looked how fast they fall down, he would have been surprised. Only he didn't actually try it out, because it must have seemed just so obvious to him that his hypothesis was true, since the model that he used in his head was able to describe all the observations he had made, so why make even make the effort to make more observations just to test such a clearly true hypothesis?

This is a common pattern of thinking in all humans. We look at something, think of an explanation, and if that explanation satisfies us, we take it as "probably true" and move on. And by "satisfy", I don't just mean "it is entirely internally logical", but it can also mean that it literally just gives us a satisfying emotion, like when we kind of *want to believe* the answer we just gave on the test was true because it would discomfort us to know it wasn't.

It's the same with political ideologies. Liberals want to believe that tax-and-spend and in general the government taking matters into its own hands solves basically every issue, while libertarians want to believe that taking away the government will solve every issue, and centrists want to believe that the solution is always in the middle. I think they're all wrong: In some cases the government intervening creates more wealth and security to go around, in some it just decreases productivity and innovation, in some cases the middle is the way to go, in some cases the middle is just the horrible mix of two terrible solutions. There is no inherent virtue in less or more government intervention or more or less of anything, really. Too little salt and you're dehydrated, too much and you're poisoned. That also doesn't mean if one person tells you to eat no salt at all, and the other tells you to eat 20 tablespoons a day that the true equilibrium must be 10 tablespoons. 

But sure, it does feel comforting "knowing" that you have the one thing that solves everything, whether it's to go left, right or center. Except if you actually do the experiment, if you actually do try to think it through in your head and you're being totally honest to yourself, you're going to find hidden aspects of EVERYTHING, quite literally. As Ben Shapiro, a man I disagree with on nearly everything, famously pointed out: "Facts don't care about your feelings." So what most people do is to not even seek out the facts that they fear might make them uncomfortable for confronting something that contradicts everything they believe in, or they don't seek out facts that they don't even know exist yet, which might do the same. It's an understandable behavior, and it's not just perhaps emotionally draining to confront your own views all the time, but it also takes up a lot of time and energy, which many people just don't want to spend.

If you really want to understand the world, though, don't just try to find out more about the things you already know about, then you just become more engrained in your existing ideology. Try to find things you didn't even know existed yet, beside becoming more familiar with the concepts you've only scratched the surface of, of course. Like, did you know that parts of Russia in the 1917 revolution actually were controlled by anarchists so you can read how that went, or that inflation is largely not actually driven by literally printing money but also for example strong unions, or for non-US readers that there was a time in America where they had banned alcohol and it went literally just as terribly as the drug war today? Those are all very interesting and somewhat surprising things to find out about, that can make you adapt your political views. For example when you realized that union rights also have negative consequences such as increasing inflation, perhaps you then prefer the German model of workers electing half the company board - again provided you have even heard about it.

Smart people are just better at creating a model in their mind that fits their observations, that doesn't mean the model is right. There are probably thousands of models that would fit with any given observation, but most of them are probably just plain false. Sure, maybe they have  grain of truth in them, but I doubt anyone here wants to have a philosophy that "has a grain of truth", we want to know how it actually works and in detail please. Well, if you want to know the details, then you got to look at the facts in detail as well. The more objective facts you know, the more you can adapt your world view to fit the observations. It is quite emotionally draining to rationalize why you believe something when you're confronted with countering evidence, though, so when you come to the point where you get evidence that counters your own position and you either adapt your opinion or calmly find a way how it fits into your worldview without any twisting, then you know that you got the right mindset. 

That mindset is something that probably nobody is born with, it's something we have to learn. As a child we do precisely what satisfies us emotionally, and only as we grow older do we realize that long-term that is not good for our emotional well-being. So while we don't stop serving our emotions, we just switch to planning ahead, changing our position now rather than later so we don't have to violently realize we were wrong later on. Of course this doesn't mean you should just change your position whenever you're confronted with something that opposes it, because then you might as well have no position at all.

So seek out new information, whether you deliberately seek out opinions that oppose your own viewpoint, or neutral information. But try to make sure not to ONLY listen to opposing opinions, because then you're probably just pulled over through mere repitition alone; people generally get more agreeable to anything they've heard or seen a lot, so if you do that you're really just exchanging one echo chamber with another. Go on Wikipedia and read an article that you're interested in, and if you see a word you don't know, then read the entry on that. If you find a word in that second article you don't know, read the entry on that one, too, and so on. Along the way you're probably going to get a lot of good ideas on what to think about and find out about next, so then you can do that.

I hope you found this post interesting, if you did you can take a look at my blog, where I'm posting regularly about stuff that I find interesting, whether policy, philosophy, and in the future probably also other topics like science. I don't like to give my opinions on recent political events here, but I just theorize about the world in general. So if you're just as stressed out by Trump/Hillary/Brexit/EU/Israel/Palestine/SJWs/Gays/etc as I am, my posts here are not about arguing about those kinds of things with "he said, she said, he started it" kinds of content. If you want to, I'm open to talk about literally anything and give my opinion, that's just not really the point of my blog here.