On Facts and Thinking

In my opinion the central thesis of this article is obscured by its framework of first vs higher order facts and thinking. The article states its real point quite simply:

> You must temper your desire to jump to conclusions, explore the search space of possible conclusions, and generate probabilities of truth.

I think "higher order facts" is a shitty label. The premise's and grid outlined is right, but the labels used are simply not clear. Higher order thinking is a real thing that you can google for, but higher order facts is not.

"high order thinking" appears to be loose, metaphorical reasoning; or partial-information where a lot isn't explicitly stated, but assumed, or extrapolated (Pragmatic? Speculative?) - but that relies heavily on correlation too, and I find the distinction is hard to outline.

It also dinstinguished facts by "topic relevance" i.e a less-relevant fact may require more speculation; However this ignore resolution - how accurate, and/or generalised a given fact is in the first place.

Finally, any corrolation/speculation can be tainted when you include an uneven mix, or cherry-picked slection, of facts to be informed by which isn't handled when we start catagorising individual facts, rather than collections of facts as a whole.

Could someone explain what he meant about the wise abstracting their knowledge into myths? What’s so special about Jesus turning the other cheek and Odysseus going home? I feel like it’s straight forward what they are metaphors for (forgiveness and I guess for the odysessus one it’s you can’t run away from your problems), unless I’m still not going deep enough which is most likely the case. It’s this kind of thinking that scares me because I feel like I stop a bit short in my thought, and I’d like to go deeper without going off the deep end

The author missed a chance to complete his example by showing how the 'right' sort of thinking about the 'right' sort of facts lead one to ask whether, and/or to what extent, attitudes about race shaped the current demographics of Chicago. Perhaps it is intended to be an exercise left to the reader, to notice that this would involve thinking causally about the given first-order fact of the matter, which puts it in the 'wisdom' quadrant.

Can we try this out?

Here's a proposed 'fact': "If you don't eat with us at mealtimes, your whole caloric intake will be sugar and oil. That's probably unhealthy in the long run."

Is that a 'first order fact' or a 'higher order fact'? How do we decide?

The problem is that no one agrees what the facts are.

And each faction is sure that the other group is poorly informed and/or stupid.

> We may now deploy trust.

Figuring out how to bootstrap trust in a network of anonymous actors is my white whale.

I liked the writing. Felt a bit short though