Objective knowledge is possible and it comes from within. Communication is lossy so even precise books and teaching can not transfer objective knowledge. It starts with conjecture and then in repeated cycles of criticism it is corrected. Through this process objective knowledge can be found, but also shared.
See also:
- Epistemology
- From The Beginning of Infinity psuedo play with Socrates, Plato, and Hermes
- Reading is the transformation of a linked list of ideas into a tree
Links to this note
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Science Is True Even If You Don’t Believe in It
The beauty of science is that it’s true even if you don’t believe in it. The scientific method is an incredible discovery for producing objective knowledge which makes it durable to time, opinion, and fashion.
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How to Be a Good Product Engineer
Companies don’t really want frontend engineers or backend engineers or infrastructure engineers. If you work at an engineering as product organization, they want good product engineers solving user problems. As an industry, this is poorly understood and little is written to help people understand the principles of good product engineering.
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Biologists Don’t Make Good Medical Doctors
Deeply theoretical fields don’t necessarily translate to highly practical fields. Economists don’t typically do well as investors. Just because biologists know a lot about the inner workings of the human body, doesn’t mean they make great medical doctors.
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AI Doubles Productivity of Top Researchers
A study of artificial intelligence on productivity at a materials research lab found that the bottom third of researchers saw no improvement but top researchers doubled in productivity (as measured by materials discovered, patents, and “downstream product innovation”). The top researchers used AI to offload 57% of idea generation to focus on evaluation of the most promising ones rather than chasing dead ends. This suggests AI multiplies the value of expertise rather than leveling the playing field.
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Outline for my annual essay about things I learned and reflections for the year.
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Conjecture Is Vital to Product Development
Product development tends to overlook the importance of conjecture. Lean startup and similar ‘lean’ movements create a culture of empiricism—only that which can be measured must be true. This might make sense for optimizing mature products, but a culture of empiricism leads to an incremental approach to building new products and, at best, leads to finding a local optima.