Chan Yew Joe

One thing about reading a lot of books is this: whatever conclusion you arrive at, whatever statement you make, you can almost always find an example to support it. But an example is just one among millions or billions of incidents. One among countless possible cases. That means its generalizability is very limited.

Unless we are talking about scientific evidence—scientific theory from scientific journals—where at least there is some notion of significance. Even then, what does “significant difference” actually mean? It means that under controlled conditions, you might have a higher probability—maybe 50% or more—of observing a certain effect.

But even in that case, there will still be outliers. There will still be edge cases. There will still be conditions, variables, and prerequisites under which the theory does not apply.

That is why in certain scenarios, reading no longer matters. Prior information does not matter. Prior data does not matter. Prior theory does not matter. Even theories from elsewhere in the world may not matter. They simply do not apply.

In those situations, the only thing you can do is act, iterate, get feedback, iterate again, act again, and get feedback again. You can only obtain local information and local validation for what you are trying to test. You can only discover whether something works in this context, under these conditions, with these constraints.

Sometimes, you simply have to spend time iterating and experimenting.

Of course, we can still use data to perform simulations. We can try to eliminate obviously unworkable experiments and focus on the experiments that have the highest leverage—those that matter most for disproving our hypotheses, those that give us the most informative feedback.

This is what worth doing in real life: updating our beliefs, falsifying bad theories, and understanding what works locally.

I think these are the three main things we should be doing: updating beliefs, falsifying weak theories, and learning what works in our own context. That is how we optimize our lives and live a good life that is suitable for us.