Ask HN: What is the best way to understand how the entire world works?
I mean, essentially, why things are the way they are. A complete understanding of the earliest days on the Earth and how human civilization continually advanced, governments and economies invented, and technology emerged, etc. And I'm not limiting this to books, but any documentaries as well. Thanks!
9 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] threadSet aside three days for your meditation experience. Do not smoke on the first day, but instead spend the day meditating on calmness. Any anxieties or agitations should be resolved by the day of your smoking. Collect and prepare all the supplies (described further.) Prepare your environment, it should be pleasant, quiet, calm, and non-threatening. You should not be disturbed during the experience. Make sure you have ample writing paper and pens. If you're a typer, prepare your typing environment. Remember that paper is the most private method of saving information we have.
On the second day, brew yourself a big pot of coffee. Do this by pouring some clean just-boiled water over a couple of handfuls of freshly-ground coffee grounds a non-reactive glass or ceramic pot. Stir it, let it brew for about five to ten minutes, until all the grounds settle to the bottom. Pour it off into another non-reactive pot. You can cover it and put it in your oven to keep it warm. (You don't have to light the oven, just the insulation will be enough.)
Put the hash into a pipe and take one big inhale of it, hold it in for a bit, and exhale. Do not cough, even if you really want to, until you have full exhaled. (Coughing with smoke still in you will only make it worse.)
The most important thing to keep in mind during is that the experience is temporary, and will be over within a few hours. This means that you should try to make the most of it in terms of thinking, and you should also remain calm and breathe deeply and softly if you feel any agitation. Remember to write, otherwise most of your insights will be forgotten.
Spend the third day recuperating, and writing down any more thoughts which come to you. You will need that third day, trust me.
May this help you gain insight about yourself and your existence.
https://fs.blog/mental-models/ might be a good starting point.
>The Bayesian method is a method of thought (named for Thomas Bayes) whereby one takes into account all prior relevant probabilities and then incrementally updates them as newer information arrives. This method is especially productive given the fundamentally non-deterministic world we experience: We must use prior odds and new information in combination to arrive at our best decisions. This is not necessarily our intuitive decision-making engine.
You can come to understand the world from your perspective... But, to have a deep and complete knowledge of how the world works, you would have to have omniprescence (the ability to transport yourself to any part of the world) and to be able to get into the thoughts of all people, observing all possible perspectives to reach a final conclusion...
This just to understand the "modern world", with this you could approximate the "why" and the "how" our world works.
If the information is conveyed to someone else, another perceiver, it is transformed twice more -- once in translating it to the communication medium, and once more to match the new perceiver's model.
Thus, the more steps information takes in getting to you, the more changed it will become. Most of the information we get has been transformed many times before reaching us.
In order to achieve information accuracy in your mental models, you must either perceive information directly from reality, or attempt to undo these transformations with speculation, aka reading between the lines.
This is only the beginning. If you want to effectively understand the world, every time you perceive new information, you must immediately try to fit it to as many of your mental models as you can before it fades, and then cascade down all the rest of them to see if the combination also fits something.
It is a pursuit which takes much uninterrupted thinking, and quiet space is essential. It will also seem fruitless at first, the same way as with meditation. Eventually, after a bit of doing this seemingly without any reward, it will start to come together, and you will begin to have regular moments of insight.
Richard Feynman wrote on this quite a bit, I advise you to seek out his writing.