THE BASIC PREPARATIONS
Before we begin, let us ensure that you have some of the most basic Monster-Hunting Tools. If you are missing these, for your personal safety please prioritize finding them.
These basic preparations are for those in the phase of studying a monster, scouting out their features to learn more about how they work, rather than aiding in any form of direct attack against them.
As fun as it may seem to skip directly to the ‘slaying’ part, this would be foolish because monsters are individuals, just as people are individuals, and it is dangerous to treat subjects as known quantities based on superficial similarities to descriptive forms in a book. Generalisations can provide points of reference for where to test for detail, but they do not provide total certainty that, because some properties are common, all properties are shared.
We can consider preparations as predominantly a matter of mindset, or a system of beliefs about how your own mind functions. Just as you can toggle and tweak settings inputs on a computer to adjust the outputs it achieves, the beliefs that we input into our minds in turn affect the output we can achieve by processing information. At times we need to change settings for precise tasks, just as one shifts gears when driving. In keeping with the same metaphor, when we approach a task in the wrong mindset we can stall or even grind the gears of the mental mechanism and wind up accomplishing considerable self-harm.
There is a time for scouting, and a time for soldiering. There are times to grow, and times to fix the course.[i]
Mental Flexibility is a key element of managing mindsets. This does not necessarily mean that you choose beliefs according to which results of belief are most convenient in the moment, but rather that there are nuances to beliefs and that in different times and situations beliefs will more correctly model your ability to interact with and influence the world around you. This is like acknowledging you can change according to the environment you find yourself in, and that if you want to understand your own mind and potential more fully, you must make an effort to understand the triggers that precipitate changes in mindset.
The alternative is Mental Inflexibility, in which a person attempts internal coherence and integrity by maintaining a set of beliefs irrespective of how well they predict the behaviour of the world around them.
This inflexibility is often tempting when the chaos of the outer world is regarded as predominantly random flux that is irrelevant to a larger, stable pattern of activity, a trend which is more important than any one event or outcome. This can feel like the rational course to take, and may well be in cases when randomness is truly unresolvable by the observer. However we must also acknowledge that randomness is ultimately incomplete information [ii], and that it is by interacting with the world, testing and understanding it, that we gain the information that allows us to reduce the range of randomness in proportion to constancy and relationship, and create a mental framework with external coherency, making sense in more and more cases in which it is applied to the world.
With this in mind, let’s begin by considering some beliefs that will help in maintaining a Scout Mindset toward monstrosity.
[i] These mindsets are attitudes t owards one’s own conscious thoughts first exposited by Carol Dweck in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2007), and as an idea was later built on by others such as Julia Galef in The Scout Mindset (2020)
[ii] Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2007)
Boots of Seekingness
Seekingness is a particular quality of personality that comes from your feet, and perhaps the metaphorical feet that you keep in your eyes. To be Seeking is to be in pursuit of newness in information.
This is different from looking for information that reiterates things that you already know, or the things you already believe to be true. Seekingness admits that your current understanding of the world is incomplete. There are pieces of the puzzle of your reality outside of yourself, and you must want to explore it more fully to figure out what your reality is.
Well, obviously you are a Seeking person. With that description, who would see themselves as otherwise? But just to make sure you’ve tied the shoelaces of your boots correctly, check in with the following questions:
· Did the last answer I receive satisfy me?
· Did the answer decrease the number of questions I have about the world?
· Is all the information I have in consistent agreement with itself?
· Are you sure?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of the above questions, you need to adjust your boots, and perhaps meditate on why that might not be a very Seeking thing to say.
Gloves of Skepticism
Skepticism is a rather complex position if we go into the full philosophical outlook it describes, but we can perhaps boil its leathery knuckles down to two fingers: an Axiom of Knowledge, and a Lemma of Doubt.[i]
The Axiom of Knowledge is simply the idea that knowledge is valuable, and you want as much of it as is possible while going after any other aims. But when you believe in something, you are inviting it to live inside of your head, and the more ideas you have in your head the greater the odds that two of them will directly contradict [ii] one another.
This is seen as a dreadful thing, because when polar opposite statements meet, they cancel each other out, a bit like 0 + 1 - 1 = 0. If you are trying to maximise the information that you have, you therefore need to filter out the negatives (‘untrue things’) before they can live inside of your head rent-free.
The simple solution is, of course, to hold several consistent beliefs and then never challenge them with new information. Or better yet, to simply exercise doubt when looking at new information but never when looking at the information you already have.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing tends to lead to local optimums where you can’t extend the knowledge you have beyond a fixed point, because you are being held back by one or more untrue beliefs.
The Lemma of Doubt is there to prevent local optimums by stating that all beliefs may prove untrue and must be doubted.[iii]
Even the ones that are already in your head. This leaves you free to ‘swap’ beliefs, maximizing the amount of consistent knowledge you possess by looking critically at all information, exercising self-doubt, challenging any signal entering your brain and all the signals currently inside of it.
Doubt is sometimes considered an ugly word, vilified as a hurtful emotion when compared with trust and faith. And it is perhaps true to say that when you wear the Gloves of Skepticism, everything you feel is not of the world but is your response to it, the texture of your own fingers bumping up against the familiar lining of skepticism’s shell.[iv] Nor is that shell ever a full guarantee against the betrayal of long-held beliefs. We call this impartiality.
Instead of partiality to beliefs, what doubt offers is exercise of the love of knowledge, the attainment of delocalized optimums far beyond what trust and faith can allow. You must be half-crazy with the love of truth, clutching fistfuls of doubt, an axiom in the right hand and a Lemma in the left to wear the gloves well. Ask yourself:
· Of all the things I believe, what are the odds all of them are true?
· So, which of the things I believe aren’t true?
· So, which of them can I trust?
Keep asking these questions, and you will be wearing The Gloves of Skepticism.[v]
[i] For a comprehensive view of Skepticism, I would recommend Steven Novella & co.’s The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (2018)
[ii] Contradiction has a casual meaning roughly like ‘inconsistency’, that two things cannot be true at the same time. More formally, it refers to any argument which, taken as valid, arrives at a false conclusion in all interpretations of the truth of its component parts. This is a decidedly bigger problem. Ian Hacking’s A Concise Introduction to Logic (1972) explains this distinction quite concretely.
[iii] This is an approach called Postpositivism, which acknowledges that there are many flaws in the ways even the most serious scientists interact with the world, rooted not least in human psychology. In Postpositivism, all beliefs are conjectures, statements which are hesitantly extended the label of ‘true’ for the purpose of investigating their implied consequences. All conjecture is open to revision as provisional rather than absolute truth.
[iv] Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (1940).
“The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.”
[v] These questions were popularized by David McRaney on the You Are Not So Smart podcast, becoming a catechism of epistemic humility.
