On Methodology

For the past few years, I’ve been becoming increasingly obsessed with methodology. In part, this is because of my education. When the results of my work in schools are so useless and impractical for my real life, the value I can extract is in the process of achieving those results

I go to UChicago, a bastion of teaching methodology. Each undergraduate is required to take the core curriculum, which exposes each individual to a breadth of disciplines from the physical sciences and math to art and humanities. At its best, going through the core will teach you a breadth of methodology to solve problems. You can pull on the mental models from each of these disciplines to achieve your ends.

Part of the reason I’ve become increasingly obsessed with methodology is that I feel that most people aren’t in tune with how they’re reaching the conclusions they’re reaching. Any idea, solution, or concept will be evaluated on the basis of pure intuition and then backed up by any confirming fact they can lay their hands on.

Here’s a wake up call: your judgment sucks. Mine does too. If it were any good, people would be funneling money into my pockets to make decisions with. Hindsight bias will forever make us feel like we have a strong sense of what’s going on but the truth is that we don’t. And I believe we largely don’t because our awareness of our methodologies is so minimal that we fail to iterate on how we solve problems.

In playing any game, you’re going to make many small bets that may pay off. You’ll dive deep into research corridors, new ideas, and work exceedingly hard. Most of the times you’ll fail. However, with the right methodology and methodology iteration, you increase your likelihood to succeed substantially.

Reaching Conclusions, Tracking Methodology

As humans, we are increasingly asked to have opinions on more topics. It would be impossible to keep track of how you reach all the conclusions you reach. But this is why we write.

To become a better thinker, you need to track 1) what you were thinking and, more importantly, 2) why you were thinking it. Through this documentation, you can both clearly point to why you have a conclusion that you have and also review your methods to see if they led you to the right conclusion.

Disagreement Functions

There are solely two ways a disagreement can arise: a difference in methodology or a difference in facts. They aren’t mutually exclusive (so - perhaps, there are 3 ways!).

A disagreement in methodology occurs when the way two people approach a question and solve it differently. They may use different computation, but they also may weigh the computation differently.

A disagreement in facts is when the facts used by both people differ. They may be contradictory or they may pull on facts from different areas. A great methodology can accommodate any fact. A great methodology reaches conclusions that can be proven false.

There’s a notion of a [[ double crux ]] in an argument which is a fact for both members of a disagreement that if altered, their opinion would change. This is highly valuable.

Document Your Methods!

The upshot is to document your methods. It helps you argue your points, make better decisions, and refine the way you make decisions over time.