1/N. On knowledge and subjectiveness, a thread.

There's a common belief about truth being relative and that subjective experience is a superior to gain understanding.

This manifests in several ways and leads people towards confusion.

2/N. A friend of mine once told me he was an anarchist. I said "awesome, which anarchists have you read?" curious to see who influenced him.

He answered "Daniel, anarchism isn't about books, that's nonsense."

A few months later I lent him a couple of my favorite ones.

3/N. After a while he returned them and said "Wow, those guys knew what they were talking about, I learned so much."

He based his earlier understanding on things he read online from other "anarchists."

A chain of self-delusion.

4/N. I was in a conversation about physics and someone was talking about time travel or something like that. They claimed it was "based on science."

I asked, "which science, specifically?"

They replied, "relativity," and proceeded to "explain" how.

Everyone else was impressed.

5/N. After they finished I explained why it was wrong. I got a piece of paper and wrote down the equations and described the phenomena they talked about. I showed them why it didn't work that way.

They learned relativity from a popular science book.

6/N. Mind you, it was a pretty good popular science book, I've read (and liked) it myself.

Nowhere in that book there was anything like that person was describing.

But they thought they gained understanding from the book and could apply it beyond what the book talked about.

7/N. If you study the actual physics you gain understanding that is applicable to all sorts of questions. You learn how to see when it's applicable and how it should be used.

Popular science books, even when written by physics Nobel laureates, don't give you this understanding.

8/N. Someone told me that stoics were against emotions. I showed them quotes from classical stoics about this.

They accepted it, but blamed the modern "pop-stoics" for spreading misinformation.

It's not useful to blame others if we accept second-hand statements.

9/N. I saw so many other examples of this, from programming to Buddhism to economics to biology.

People read blogs and tweet threads, listen to podcasts, or watch YouTube videos, and think they gained understanding.

All of those are useful, but as pointers to the sources.

10/N. Those are like reading travel guides without traveling. Actual travel is entirely different from reading a travel guide.

Sometimes the "true and final" source isn't a book, but practice. You have to do it for yourself.

Otherwise it's just travel guides all the way down.

11/11. Even this thread is just a shitty travel guide about understanding.

This is a much better one, but remember to travel afterwards:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/