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Learning and growth

Socrates

Knowing you do not know

Socrates (Athens · 470–399 BC) — Knowing you do not know.

Learning and growthPre-Qin and classicalKnowing you do not know

What actually happened?

Crito came to the prison before dawn with everything arranged: guards paid, a ship waiting, a household abroad ready to take him. Socrates would not argue about whether the verdict had been just. He asked instead whether a private citizen may set aside a judgement he dislikes, and what a city would be if everybody did. Crito had to agree that it could not stand. Then leaving, Socrates said, would teach exactly that, and would do Athens more harm than anything he stood accused of. He stayed, and drank the hemlock.

Not knowing, and not pretending to know

The line on the posters says he knew nothing. What he actually claims is smaller and far more usable: about the things he does not know, he does not suppose that he knows them. That gap is the whole advantage.

Say I have not checked that, and people bring you answers. Say I know, and people bring you agreement, which contains no information.

Being good at one thing makes you sure about everything

He found the craftsmen genuinely skilled and, because of that skill, convinced they understood the largest questions too. A validated record in one domain is the hardest thing to leave at the door of another.

The strongest technical judgement in the room decides the pricing as well, at the same volume, on none of the evidence.

He questioned rather than answered

He compared himself to a midwife: unable to give birth to anything himself, only to help others deliver. A conclusion somebody reaches under questioning gets defended by them. One handed over gets dropped at the first objection.

Show him the flaw and one line changes. Ask until he finds it and the same flaw gets fixed everywhere else in the document.

The examined life had a price and he paid it

Offered silence or exile instead of death, he took death, on the ground that leaving would teach the city that inconvenient judgements may be ignored. Consistency between what he said and what he did cost him everything it could cost.

Any rule you announce and then quietly exempt yourself from is not a rule. It is a preference with a press office.

How do I use it today?

Next time you are certain, run the three questions: what is this judgement resting on, under what conditions would it fail, and what have I not looked at? Run them especially when the conclusion suits you. Either the certainty gets firmer or a hole opens, and both are worth ten minutes.

Deep read

Not supposing that you knowThe whole margin is that thinHe never claimed to know nothing, only not to suppose he knewThe midwife's tradeNo answers, only deliveryAn answer counts only if it came out of the other person

Read alongside

Wang YangmingTwo thousand years apart and the same move: Socrates delivers what is already in you, Wang Yangming says the knowing was there all along and only obscured. MachiavelliThe two ends of philosophy: one died for a principle, the other wrote the manual for staying alive inside power. The AnalectsNear contemporaries who both taught by asking rather than telling, and both paid for holding a position against the people in power. Nonviolent CommunicationTwo ways of getting somebody to say the answer themselves: Socrates by questioning, Rosenberg by naming the need the other person has not said out loud. NietzscheHis fiercest target was Socrates: he held that the cult of reason had castrated the vitality of the Greeks and turned philosophy into a denial of life — the two of them side by side is the most important collision in Western thought. Carl RogersTwo ways of making somebody find their own answer: Socrates presses with questions, Rogers removes the conditions. Richard FeynmanBoth use questions to force ignorance into the open. Socrates aims them at other people, Feynman at himself.

Further

Wang Yangming Tao Te Ching Charlie Munger Ray Dalio The Analects Gandhi Nonviolent Communication Epictetus Nietzsche Viktor Frankl Richard Feynman Karl Popper Bruce Lee Albert Einstein

Lines to keep

Wisdom begins in not pretending to know what you do not.

An answer handed over gets dropped. One delivered gets defended.