Sorcery
Meta-rational magic for un-Special people
This post is a new draft section of Part Four of my meta-rationality book. If you are newly arrived, check the outline to get oriented. If you run into unfamiliar terms, consult the Glossary.
This is a partly-paid post. Roughly the first half is free, and there’s a paywall in the middle.
This post features a humorous meta-rational fable as dessert. It’s in a style similar to Getcha Boots On. For paying subscribers only! I promised you writing that is too much fun for my serious sites. This fable is almost certainly too much fun to get included in the final version of the book. I enjoyed writing it, though, and I hope you enjoy reading it!
Don’t miss it—it comes at the end, after the healthy Exercises vegetable course.
Fluid competence is the willingness and ability to address a situation’s purposes with any field or system of knowledge, skill, practice, method, mode of reasoning, form of understanding, or way of being. “Any” sort includes:
Ones you aren’t expert in
Ones you don’t have any knowledge or skill in yet
Ones that make you personally uncomfortable, initially at least
Ones that other participants would never consider, don’t understand, or might even scorn
Fluid competence is general competence, meaning potentially competent enough in any domain to provide “what the situation needs.” It doesn’t mean you are expert at everything; no one can be. It’s based on a realistic assessment of what you can do now, and what it may take you to become able to act outside your areas of expertise well enough to address the current situation.
Fluid competence is a direct consequence of prioritizing meta-rational norms over rational, systemic ones. That means prioritizing the whole situation, in its real-world context, over whatever system or systems operate in it. It means prioritizing perception and understanding of concrete phenomena over abstract theories—while still orienting to those rational principles as well. It means caring for the situation more than caring about your identity as a professional in some domain.
Deep expertise in at least one domain, probably more than one, is a prerequisite. You can’t think and act meta-rationally without having already mastered thinking and acting rationally.
Fluid competence vs. expertise
The confidence of an expert is based on a self-definition as someone with complete mastery of a circumscribed rational system. It provides a comforting feeling of certainty. Expertise requires deliberate blindness to anything outside its domain. (This observation is an expansion of Part Three’s explanation of the deliberate un-seeing of anything outside the system as essential to rationality.)
The confidence of the generally competent is based on absence of any self-definition. You do not identify as “a professional software engineer,” even if that’s what you were hired as. The boundaries of your self are nebulous, so you are not limited by any fixed conception of the situation, of the context, of your role, or of your capabilities. You are not subject to the constraints of any system within which you operate, the way an expert is. You maintain panoramic awareness of the situation and context, as well as the systematic details, so you are not blinded by expertise, but can deploy it when suitable.
This meta-rational re-prioritization implies a willingness to apply any or many systems, ideas, tools, methods, from any source. That may involve figuring out what know-how is needed. It’s also a willingness to forego all such paraphernalia, if none seem adequate, and to improvise in resonant response to nebulous specifics. What’s needed may be something non-rational, such as delivering an inspiring speech. Fluid confidence is active enjoyment of uncertainty as to what may or may not be possible, when exploring a situation in which all expertise might be irrelevant.
This is where breakthroughs come from. What are broken through are limits that are consequences of some system’s explicit rules or implicit expectations.
This is where meta-rationality diverges from multi-rationality. Multi-rationality can bring multiple bodies of expertise to bear on a Problem; but it remains limited to expertise. “Using diverse rational systems to address a situation’s purposes” is still somewhat instrumental, rational language.
Meta-rationality reevaluates a situation more for the sake of allowing the ongoing unfolding of its meanings than for any specific systemic improvement. For meta-rationality, “what does this situation need?” remains a permanently open question, whose meaning shifts fluidly over time. There are no fixed goals; no Problem to be Solved. What counts as improvement, progress, or achievement is nebulous, and develops dynamically. Meta-rational language would advocate “becoming the space of the entire context as it burgeons spontaneously.” (That may not yet make any sense at this point in the book; but you might take a moment to think about what it could possibly mean.)
Meta-rational magic for un-Special people
From rationality’s point of view, fluid competence can sometimes give an impression of omniscience and of unlimited ability. That is why I titled this section “Sorcery.” Bringing to bear knowledge and methods from distant fields no one could expect you to know: seeming omniscience. Willingness to engage in any helpful form of activity, setting aside systematic strictures: seeming omnicompetence. “Jack of all trades, sorcerer of several”: this may make your actions seem mysterious, and your results magical, to the expert mindset.
“Sorcery” is misleading, though, if it suggests that you need to be a Special sort of person. The best-known examples of meta-rationality are paradigm-breaking scientific acts of genius, such as those of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. These are not good examples. Whether or not those were Special people, the type of work they did is highly atypical of meta-rationality. (I’ll explain specifically what that type is, and why they are poor prototypes, when we discuss meta-rational scientific practice later.)
This book is meant as a practical guide for people who are not so extraordinary, doing work that is not so extraordinary. I want to demystify ideas like “discovery,” “genius,” and “intuition,” and replace them with down-to-earth practices. What are required are openness, willingness, and a bag full of mundane trickery. Nevertheless, meta-rationality’s results can be extraordinary—as in the example of the Oxford penicillin group.
Norman Heatley explained that it “was pretty straightforward. There really wasn’t anything original in it… It was just a question of applying already-known techniques, or perhaps modifying them in different ways, and you’re bound to get an answer.’’ He was too modest. “Modifying already-known techniques in different ways” (requiring openness) is an essential meta-rational operation; and his modifications were not obvious to several highly-motivated experts in the field who had failed where he succeeded.
Howard Florey wrote: “Nor should anyone suppose that we have performed any great intellectual feats here. All we did was to do some decent experiments and have the luck to hit on a substance with astonishing properties.” But another scientist’s assessment was that “Florey was a practical scientist, not a great one… he had one supreme virtue: he knew exactly what had to be done, and he got it done.” Willingness.
This book is about all three prerequisites: openness, willingness, and a bag of tricks. The trickery is easiest to explain, and so takes up most of the text. A section of the next chapter is about how to learn the trickery (whereas most of the Part is about the trickery itself). A chapter near the end of this Part is about developing the attitude: of openness and willingness.
Openness comes with sufficient experience of systems working well, and also of their failing due to their own self-imposed blindnesses. You recognize that “conform to the principles of the system!” is not always good advice. You start to see patterns in systematic success and failure, and you open to the possibility of operating outside systems when they aren’t working well enough.
Willingness comes with growing trust in your own fluid, meta-rational competence, based on increasingly frequent and valuable successes.
How to be omniscient
As for trickery: the simplest way of applying a field you are not expert in is to learn just enough of the part of it that is relevant to your situation. This requires learning to learn in two new ways, a short-term one and a long-term one.
These are almost the opposite of the way you learned to learn in STEM school. Technical education prepares you to become an expert professional. To get through it, you need to learn how to learn systematically: to cover particular subjects completely, to master their principles, to be able to Solve any Problem within the scope of the field.
In the short term, for fluidity, you want instead to learn as little as possible of a relevant field, while making sure your understanding of just that one bit is accurate enough for your use of it. The bit may be an obscure corner of the field, or considered an advanced topic that only graduate students would encounter. STEM education would deem it necessary to have gotten an undergraduate degree and mastered the basics before even looking at it. But you don’t have time for that! And, if you are lucky, you don’t need to understand the principles it rests on, nor how that bit operates in its full generality.