Salient Facts

It’s interesting coming across blog posts on skills vs. content, because it’s a topic near and dear to my own heart.

When I put together my self-determined major in Epistemology of the Social Sciences, one of the core drivers was the realization that I didn’t know who to believe – that is, I was being taught “facts” about the world which were at best different and at worst contradictory. I imagine this problem occurs less in the hard sciences than the social sciences, where we’re beset by the over-formalization of economics, the valiant attempts at laboratory testing in psychology, “wishy-washy sociology”, etc and so on.

So the problem became: how do I judge what information to accept at the moment? Certainly, you can ask experts – people who know everything about a field – or you can become an expert yourself (in 10 years or so). But what happens if you ask multiple experts, each of which gives you a different answer? Whose information do you accept? Is it whoever has the best suit?

It turns out there’s a skill-set involved in judging what information is best for you at the moment, given some pre-existing criteria. Among other things, you focus on methodology over findings; under the assumption that if you know the limits of the methods, you know the limits of the conclusions. “Knowing that” is much less important than “knowing how”, in the end.

Knowledge isn’t everything of course, and being able to pick out which facts are salient – and which are really facts, as opposed to guesses masquerading as facts – is never sufficient. But it is necessary for so many things – good decisions being the most obvious.