Causes of Things: The Forgotten Treasure in the Information Age

Photo by Kevin Bluer on Unsplash

Welcome to the age of practicality…

Finding useful frameworks, reaching quick solutions.

Ceasing the advantage of a single piece of information and going one step ahead.

We are selecting the reads no more than 10 mins and jumping to the next article to see another learning to copy.

Now learning is a gold rush and the ultimate gains are takeaways that help us -probably- to compete or show-off ( sorry…). No clue how much we are processing and mixing/matching the different learnings.

We are becoming the victims of superficial sense that free fall questions or thoughts are useless speculations.

I feel that our minds and souls are captivated by the Conquistador spirit where it does not fit in the cause of intellectual efforts and I see the pressure of ‘take-aways’ becomes more like a war chest which replaces the humble curiosity with the pride ( sometimes arrogance ) of ‘knowing’.

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Albert Einstein

What we need is what we forget. We must remember how learning becomes enlightening rather than instructive and how the journey between those two is that much distinct.

Let me start with Pythagoras’ Theorem that is a demonstration of how in-depth understanding can distinguish your contributions compared to mastery of fact-hunting.

I believe the theorem is still vivid in your memories of your early childhood math classes:

Yes. Basically, the theorem is ‘ the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal in area to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.’

BUT, why do we attribute the theorem to Pythagoras?

The fact that right-angled triangles have fixed lengths was quite known in Egyptian Civilization (1). It was widely essential to use geometrical information for massive buildings like pyramids. 3–4–5, 5–12–13, and many others were already in use even — close to- thousands of years before Pythagoras.

So here is the question again, why do we attribute the fact to Pythagoras but not to unknown practitioners from Egypt?

1- Pythagoras is the one who generated the formula

2- Pythagoras is the one who made the proof of the formula

3- Pythagoras is the one who made information possible for other practical uses not only for buildings.

‘Rerum Cognoscere Causas’

This Latin phrase is the motto of many colleagues for a reason. The full translation is ‘Fortunate is he, who is able to know the causes of things’.

The difference between Pythagoras and practitioners of important civilizations is a simple fact that curiosity to grasp what is behind the face value of the practice, not to keep it as common knowledge.

I believe the connection is obvious that ‘takeaways’ are more like triangle blocks that you can use in certain situations but Pythagoras’ intellectual effort of finding underlying dynamics of the phenomena and conceptualizing it lead to other means of practice for the whole humanity.

However, how beneficial can it be to apply Pythagoras’ virtue to real-life examples as simple as buying a car?

Let’s say, you just need a car to travel a few blocks when public transportation is not that safe or practical.

Here how the thinking flow goes…

First, you start collecting advice:

Your friend Andy tips you that the best car is brand X because of gas consumption and driving comfort. Another friend of yours, Jennifer, whose passion is about the performance, says that Brand Y is the best in class for the price range that you are looking for. You wanna deepen your search and find out a great article about the categories of automobile types and reading reviews.

It sounds like a fair process: we are doing our homework and collecting different views/learnings but are we aware of the sense behind these learnings?

How could possibly ‘knowing the causes of things’ make you fortunate, where you can land on a better decision.

So let’s start to speculate a bit and convert the question of why you need a car ( straight forward answer is the safety ) to what the cars are good for or why the cars were needed in the first place.

I can guess some of you have just eye-rolled that I am making such a point in the discussion of buying a car.

Meanwhile, one curious mind can easily find the history of the automobile industry. One milestone of the industry after the initial competitive start of the late 19th century is the T-model engine of Ford. It is the first affordable model that the middle class can enjoy the ride and free accessibility to anywhere and at any time.

This is very meaningful, right? One of the driving forces behind the industry was the feeling of liberty of the middle class at the beginning of the 20th century. It might hit you that how this motivation resembles yours which you get more aware that it is not a matter of alternating the public transportation but freedom of individual selection of where and when.

This helps, however, you better continue on your journey through the history of automobiles. What had been changed back then? Does driving a car to have the same flexibility once middle-class families enjoy the weekends? You may come across the concept of urbanization and some effects that can limit your joy of driving: traffic jams, elevated gas consumption, lack of parking lots, and so on.

Now, the problem is not to buy the best-fit car but any means of transportation that provides flexibility across different neighborhoods. One might ( i.e. me ) figure out motorbike could be the way better option when you consider the slim gas consumption, easiness of parking, ruling out the traffic effect, etc.

There are pros and cons of every alternative but being curious about underlying dynamics of phenomena nurtures us in a way that we can alter the way we define the problem and reach distinct and out-of-box solutions that you can enjoy superior decision making.

I am not suggesting an awkward step back to dive in the theoretical discussions in the middle of the decision-making but adopting the approach keeps you equipped with the mind-set to ask the right questions.

Take-aways are useful for sure, however, swallow motivation converts them to blockers for the vision of intellectual curiosity which I demonstrated both daily and life long effects in life.

So here we are at the end of the discussion; how do you want to enjoy your life? :

• holding the many versions of the right triangle while waiting for some to tell you which blocks fit where

OR

• having the journey of discovering ‘causes of things’ that is the footsteps of the wisdom of Pythagoras?

(1)History of Western Philosophy- Bernard Russell- chapter-3