Using Time as a Truth Filter
The latest idea I’m obsessed with is from Peter Kaufman via the Farnham Street blog.
It’s called the multidisciplinary approach to thinking, a method that helps you know if your claim is right.
It goes like this.
Large sample sizes are a statistician’s best friend. If a sample size is large enough, it can give you high degree of certainty in an outcome. The longer the time horizon something has been right, the more likely it is to continue to be right.
Along these lines, there are three buckets of time that you should run your thinking through. The length of physical laws, also known as the length of the universe. The length of organic matter. And the length of human nature.
The first bucket, the length of physical laws (~13.8B years), is the largest sample size.
If something has been true for all of time, then it will continue to be true. The laws of physics don’t change. Our understanding of them only does. These laws are axiomatic–true everywhere, always.
The second bucket goes back to the origins of biology and our planet, a ~3.5B year-old sample size.
While laws on Earth aren’t always as self-evident as the laws of physics, they are probabilistic—much more likely to be true than their alternatives.
Biology and chemistry are refined periodically. But rarely do we make new findings that lead to substantive changes in our understanding of organic matter. And while our understanding of biological science can change, it’s on solid ground.
The final bucket is the length of human nature and the knowledge we’ve accumulated about people.
As far as recorded history, humans have created tools, told stories, sought companionship, made art and war, and more. When you run into something that has existed for the length of human history, then you know there’s a good chance it will continue to be true in the future.
If something has been true across all three buckets, you’ve struck gold.
You’re in the realm of something that is as right as law. It stands the test of time going back through the history of humans, organic matter, and inorganic matter.
Stress testing your ideas through these buckets is rarely done. But the reward for doing it is high.
Finding something that you can be certain of when others are unaware of it is a recipe for massive outlier success.