Answering a Reader’s Question with one Word: “Spinach”
For new readers:
- Please read the “Pinned Post” at the top of this Substack’s Home Page, and titled Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers & subscribers:
A reader asked: “Why do you do this instead of going gently into the good night of retirement?” – or words to that effect.
The answer in one word:
“Spinach”.
The longer answer:
CTRI’s first Membership Note told the story of commonly held beliefs about the presence, or absence of metabolically available iron in Spinach as an analogy for the motivation behind this project of reading research from the perspective of “Constructive Skepticism”, instead of going gently into the good night of retirement.
Back then, Michael Sutton’s detective work about “Real Story” behind the “Good Story” of iron in spinach felt like an exceptional example of “Willful Ignorance, Error & Deceit”. We thought, at the time, that such examples of beliefs opposite to observable reality may be rare, thus worth finding by reading research from the foundational papers on up in order to find value from scarcity: What do we need to understand in order to make good decisions such as eating spinach or not, and beyond?
However, and since then reading research across many fields suggests that such beliefs may be the rule, and not the exception. We now see validated alternatives to commonly held beliefs in Cosmology, the Humanities, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.
Richard Prum’s work with birds, and what they can teach us about the evolution of beauty, revives Charles Darwin’s second half of his theory of evolution. Prum gives us a hint at to why “Willful Ignorance, Error & Deceit” may be the rule, and not the exception. Darwin’s second half to the theory of evolution complements adaptation through “Natural Selection” in the objective world with adaptation through “Aesthetic Evolution” in the subjective world.
The objective world suffers from hard material constraints based on scarcity. The subjective world, the world of Hannah Arendt’s “Two-in-One-Mind”, and Rodolfo Llinás’ “Mindness, Perceptions & Predictions” suffers from a lack of hard conceptual constraints, leading humans to unrestrained flights of fancy that range from breath-taking beauty to murderous ideologies, and perhaps some useful knowledge in-between.
We see what we understand, and a differentiated advantage comes from a differentiated understanding: Seeing what other people do not yet see.
What do we need to understand in order to navigate the “Large World” with a map that fits observable circumstances instead of deferring to the GPS-like directions of experts.
Retired or not, we all need to make good decisions. This work on decision-making, like previous work on retirement planning, started from an personal interest in making personal decisions, and its formalization turned into a body of knowledge that can be shared with others.
Developing…
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a book in three volumes, published at the rate of one two-pages section per day on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, & continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.