HACKER Q&A
📣 cshift

What is the best way to understand how the entire world works?


I mean, essentially, why things are the way they are. A complete understanding of the earliest days on the Earth and how human civilization continually advanced, governments and economies invented, and technology emerged, etc. And I'm not limiting this to books, but any documentaries as well. Thanks!


  👤 jsilence Accepted Answer ✓
I think it help to familiarize yourself with mental models. These are not going to explain the world, but they will give you a toolset to gauge and structure all the information you'll collect along your journey.

https://fs.blog/mental-models/ might be a good starting point.


👤 Avtomatk
I had the same thought when I was 18 (now I am 19)...

You can come to understand the world from your perspective... But, to have a deep and complete knowledge of how the world works, you would have to have omniprescence (the ability to transport yourself to any part of the world) and to be able to get into the thoughts of all people, observing all possible perspectives to reach a final conclusion...

This just to understand the "modern world", with this you could approximate the "why" and the "how" our world works.


👤 forgotmypw17
All information comes from reality. The act of perceiving it immediately transforms it into a model compatible with the perceiver.

If the information is conveyed to someone else, another perceiver, it is transformed twice more -- once in translating it to the communication medium, and once more to match the new perceiver's model.

Thus, the more steps information takes in getting to you, the more changed it will become. Most of the information we get has been transformed many times before reaching us.

In order to achieve information accuracy in your mental models, you must either perceive information directly from reality, or attempt to undo these transformations with speculation, aka reading between the lines.

This is only the beginning. If you want to effectively understand the world, every time you perceive new information, you must immediately try to fit it to as many of your mental models as you can before it fades, and then cascade down all the rest of them to see if the combination also fits something.

It is a pursuit which takes much uninterrupted thinking, and quiet space is essential. It will also seem fruitless at first, the same way as with meditation. Eventually, after a bit of doing this seemingly without any reward, it will start to come together, and you will begin to have regular moments of insight.

Richard Feynman wrote on this quite a bit, I advise you to seek out his writing.


👤 proc0
Sapiens by Yuval Harari, is a good intro to some aspects of this. I would then go to books on Civilizations, and history of Civilizations (after having a solid a history background to reference events across time). I think this starts building a big picture of the evolution of humans into the modern world.

👤 fuzzfactor
You're going to have to go there in person, and spend some serious time interacting with the part that's working.

👤 yuppie_scum
Smoke more weed Turtle, seriously

👤 rurban
Read more books. Stay away from documentaries, when you can read a book instead