"Negative Knowledge" is Better Than Knowledge

The Self Help industry is focused on adding to our lives — it mostly tells us what we need to be doing.

We’re told how we need to do more, have more, and be more. But is this the right approach? The answer is arguably a resounding no. For hundreds of years, human beings have known that the path to success and wisdom is more likely found through removing rather than adding.

The problem is that doing less is harder to sell, and therefore has taken a backseat to the consumerist message that continuously tells us to solve our problems with more.

Let’s revisit the ancient wisdom that less is more, the negative is more concrete than the positive, and that removing things is often more helpful for our goals than adding.

Via Negativa

The arrogance of humanity is to assume that only that which we can comprehend is real. People were falling off of cliffs far before Sir Isaac Newtown wrote the equation for gravity.

Via Negativa is a Latin idea that originates from trying to understand God by focusing on what God isn’t. Attempting to articulate the transcendent is hard, but it turns out that figuring out what sucks (and is not transcendent) is a more manageable task.

There are many concepts and ideas that are true but transcend our ability to frame them in language. Rather than try, we can achieve better results by articulating what is not true.

In “Antifragile,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb connects this idea to his concept of “Subtractive Epistemology.” Subtractive epistemology is the idea that “negative knowledge is more robust to error than positive knowledge”.

Essentially, something that we feel we “know” and assume to be correct may be proved wrong tomorrow, but it is far less likely that something that we know to be wrong will be proved correct.

Practical Uses

Let’s take this out of the abstract and see how this can be of use to us here in reality.

If you’ve ever interacted with a corporate career coach, then you’ve probably been forced to answer the question “what does your perfect day look like?” My answer to this question has always been “How the hell should I know?” Maybe I’ll know when I experience it.

Steve Jobs famously said that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” It turns out, however, that we are much better at articulating what we don’t want and what our worst day looks like.

The concept of a perfect day is abstract and difficult to imagine, but I’m willing to bet you’ll struggle less to think of a shitty day.

You put Via Negativa in action when you shift your focus to removing the aspects of what makes the shitty day shitty rather than attempting to articulate the lofty ideal of your theoretically perfect day.

The negative is more potent than the positive, and it can lead to better decision-making. Framing your choices in life around avoiding what you don’t want may cause you to be happier than trying to constantly acquire things you do want.

Perhaps your perfect day is as simple as not commuting for an hour to a stuffy office to work a tedious job with irksome people.

Iatrogenics

Human beings are biased toward action. “Bias for action” is one of Amazon’s leadership principles, and also one of the leadership principles of a startup I interviewed for last year that blatantly copied Amazon (I didn’t get the job).

Our heroes of history are the ones who took extraordinary action and did amazing things. But think, how many nameless heroes are there who never made it into the books precisely because they didn’t do anything?

We don’t celebrate the leaders who didn’t go to war or the general who didn’t give the order to launch nuclear weapons and avoided world destruction. But these effects of not doing are often far more potent. History is full of unnamed heroes of inaction.

Iatrogenic is a term for when treatment causes more harm than benefit. While typically used in the context of medicine, the concept can apply to any situation where the intervention caused more damage than the original problem.

A famous case of an Iatrogenic is the death of George Washington, whose demise was hastened by his doctors practicing the technique of bloodletting.

On a more recent note, the strict Covid 19 policies that we’ve all recently endured had an Iatrogenic effect. The Great Barrington Declaration is a document signed by epidemiologists and health practitioners who claim that the long list of negative results from lockdowns caused more harm than the virus (they didn’t advocate for no action, but “focused protection”, the protection of the most vulnerable.)

Antibiotics are possibly the most useful human invention ever made, and only a moron would attempt to denigrate them across all circumstances. But there are many occasions when being prescribed antibiotics is not the best course of action: Taking them too much can lead to bacteria becoming resilient to their effects.

Consider the case of the paranoid investor, who panics with every dip in the market and sells their shares at a price lower than what they paid. Soon they will be out of money, but had they been patient and merely weathered the market fluctuations while doing nothing, their portfolio would have been likely to increase over time.

The moral of the story is that sometimes the best course of action is to let things be. Action may worsen the problem, but sometimes the best course of action is inaction: let things play out.

Displacement

Thanks again to the adding nature of self-help, when one decides on a new direction they wish to take in life, they’ll begin considering all the actions that they need to take.

They’ll make lists of books to read, courses to take, gym regimens to suffer and martial arts to learn. In their desire to add, they neglect to consider the most pertinent aspect of any endeavor: What needs to be removed to make room for it.

Most people don’t have ample free hours to put towards new hobbies and pursuits. I’m willing to bet that your life is quite full already. You have the main thing that you to acquire resources, chores, friends, family, and hopefully a bit of entertainment.

When you set out to add something new, the idea will remain an item on a list for someday unless you decide what thing it will replace.

We all have only twenty-four hours in the day, there isn’t room to add constantly. We need to be cognizant of what we should remove to make room for something more important. We need to trim the fat.

Less Is More

Have you ever done a psychedelic? The use of psilocybin (found in “magic mushrooms”) is shown to reduce the activity in our Default Mode Network.

When you experience the effects of psilocybin, you notice far more than you would otherwise. Think of the stereotypical example of someone “tripping” — they’re immersed in their surroundings and become fascinated with the ordinary.

A nullified Default Mode Network can be invigorating and possibly therapeutical, but to continuously exist in this state would be catastrophic. You wouldn’t get anything done.

We’re able to act in the world through omission. We focus on what’s important by ignoring most things in our field of vision. The process of doing anything involves creating a hierarchy of what’s important and disregarding that which is not at the top.

Success requires us to say no to far more things than we say yes to. We need to pursue past the temptation of “shiny object system” and stay focused on the most important things. Trying to do too much won’t return any results.

Instead of hopping on every new trend and constantly trying to add the hot new thing, the best course of action might be to stay focused on the track you’re on and say no.

You can think of this suite of techniques as “Negative Knowledge”. It’s an alternative to the constant addition of new habits and actions that you can fall into if you follow typical self-help advice.

To sum it up, you apply the negative when you can

• Make life choices from a perspective of avoiding bad rather than optimizing (and defining) the good

• Look for situations where the best course of action is to not interfere and let things play out

• Understand that the critical part of a new endeavor is removing what it will displace

• Trim the fat in your life and prioritize the things that are the most important