Systems Thinking Ep. 4 - Distillation (Elegant Simplicity)

morning everybody David Shapiro here with a video by popular demand I am returning to my systems thinking uh series today's episode is episode 4 which is distillation uh before we get into the show I just wanted to do a quick plug for my patreon um patreon.com daveshapp all tiers get you access to the private Discord where we talk about AI uh being neurospicey philosophy future of humanity all kinds of fun stuff the higher tiers also get you one-on-one access uh whether through Discord chats or consultations one thing is that all of my content is ad-free

and open source which is basically that's my mission in life which is to help steer Humanity towards Utopia and I'm doing my part by uh by producing as much valuable content as I can and putting it out into the world and the exchange is that I get supported by the public which I am supporting so incentivize the behavior you want to see so support me on patreon and with that let's get back to the show okay so what is distillation when I say distillation in the context of systems thinking it is the process of isolating

the most fundamental or Essential Elements and features of a concept idea or system so key thing is isolation simplification it is also about simplifying complex ideas into more understandable and manageable forms Often by removing the extraneous or Superfluous aspects of it a lot of a lot of communication is just noise and then finally it's about presentation it is to get it down into something that is uh pretty uh elegantly simple it needs to be pure and concentrated and optimized for communication and so we'll unpack all of this as we go through the rest of the

video uh now so I will say the term elegant Simplicity a few times and the reason is because this is what you're aiming for the the end result of distillation is understanding and expressions of Concepts that are elegantly simple so for instance E equals m c squared this is an elegantly simple expression of an incredibly complex set of ideas it often takes many years of work lots of dead ends lots of frustration you have to look at something from many different angles lots of sleepless nights and sometimes very intense arguments if you're a physicist apparently

physicists are pretty hardcore um some of the physicists that I know like literally get into fist fights over some Concepts anyways the end result that is elegantly simple tends to be very robust and so uh on top of the E equals MC squared example another example is I was recently thinking about human evolution and society and that sort of things and I asked myself the question why do prisons exist and so because of my uh all the all the characteristics of of what I'll talk about in just a moment the end result that I came

up with was that prisons are a systematic expression of the human instinct to banish or punish people who transgress upon the tribe that is why prisons exist that is an elegantly simple explanation and definition of Prisons it encapsulates sociology history Evolution um philosophy like it there's so much that went into this definition and it is a very highly distilled and elegantly simple explanation of why prisons exist um and then another example is my personal mission which took about four years to clarify uh is steer Humanity towards Utopia so by iteratively defining and refining and Distilling

uh what my mission was I was able to get it down to four words and those four words there is not a single word lost there is nothing Superfluous in this description it is a uh it is an unassailable kernel of who I am okay so now that you have a little bit of background about what distillation is and what it looks like let's talk about how we get there so the number one thing the first thing is transdisciplinarity so being transdisciplinary used to be called being a polymath so the I the the university system

was the idea of you become a universal man which means that you know all things that are knowable that is of course no longer possible uh because there's more information out there than anyone could possibly uh learn in a lifetime now that being said you can be transdisciplinary and so how do you do this one through cross-pollination you develop expertise in multiple disciplines but also you don't just keep them in isolation so this is one thing that really confuses me is a lot of people will say like let's talk about philosophy or let's talk about

science or let's talk about finance and most people seem to keep these things separate in their minds and I don't understand how or why they do that for me it's partly instinctive but it's also something that I've deliberately practiced which is like hey what is what does quantum physics how have to do with you know the economy or like you know what are what are these different disciplines uh have in common and what what can you generalize and hold in common between them and so that cross-pollination is very important to uh distillation uh holistic complexity

so basically you take all these different these different um uh disciplines and you synthesize new knowledge and new Frameworks in order to address complex problems and then this uh even furthermore is uh recombining disciplines so basically if something is transdisciplinary it is a new discipline that has been synthesized from multiple disciplines so you uh you you merge and synthesize something entirely new an entirely new framework an entirely new discipline um based on the problems that you're solving and so in this case it's like okay well what are all the disciplines that are relevant to a

given problem let me learn all of about them and then merge them and synthesize them into a new discipline that is bespoke for this problem and then the final aspect which I probably should have put this first actually is systematic curiosity deliberately explore your world and fill in the blanks these are the raw ingredients that will go into the process of distillation if you don't have a transdisciplinary approach or a you know rigorously systematic systematically curious approach to the world you're not going to be able to distill anything because you don't have the raw ingredients

to distill the second part of distillation is mental scaffolding so you will have to build mental scaffolding and depending on where you're at in life you might still be building just the the from the ground up so this is one of the purposes of school of the reason that general education you know whether it's K-12 primary education or even secondary education that has requirements so that you're well-rounded this is what we mean by well-rounded is that you've been exposed to enough different topics and different kinds of problems that you have a more comprehensive mental scaffolding

of one how your own brain works two how the entire world works so this is one of the key differentiating factors between many people who are uneducated versus educated is that they have a larger more robust and complete mental scaffolding of the world now that being said I have exactly five weeks of college in my life I'm an auto did act and so I deliberately Built My Own mental scaffolding rather than being spoon fed by an institution uh now okay so what goes into a mental scaffolding these are the cognitive Frameworks that allow you to

understand the world and solve problems the more the larger and more complete your scaffolding is the more uh I guess holistic it is the better understanding you have of the whole world and also by having a more complete uh mental scaffolding you are able to better impute what you don't know if there's a gap in your scaffolding you can say okay well there's a hole here so I don't there's this whole big thing that I don't know what I know I know that I don't know this topic that kind of thing having a good robust

mental scaffolding also helps you maintain systems perspective in the entire thing because you know whether you're working on different like ontological layers you say okay is this a first principle or is this just a high level concept for instance so you can kind of mentally keep track of where on the knowledge hierarchy you are and then so that's like the depth right and then there's also breadth you know what your mental scaffolding covers in terms of topics and you know what it doesn't cover and so by reflecting on what you know and what you don't

know you're able to then infer and impute what you don't know and also to what depth so breadth and depth I probably should have added that to the mental scaffolding thing but this is the process of distillation I had not fully distilled this slide but by teaching it to you right surfaced another Insight which is mental scaffolding you measure your mental scaffolding through breadth and depth okay so ultimately you should have a mental scaffolding for all of your knowledge and what I do is I consider the entire universe all information is within a single domain

um and I I can I can already hear my physicist friends out there saying okay but you we we literally don't know how to correlate quantum physics with classical physics so even though yes they are in the same information domain we don't even have the scientific scaffolding to fully connect the two yes but by keeping in mind that that the Universe exists as a single information domain you you know that you're building one universal scaffold over the course of your lifetime iterative refinement so this is the essence of boiling it down so this is an

ongoing process of of improving and evolving your scaffolding Frameworks and mental models the goal here is to increase the accuracy coherence and utility of all the cognitive Tools in your mental toolbox over time by synthesizing information from multiple disciplines and one of the primary signals that you pay attention to is reducing cognitive dissonance errors and gaps this is a uh repetitious cycle it's a cyclical approach where you don't necessarily sit there and do it for like nine months and then you're done forever you come back to iterative refinement you know every now and then over

the course of your entire life uh basically what you're looking for is you're trying to optimize your mental models uh one to to make them more accurate and useful but also efficient and easier to use the best mental models tend to be ones that generalize very broadly and have high accuracy and high utility and this means extracting the key insights in order to make the most use of it so for instance that definition that I have of Prisons is a really useful definition because that helps you interpret everything about the prison system why it exists

what its flaws are and and that sort of thing because then you realize like okay so here's here's a here's a an example of why that's a good distillation when you talk about systematic Injustice you can say okay well the prison system is is based on Instinct right it is based on a human instinct to punish and banish uh people that you perceive as transgressing against your tribe and that alone allows you to really uh in infer why there are things such as systematic abuses of the prison system but also that core truth can then

apply to everything whether it's uh policing the the legal system the judicial system even the history of America versus other nations and you see like oh well the reason that concentration camps existed was because again there was a perceived transgression by certain groups against another group and so then you systematically banish and oppress them so basically concentration camps are an extreme form of prison but it's under but it's uh responding to the same underpinning instincts um so that is what I mean by iterative refinement is once you have those key insights and then you can

use them they are incredibly useful tools in your mental toolbox but they're also simple and easy to use um complex tools are harder to use so like in this picture you've got a file a metal file is a very useful tool and you can use it on any number of things okay metacognitive skills so uh metacognitive skills apply to a lot of different things but there are a few there are these three metacognitive skills that uh are absolutely critical to the process of distillation so number one is knowledge integration and so basically this is what

I've been talking about is awareness of what you know so if you have a mental index or a categorical understanding of what you know you can also at least be aware of the categories and topics that you don't know and so then you can use that ability to triangulate and infer like okay what don't I know about this and then that allows you to go and systematically and strategically learn the things that you don't know and so this is uh there are many behaviors so Strategic Learning is one Behavior information foraging is another because if

information foraging is basically you go on a fishing expedition to find new information you don't necessarily know what information you need but you know that you need new information and so information foraging and Strategic Learning are really critical to this process of distillation because there's probably some key Insight out there that you can get from a different discipline or a body of knowledge that you're not familiar with and once you get that key Insight your brain actually has a unique signal called the Eureka signal where it's like that's what I was looking for that's exactly

what I'm getting chills just thinking about it because that's what kind of nerd I am um but you know you know that Sensation that I'm talking about and that's what you're looking for when you're information foraging and then once you once your brain gives you that signal like yes this is what I was looking for this answers all the problems this you know helps simplify the framework that is what I mean by knowledge integrate and that is a metacognitive skill where you learn to pay attention to those internal signals because again your brain is your

brain is what it allows you to do all of this and so first and foremost you need to pay attention to your brain um it was funny reading um reading Dune where uh I think it was in the third book where he talks about like the process of what it feels like to be a mint at and this is what Frank Herbert was actually trying to describe but of course this was like 60 years ago so he didn't have the language that we have today um to really describe the metacognitive processes going on and so

yes this is mentat training uh mental models the second thing is mental models which is the deliberate construction utilization and refinement of your cognitive Frameworks your definitions and your mental tools so again your brain like what whatever it whatever it is capable of and whatever it is not capable of those are underpinning neurological uh abilities that you may or may not be conscious of and of course if something just doesn't exist in your brain you can't be conscious of it and so even if you're you know vaguely aware of a tool that you might need

or a gap in your knowledge it already exists in your brain it's just not refined or not fleshed out so again being aware of how your brain works and these mental models and these cognitive tools very very critical because it's not just about like identifying knowledge that you need it's also about identifying metacognitive tools that you might need or metacognitive tools that you need to you that you need to polish and refine and make better and so this is what I mean by mental models and this is you know like the ability to make distal

connections for instance uh between Concepts and then and if you go back to what I was talking about with cross-pollination um this is a metacognitive process that will just kind of automatically make you better at some of these things um but we'll get to the last one um in just a moment uh which is self-reflection so reflection is about uh taking the time to just think about things uh to to mentally experiment with the knowledge that you have the concepts that you have the tools um and it's a one thing that that I didn't add

into this description but that is really important is making those connections this is the so when I talk about distal connections this is the per this is one of the key purposes of self-reflection is is finding those insights that are already in your brain and so what I mean by this is you know how if you're talking to like chat GPT or Claude or any you know of the chat Bots out there how like it knows a lot about this other thing and then it knows a lot about this other thing and then if you

manually connect the dots it's like you almost see the Eureka signal in the language model where it's like oh yeah that's a really insightful way of talking about this so this is this is uh self-reflection is about making those connections between latent information that's in your brain and again this is also seems hot like it's how language models work and so once you make those distal connections between different disciplines or things that feel distant because sometimes uh things feel distance they feel cognitively distant just because you don't have the mental Frameworks and so it's like

okay well the scaffolding there's a gap in the scaffolding so you have to go like way around to make the connection but then once you come back around you realize actually those two topics were not particularly far apart or they weren't as different as you thought anyways the entire Point here is that using your own brain is an entire set of skills get good at using your own brain it's also really really the only tool that you have all right the next thing is incubation period so incubation period This is actually a cognitive Neuroscience term

and it is scientifically validated but this is the subconscious mental processes that that happen while you're not consciously working on a problem so you take in a bunch of information uh you think about it and then you just set it down you put it on the back burner and you ignore it uh pretty much every developer and technologist is aware of this and there's other disciplines but pretty much you talk to any developer and it's like man I was working on this problem all week and then I didn't think about it at all all weekend

and then I um you know came in first thing Monday morning and the answer was just there so there is lots and lots of empirical evidence that your brain continues to work on things in the background and in fact depending on who you ask it seems like up to 90 percent of our cognition is unconscious so that means that that the the the the conscious effort that you put in that's only ten percent of what your brain is capable of the rest you just put it all in you put in all the raw ingredients you

develop the skills the reflection and then you let it happen in the background this is another thing that Frank Herbert talked about when he described being a mentat was that you just let the calculation happen in the background very insightful guy did lots of drugs um let's see so the the end result of of knowing about and deliberately utilizing incubation period is that you'll get UNS you'll get unexpected um Insight Solutions um surfacing unexpectedly uh I said unexpected too many times there um anyways this is a critical component to creativity and problem solving uh make

deliberate use of this so that again this is a metacognitive skill knowing that incubation period is a thing and deliberately making use of it so for instance when I'm working on these slide decks if I get to a part where it's like you know what it's just not working and then I'll just walk away for a day a week however long it takes until the incubation period And it's like you know ding the cake is done baking so then I take it out I'm like oh yeah this looks much better and then I come back

to it and then the ideas are distilled and I can communicate them very clearly so what I'll say is that for me and I don't know if this is universal but time and nature exercise and socializing are the best ways to distract myself while the incubation period is happening some people go to movies some people read books some people play video games actually playing video games is another good thing because it's it completely takes your brain away from the other problem um that you were working on so this is basically you have to like Let

It Go um you know let the dough proof on its own Let It Bake and you know because if you keep keep poking it you're not going to let the process work out naturally finally Mastery through teaching so this is actually something that um people have commented on like how good I am at communicating things and that comes through practice um I've always been kind of a natural Communicator even before I started this my wife tells me that uh you know I was always good at talking but certainly it's gotten better since I started my

YouTube career because now like literally the value that I give to you is entirely predicated on my ability to teach things clearly and so Mastery through teaching is about achieving a deeper understanding of a subject by systematically and rigorously organizing information and knowledge so that it is optimized for communication optimizing for communication is the key thing here the act of preparing and conveying this information forces you to distill complex ideas to their Core Essence thereby enhancing Clarity and coherence in other words it's harder to teach something if you don't already have Mastery of it yourself

and so when I'm going through and making these slides I have to think about okay what is the optimal way of organizing this information what are the key points that I actually need to convey to you and then how do I convey them so that I can imprint them on your mind so the act of teaching is itself another set of skills and metacognitive skills and Frameworks that allows you to better handle information and knowledge so teaching things is actually a really good way to refine and distill them further also when you think about the

ways that someone can misunderstand things this means that I have to mentally be thinking about my mental models but also your mental models so people have commented on like oh hey like when I'm explaining something I'll often stop and explain something you know more clearly because I have mental models of your mental models so I have like Holograms of other people's mental models so that I can understand the gaps in their understanding which means it's like okay I'm going to hand you the piece of the puzzle that you need right now and this is all

this is all stuff that's that's discussed in teaching Theory my ex-wife was a uh was a teacher so these are like kitchen table conversations that we used to have um but yeah so teaching requires theory of mind which is another valuable set of skills and as I just said how do you how do I imprint knowledge and models into another mind without having the Vulcan mind melt um and so the part of the teaching tool is building these slide decks so by externalizing my knowledge and putting it in a linear uh format like this where

I use text and images to kind of convey and imprint the idea that's how I am able to convey so much information so quickly and it also achieves a level of stimulation that means that you don't get bored while you're listening and watching okay so in summary there are just a few steps to distillation first systematically and strategically learn a lot uh systematic curiosity number two deliberately get good at using your brain this is the primary thing about distillation number three constantly polish and refine everything that you know and everything that you think you know

and all the tools in your mental toolbox number four boil it down to the Core Essence number five extract the hard kernel of Truth this is the elegantly simple aspect and number six communicate it to others communicating Mastery through teaching is actually is an uh critical critical component and so there's a number of ways you can do this you can write about it on Reddit or medium or less wrong this is a really good practice where it's like okay let me take the thing that I think that I know and communicate it to others you

are optimizing for clarity and aiming for elegant Simplicity this is how you achieve distillation thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this video cheers uh like subscribe etc etc sign up on patreon talk to you all again soon