Every statistician knows that a large, relevant sample size is their best friend. What are the three largest, most relevant sample sizes for identifying universal principles? Bucket number one is inorganic systems, which are 13.7 billion years in size. It’s all the laws of math and physics, the entire physical universe. Bucket number two is organic systems, 3.5 billion years of biology on Earth. And bucket number three is human history, you can pick your own number, I picked 20,000 years of recorded human behavior. Those are the three largest sample sizes we can access and the most relevant. — Peter Kaufman
When we seek to understand the world, we’re faced with a basic question: Where do I start? Which sources of knowledge are the most useful and the most fundamental?
Farnam Street takes its lead here from Charlie Munger, who argued that the “base” of your intellectual pyramid should be the great ideas from the big academic disciplines. Mental models. Similarly, Mr. Kaufman’s idea, presented above, is that we can learn the most fundamental knowledge from the three oldest and most invariant forms of knowledge: Physics and math, from which we derive the rules the universe plays by; biology, from which we derive the rules life on Earth plays by; and human history, from which we derive the rules humans have played by.
With that starting point, we’ve explored a lot of ideas and read a lot of books, looking for connections amongst the big, broad areas of useful knowledge. Our search led us to a wonderful book called The Lessons of History, which we’ve posted about before. The book is a hundred-page distillation of the lessons learned in 50 years of work by two brilliant historians, Will and Ariel Durant. The Durants spent those years writing a sweeping 11-book, 10,000-page synthesis of the major figures and periods in human history, with an admitted focus on Western civilization.(Although they admirably tackle Eastern civilization up to 1930 or so in the epic Our Oriental Heritage.) With The Lessons of History, the pair sought to derive a few major lessons learned from the long pull.
Let’s explore a few ways in which Durants’ brilliant work interplays with the three buckets of human knowledge that help us understand the world at a deep level.
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