Take a look at your extremities: arms, legs and head & neck. If I want to understand the volume of these, I might come up with an equation (V for volume)
V(legs) ≈ V(head&neck+arms).
Roughly that's true. And it might tell us something about human balance, but not much more.
Suppose I want to understand the structures of the extremities. I might come up with the observation that the bones of the arms and hands are one-to-one with the legs and feet, while the head and neck are completely unrelated.
That will tells us not only about mobility and use, but also a relation to other mammals and reptiles, and that relation will lead us to a theory of evolution.
Both inquiries are legit, and both yield truths, but their uses are different and their values are incomparable. A single phenomenon can have multiple explanations or interpretations, each of which is true or accurate, yet one tells you little of worth, the other a door to understanding a universe.
And not surprisingly two solutions can be contrary -- true but wrong.
Another example if it hasn't already occurred to you: GDP as a measure of national value vs per captia or purchasing power parity (PPP). If you want to brag about America, talk GDP as a measure because it tells us it's the biggest economy in the world. GDP PPP tells us it's China.
Ask about financial wealth -- income and assets -- and you find extremes of inequality growing across the globe. Ask about real wealth -- access to electricity, potable water, food, indoor plumbing, computer-video-map-commercial services-financial service-music-camera-phone pocket device, multiple shoes and clothing outfits, varied cuisines, life-saving medicines and procedures, traversable roads and bridges, access to flying machines and rapid transit -- then you see unprecedented and unimaginable rise in common wealth far outstripping the real wealth growth at the top. Ask about housing availability as a measure of wealth, and you see little change.
In another post (the gnomiad) I pointed out the paradoxes of gnomes -- life advice proverbs and adages. It's characteristic of the gnomiad that advice is framed misleadingly as universal, when actually the advice usually depends on the question.
It also matters how the question is received. Looking for positive evidence is often useless, cheap or limiting. Looking for the hypothetical negative can be more insightful. If I ask "why do people hold the door for people behind them" I always get positive answers that describe what happens when people open the door. I never get answers describing what would happen if they didn't open the door but let it slam against the person behind. That hypothetical negative tells you right away that we hold the doornot to help but to avoid being viewed as a dick. And that opens the door to understanding all of our morality and social cooperation -- our naturally selected emotion to seek approval. Holding the door isn't helping. Every able-bodied person can and does open doors allthe time, and if the person behind has to hurry a bit to catch the door you're holding, you're actually inconveniencing that person. It's not a positive. It's to avoid public shame -- to appear to be good.
If I ask, what's the benefit of free speech when it facilitates hateful lies, I get all kinds of positive but lame answers, but never, "if we didn't have that freedom, then there'd have to be punishment for some speech, and no one would really know whether anyone was sincere and no one would trust anyone. Everyone hiding. Sounds like hell."
And some questions are misleading. Why do empires collapse? The question seems to assume that there is a particular cause, and not that empires face all sorts of idiosyncratic crises some of which they solve, others not.
And there are mysterious and vaguely incoherent questions like "what is the meaning of life" which itself has no meaning. Words and symbols have meanings. Non symbolic things are just things. The question is a mysterious way of asking, is there a purpose to life? Or something broad like "what's it all about?"
A word on that last question. Phenomenology -- understanding how we relate to the world -- is a theory of experience, a kind of introverted investigation. Science -- understanding the world in itself -- is a theory of testing beyond personal experience. Its revelations are outside the introverted world. It should be no surprise that the phenomenological world will be more conventional in its observations -- its's all about us and how we experience -- and the sciences wildly unconventional, since the universe is not made to conform to our imagination. One is us looking at us, the other is looking at something else, even when the object is the mind, the mind as an object of experimentation beyond personal experience. What you ask questions of determine the range of imagination and surprise.
So this post has two observations: the question you ask, but also how you frame it -- a loaded question or an open one -- hinting towards a disconfirmatory answer or a selective search for confirmation.
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