The Power of Negative Knowledge | Foundations, Part 2
"Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" sucks — that’s why you should watch it
This is part 2 of the Foundations series of Earthly Fortunes. Here I share a broader view of how I make sense of the world, as foundations of specific topics and stories that we will dive into later.
See Part 1 of the Foundations series on three types of knowledge, Part 3 on the Vegas-Eden spectrum, Part 4 for the fundamental physical model of our world, Part 5 for my Materialist confessions.
I confess I followed Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (RoP) like a religion: every Thursday came my Holy Hour devoted to a computer screen, to a billion-dollar show about Middle Earth thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings epic.
But I did not watch RoP because it’s a masterpiece. I followed RoP precisely because it sucks. I had wanted to like the show, but I was greeted by disjoint plots, clunky dialogues1, awkward characters2, and overall lack of attention to details3. No, I’m not a masochist enjoying wasting 8 hours of my life. I did it because of the power of negative knowledge: learning exactly what NOT to do.
And my favorite business book is, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars.
Why is negative knowledge valuable? For one, it is not biased solely in favor of a few success stories, as positive knowledge is prone to: did stories break out, did people succeed, because of their characteristics, or in spite of the same things? Too often, positive knowledge sides with the because-of rather than the in-spite-of — and there is a big cost to it. Silicon Valley’s elite VCs could have saved hundreds of millions, if they didn't take a black turtleneck, a deep voice, and a stage personality as the next Steve Jobs, in the whole farce that is Theranos. Investors who put their faiths and farthings into Nikola would also find out that not every bombastic guy with a generic haircut claiming technology breakthroughs is Elon Musk. But how many turtle-neck-wearing deep-voiced founders failed? How many claims to technology breakthroughs bit the dust? The jacuzzi of success stories pops bubbles that comfort us, but also blurs our vision.
To see what’s really in the tub, we need calm water surfaces: negative knowledge.
Negative knowledge simplifies things. Did it take forever to decide on which restaurant to go to with your friends? I bet 9.9 out of 10 times, someone asked “what do you want to eat?” That’s why it took forever! But now you heard about negative knowledge, next time you could ask: “what do you not want to eat?” I bet you can reach agreement faster. Same thing goes for high-stake investing. Take this from Warren Buffett: he has two essential rules, the first one is to never lose money, and the second one is to never forget the first rule.
Other than avoiding traps and simplifying things, negative knowledge improves focus, especially when limited resources face off against an endless TODO list. For example, any self-funded start-up. Every LinkedIn viral story tells you to figure out product-market fit, to set go-to-market strategy right, to hustle for sales (whatever that means), to drink 763ml of water after 7.52 hours of sleep…But how about this:
“Never run out of money.”
Then every day, you know exactly what to do to survive and fight for a better tomorrow. Take it from Buffett’s buddy Charlie Munger on staying in business: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” Want to succeed? Ditch the success stories about attire and mannerism, and look for ways to not run out of money — a millennia-old business wisdom.
This wisdom is as old as the notion of negative knowledge. Throughout history it has many different names:
Apophatic theology asks what God is not.
Philosophy has via negativa, the “negative way”.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote about infinite qualitative distinction.
Nassim Taleb calls it subtractive knowledge: “You know what is wrong with more certainty than you know anything else.”4
But if negative knowledge is such time-tested wisdom, why are we still bathing in the jacuzzi of success stories? Because we all yearn for the orderly, for the clean cause-and-effect explanations, and for a world where people reap exactly what they sow. But we live in a world full of chance and anarchy, so things happen randomly. A lot. And success stories are just that — stories, where logic rules, the cause-to-effect lines run deep, and chances, randomness, coincidences are decried as cheap plot devices.
This circles back to RoP — a story that sucks — and the final question: how do we harness negative knowledge?
For each episode of RoP, I ask, Given the current material, how would you amend or discard the bad parts? Here I do patch-ups and fixes. But my more ambitious self would also ask, If you were to have it your way, how would you steer clear of the failures you noticed? Here I try to create an entirely different story. Someday, I may share both the fix-up and the new-build versions.
Why not this day? I’d like to hang out with the Elves, but I’d rather go undercover in Mordor to investigate how a barren and arid volcanic land could feed the dark lord’s massive army. It may seem like black magic on Middle Earth, but happens everyday on this Earth. In many ways, the stories of this Earth are more magical than those of Middle Earth.
Here on Earthly Fortunes, I will share stories about this Earth based on my knowledge. This is my promise to you: these stories won’t suck 😊
Thank you for reading Earthly Fortunes. If you liked this, please share with your friends. Subscribe for free to join my journey and support my work. Much appreciated! Helen.
The timeless theme of death vs immortality, unfolding as mortal Human’s envy and resentment of the immortal Elves, was reduced to a contemporary catchphrase about unemployment.
Let’s face it, Amazon: if Forbes comments on your story’s character not done well, you have a meteor-crater-sized hole in your storytelling and character building.
The aimless rope tugging does nothing to character development or world-building. One fix would be to have her tie nautical knots. Another is to show the raft’s positions and bearing change whenever she pulls the ropes.