 People spend way too much time focusing on and evaluating the conclusions of their worldview. But conclusions by themselves are ultimately irrelevant. What people should be focusing on is the premises in their worldview. All conclusions are at the ultimate end of a chain of reasoning. You might have conclusion D, but you only arrived at conclusion D because of conclusion C. And you only arrived at conclusion C because of conclusion B and because of conclusion A. So evaluating conclusion D by itself, with not even evaluating the premises which lead to conclusion D, is kind of a waste of time. It's like you're trying to run a marathon, right? And you're obsessed. You're focused on the last two feet of the marathon. It's like, well, yeah, okay, the last two feet do matter. But what really matters is the miles and miles that came before the last two feet. And if you haven't established how to run the 26 miles, it doesn't really matter how much you focus on the last two feet. What you see over and over in public discourse is that people have these flame wars with one another because they disagree on ultimate conclusions. They don't talk about the premises. They just throw crap at each other because they disagree about conclusions. Let me give you a fantastic example, something like the eternal life. What happens to us once we die? We have a huge amount of people that think the very idea of eternal life by itself is patently absurd. If you believe in such a thing, you're essentially an idiot. You have another group of people, religious folk, who think that not accepting the idea of eternal life is completely ridiculous. And if you're an atheist, you're a complete moron. And you see these people go back and forth and back and forth. They say, obviously, eternal life is dumb. Obviously, eternal life is great. It's just a waste of time. What they need to focus on is the premises. How is it that you could get to the conclusion that once you die, you keep on existing? But that conclusion by itself isn't reasonable or unreasonable. It's not a logical contradiction. You can't just evaluate it in a vacuum. You have to see the premises which would lead to such a conclusion. So premise, for example, what do we mean by eternal life? Like what part of us would be eternal? Embedded in that premise is an idea about what are human beings in the first place? If it's the case that the premise is that human beings are entirely 100% physical, that our self is actually our brain, then it makes complete sense to think when our physical body gets destroyed, there is nothing left over, right? The conclusion that you have eternal life without a physical body, and yet the being is the physical body, is absurd. However, if it's the case that human beings are not entirely explained by the assortment of physical bits, if there is some kind of non-physical consciousness, some point of awareness that is not spatially located in my brain, then it doesn't seem patently absurd to think that once the physical body dies, that part keeps continuing. Of course, the physical body dies, we all agree with that, the physical body could go away, but if what the self is is something non-physical, then what seems silly about eternal life? So why in the world would everybody be wasting time evaluating whether or not it seems reasonable that we have eternal life, when they're not even talking about what the self is? And what you find is when you start examining these essential premises, what appeared as radically crazy conclusions don't actually seem so radically crazy anymore. For example, this is a good example in religion and spirituality. People are really big on evangelizing. They go out and tell the world about the good news. And people who don't share these foundational beliefs look at these evangelicals and say, what the heck are they doing with these guys smoking? This is crazy. No, but think about it. If the premise is true that every human being is an individual soul that may or may not burn an L for eternity, of course you're going to go out and evangelize. And yes, you're a sociopath with massively high stakes. And this is one reason why I am so obsessed with philosophy, because philosophy is the examination of the premises. If you don't want to end up in a radically wrong conclusion, forget your conclusions. Who cares about them? The periphery. What you need to focus on is the methodology. If you found these foundational premises, if you get those right, then you can have much more confidence in the accuracy of your conclusions.