 You go to your kitchen, turn the knob on your stovetop, and wait about a minute. You start to notice that the pot of water you had on the stovetop begins to boil. And as a curious person, you ask, why did this happen? Why did the water boil? There's a particular method of thinking, a tool of critical thinking that is incredibly powerful and guaranteed to profoundly increase your understanding of the world. I call it zooming in and zooming out. And this is the example we're going to use of zooming in and zooming out, the pot of water boiling on the stove. But zooming in and zooming out can also be abused and is most often abused. People are too zoomed in or too zoomed out, and they actually lack understanding because they have the wrong resolution for their analysis of some phenomenon. So consider the water boiling. We say, why did it happen? OK, let's zoom in a little bit. Well, OK, well, what are all of the things that we're observing taking place in this example? Well, there's the knob on the stove. We notice that the orientation of the knob changes. And then we see underneath the pot of water, maybe there's a coil that gets red. And if we put our hands up, we can feel heat coming out of the coil. And then we notice it gets hotter and hotter and hotter. And the water seems to get hotter and hotter. And then eventually, the water boils. We've zoomed in a little bit more on the phenomenon we're observing. But let's zoom in even more. We say, OK, well, hang on a second. Why is it that when the orientation of the knob changes, it causes this red coil to get hotter and hotter? Why does that happen? And if we keep asking questions, we're already in the domain of something like physics, maybe even quantum physics, if we want a fundamental explanation for how does heat work. Imagine we zoom in even farther and we say, OK, hang on. Let's really try to grasp cause and effect here. Let's try to isolate in our minds all the variables and then just change one variable at a time to see if we can pick out cause and effect. Is it the case that actually turning the knob itself, the only the spatial orientation of the knob, is the thing that causes the water to boil? I think you can, if you think about it really, think through the logic of it, it's not actually the orientation of the knob, which makes the water boil. Like if you held everything else constant, just the orientation of the knob has no logical connection, no causal connection with the water boiling. And so the person who's too zoomed in concludes, aha, in fact, you cannot cause water to boil by simply turning a knob on your stovetop. You can see where that would be a mistake of resolution that it might actually technically be true that just the orientation of the knob doesn't change things. It's that one variable changes another variable, which changes another variable, which changes another variable, which ultimately results in the water boiling. That would be an abuse of zooming in. But let's do the same thing when we zoom out. So we've recognized that, OK, well, there are multiple variables at play that seem to be interconnected here. So maybe we're content with saying, well, we don't understand the laws of physics, but we understand there's some kind of connection between the turning of the knob, starting a chain of events which causes the water to boil. But why is it the case that that happens? Like, why should it be that thermodynamics is the way that it is? Do we understand why that's the case? We'll zoom out a little bit more. Well, we're talking about areas of physics here, maybe really big picture physics. What exactly is the cause of the laws of physics in the first place? And then you might end up with a question like, well, I don't know, the structure of reality is the reason for the laws of physics, or maybe the Big Bang ultimately caused the water to boil. And you ask, well, what is the cause of the Big Bang? You go, oh, well, it's God, or there is no cause, something like that. So somebody that's zoomed out too far might ultimately conclude, oh, well, what causes the water to boil? Well, God causes the water to boil. That might be true. God might have some truth to it, but it's probably not the correct resolution for understanding the phenomena that you're observing. I see the abuse of zooming in as the autistic mindset or the extremely mathematical mindset, the computer science mindset. It hyper-focuses on the logic of the thing, and then it very easily misses facts that systems are interconnected or that the assumptions of your little chain of deduction are probably wrong and connected to other areas of thought. Myself, I personally am constantly working on trying not to be too zoomed in. I've seen errors in my previous methods of thinking by being too far zoomed in and not recognizing that things are interconnected. I see the errors of zooming out coming from the stereotypical transcendentalist or mushroom eater individuals who go, look me in. Ultimately, all is one. It's all one thing. Everything is caused by God. So there's no detailed understanding of the world or how things actually function because they're observing the fact that, well, all of it is interconnected and they're content with that level of analysis. So, now, critically, both the zoomed in philosophy and the zoomed out philosophy have bits of truth. It may be very important. It might be incredibly important to go down to the most logical, finest grain understanding of some phenomenon in order to understand it. And it might be profoundly important to keep zooming out until you understand how the whole thing interconnects. But it's even more important to have both of those resolutions at the same time. So you can recognize, okay, this is true and it's zoomed in and this is true and it's zoomed out and here's how they interrelate. Unfortunately, I see that with formal education, it almost always disposes people to be too far zoomed in. They have some type of technical expertise, technical understanding of something and they don't even realize that some of those assumptions are probably mistaken or they come from other fields of thought or various fields of thought are interconnected and so the actual quality of their conclusions is very, very poor despite being technically educated because they have not zoomed out enough. It would be akin to somebody confidently saying, hey, listen, I have a degree in physics and I can tell you, you cannot boil water simply by changing the position of the knob on your stove. There's a kind of overeducation and over focus where they actually, their conclusions are completely wrong despite them having some very focused understanding of the truth. Because they missed the big picture, they effectively have built some theory that does not correctly explain reality. A good analogy might be literally like taking pictures of reality. If you try to understand the world, if you try to understand what Earth is by looking into a microscope and that's all of the pictures that you have of the world or what it looks like under a microscope, you're not going to understand what the world is. Similarly, if you try to understand what the world is by imagining what it would look like from the perspective of the sun, you know, if you're 90 million miles away from Earth and you're looking at it and you go, oh, I know what the world is. It is a blue dot and a field of black. You're going to be missing all of the details if you have various pictures of different resolutions. In fact, all of the resolutions are important because reality is very, very, very, very vast. So you want to have the microscopic, you want to have the macroscopic and the whole range in between. I hope you guys find that helpful. You'll find that over time, if you try to intentionally zoom in and say, okay, I'm going to try to understand the details of cause and effect here, your understanding will increase. And if you try to intentionally zoom out and say, okay, what are the other variables? How do they interconnect? Your understanding will increase. And then you may realize that this is kind of a primary skill in really having strong critical thinking ability is to manually and intentionally adjust your level of zooming in and zooming out.