The tricky relationship between explanation and application
The Do-It Newsletter #36 - The 5 Acts book updates and interesting resources I enjoyed
Hello everyone,
I've struggled to integrate my guides (such as those on goal setting and reasoning) with the explanations of how reality works. I realized that each has its own ideal narrative to convey information clearly, which causes friction. Lately, however, I've made significant break-throughs by asking myself this practical question:
“What would I want the reader to do with this information?”
This outcome-oriented approach is extremely useful, yet strangely unintuitive, to apply. Try it for yourself! The Next time you're having a conversation with someone, try asking yourself;
What results do I, and the others, wish to gain from this?
In today's Do-It newsletter edition, I'll share:
The significant updates and insights on my progress with the 5 Acts Book
A great app, book, essay, substack, and podcast I enjoyed over the past month
5 Acts updates & insights
The 5-Act cycle as the core
I realized I needed to cement and explicitly define the 5 Acts model before stacking and organizing the rest of the book on top of it. So here it is:
Every action we take, both conscious and unconscious, can be represented as a 5-step cycle
The first act sets the stage and describes what is real and what can influence reality. It’s about (particle) physics, the reality of abstractions, systems thinking, and the structure of knowledge (epistemology).
The second act is understanding what drives the behavior of the living actors at play on the stage. The most significant factor is the human species and the process of memetic evolution that utilizes us.
The third act is about the internal mechanism humans use to process information and select/decide what we act on. This includes making your intentions explicit in the form of a goal and a plan.
The fourth act is executing your intentions (optimally) through the use of systems, resource management, and techniques for staying on track.
The fifth act is learning from the experience you gained through executing your intentions. Also, it considers optimal strategies to convey information to others.
Two chapter types: explanation and application
The 5 Acts is not another productivity book with a collection of tips and tricks based on empirical results. Yet it's also not a popular science piece that elegantly explains concepts with little regard for practical follow-up. Instead, the 5 Acts bridges these genres by providing a practical process with its bearing in the best explanations available to us at present. I previously started with the “how it works”, after which I'd describe how to apply this knowledge. Intuitively this seemed like the logical sequence, but over time two major flaws became clear:
Often you empirically know how something works before you can explain it. Going just off theory and explanation is thus inevitably incomplete. Not to mention untested against reality.
Without considering the practical use cases, it's nearly impossible to come up with the situations in which you'll apply that knowledge. Each time I began working on a guide, I would find that the explanations I required were scattered across chapters based on impractical topic-based grouping. (A mistake which I embarrassingly have warned against in the past: Everything ought to be organized by actions and their outcomes. Not by categories and labels.” - (From the KEE Productivity system).
To avoid these flaws, this quarter, I am trying out an inverted method:
Complete the structure of the guides on how to use the 5 acts: reasoning, execution, and learning.
Evaluate and write down which explanations fueled these guides
Consider how these explanations can best be bundled and placed in chapters
This has made things click and brought me to a structure that I finally consider stable. Chapters are categorized as either explanation- or application-based (not both!). And I've explicitly related the explanations in one chapter to the application in others.
Two modes of action: focused and fast-track
While working on the guide for reasoning and problem-solving, it became clear that many situations don't permit the required time and effort of the ideal process. This, of course, applies to the acts of execution and learning as well.
In these resource-constrained situations, we have to move fast. We do go through the same steps of the process but with less attention to detail. We quickly scan the situation and evaluate what step we should focus on and then what simple "rules” we can apply to make the most suitable decision. Rules can be expressed as dos (the right way) or don'ts (avoid the wrong way).
In the 5 Acts book, I include the fast-track framework as well as a default universal ruleset deduced from the explanations in the book. Here are some examples of the rules for the step of “Root problem identification.”
In addition to the universal and foundational rules, everyone has their own unique context and specialization, which birth personalized rules. That's why I'm also planning to include an interactive tool with the 5 Acts framework with which you can add and organize your own rules.
What's next?
The goal for Q3: create the 5 Acts application chapters
The application chapters with the accompanying worksheets will be wrapped up in Q3. The goal is not merely to write them but also put them to the test. I'm trialing them with my colleagues and workshop attendees, but if you'd also wish to get private access and leave feedback, send me an e-mail: me@edwindoit.com
The goal for Q4: publish the full 5 Acts e-book, including the explanation chapters
I'm attempting to put my full focus on completing the first version of the 5 Acts e-book by the end of this year. My thoughts and progress are in this public Google Doc working document. I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
Interesting finds of the month:
🤍 Appreciated:
The Reader App (by the Readwise team)
I've been a proponent of taking control of what and when you consume media for a while and even created a guide + free Notion template to facilitate this process. There simply wasn't a good alternative already out there back then. However, I've been trying out the Reader app for a couple of months now, and it's exactly what I had in mind when I last searched for a solid app. It has a comfortable UX, can randomly sort the content you get, automatically imports e-mail newsletters and tweets, allows native text-to-speech transcription, and formats any content you throw it at beautifully without any glitches/bugs.
🔗 Link to the Reader beta (paid for sustained use)
🔊 Listened to:
Paul Rosalie on JRE
Paul Rosalie shares some killer stories about his years spent scouring the Amazon. I'm a sucker for podcast episodes with guests that are frontier explorers at the edge of our knowledge.
🔗 Link to the podcast episode on Spotify
📖 Read:
Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman (& Amos Tversky)
If you read one book on cognitive biases and our innate reasoning fallacies, I'd recommend it be this one. It's a distillation of years of scientific research by the author and Amos Tversky and is an amazingly accessible read.
🔗 Link to the book on Amazon
Knowledge without Authority - 10-page essay on explanatory knowledge by Karl Popper (1960)
This a wonderful essay that crisply gives the least wrong (meaning best, in Popperian) explanation of the structure of knowledge. I particularly enjoyed his refutations on empiricism which can be seen as an infinite regress for purer and more supreme sources, which simply do not exist.
🔗 Link to the essay
The Dark Side of Property - by fellow substack writer J.K. Lunk
J.K. Lunk has very similar interests to mine but goes a layer deeper with the essays he writes on the topic of progress and risk. So, If you're also interested in improving societal structures such as property rights, give this article and his others a read!
🔗 Link to the substack post
That’s a wrap
I’d love to hear what you thought of this edition of the Do-It newsletter. You can leave a comment on Substack, send me a private message, or simply reply to this e-mail. See you soon!
, Edwin