An introduction to the Empirical Tripod and Epilogism since I’ll probably be returning to them in the future.
The Empirical Tripod is the methodology practiced by the empirical greeks that allows real-life decision making without relying on reasoning. The three legs are:
- Personal experience
- Observations recorded by others (minus the theory)
- Metabasis: cautiously going from the similar to the similar
Epilogism is the practice of going from the seen to the unseen. Remaining open to the idea that there may yet be a bigger blockbuster than the movie Titanic and a more deadly disease than the plague. One can learn from a data set by considering how limited it is.
Experience is a two-edged sword in the practice of epilogism. It does help seed the imagination, and an experienced operator can certainly imagine more scenarios than an inexperienced one, but the same experience can also make one overconfident and “overfit” the data, thus shutting out certain scenarios simply because they haven’t occurred before.
Epilogism is essential for true preparedness, but we are all limited by our imagination and experience. Any technique that helps move our minds into a state that can practice epilogism will be of tremendous help. I suspect thinking in terms of a “bizarro world” will help to a certain extent, but doing so with the right parameters is the challenge.