With any question, why is it always so helpful to know why the answer is the one that is? In another words, which principle of thinking and learning is most closely tied to question “why”? Or is it purely social act of expressing deeper interest? Is questioning for reasons mandatory?
I feel I know the answer to this question intuitively, but find it hard to express it into words without it sounding stereotypical and lazy.
This seems bizarre, because it’s children who are most “famous” for asking “why” all the time, but: How would you, say explain to a child, why do we need to know reasons behind things?
It’s kind of important. Boss says “every 10 minutes you need to flip this switch the opposite direction”. It’s just a switch on a wall. Sure you can just do it blindly and never know why, you’re still getting paid after all. Or you can ask. Maybe it changes a signal to prevent collisions between trains. Maybe it tells all the sliding doors to open at a shopping mall in New Jersey. Maybe it drops treats into a pet enclosure. Or maybe it is really truly wasting your time.
If you can’t directly see the results from doing/avoiding a thing, having the purpose explained helps.
But does it? I suppose it could be the opposite as well, right? It seems like there is some inherent hazard connected to the motivation of answering a “why” question. It can open Pandora’s box of misalignment.
I mean, what if I’m against malls? Then I could decide I want nothing to do with this button. (Or even purposefully sabotage it in some way.)
It’s hard to overstate how permanent and omnipresent this hazard is: Even if there was an objective truth about good vs. evil and it was accessible to any conscious being just by exploration and thinking, there still would be this hazard because one cannot know how close to this truth the other one is.
A crazy thought: Maybe that’s why we have all these kinds of weird social phenomena, from interpersonal struggles, mental illness to social structures like family, state, religion… all this inability of people to really pull together has something to do with nature managing this constant hazard of misalignment. It must be chaotic is because it’s evolution: the only strategy that works long-term is to have all kinds of strategies present all the time. Maybe it’s actually adaptive for society as a whole – that’s why trying to fix broken people and societies is such a steep uphill battle.
“Why” is scary.