Up until this point, we have discussed many different aspects of what we were learning. Those items relate to health, time management, and food. The more information and contradictory information we found, the more we started to see a pattern forming. That pattern was people coming from two different sources of information. In this post, we will explore a little bit of the phenomenon and how it impacts us.
Questions Needing Answers
Over the last couple of years, I have been following many Facebook groups to learn from others. The primary areas I am interested in are homesteading, food, and fishing. In all three, when an argument starts, you see two points of view: someone who has been doing something one way forever and someone who quotes a resource. I swear World War Three will start from an argument around whether water bath canning is safe or not.
You would think this was basic science. Canning, and what method to use, is based on the PH or acidity levels of the food being canned. The safe level of PH in food to allow for water bath canning according to science, extension offices, and health experts is 4.6. It is that simple because it is a specific PH combined with heat to kill and stop any new nasties from growing in the canned food. Some people refuse to believe this. Why is the question I have?
Beginning to See the Myths
As we started to revisit cooking, the age-old argument of how to care for cast iron cookware came up. Caring for cast iron has its own almost mystical mythology around how to care for it. That we can cover in another post. Being an engineer by trade and schooling, I have learned to trust but verify so I did some reading. Again, it is pretty simple.
The manufacturer of Lodge cookware, who is a well-known manufacturer of cast iron has a great page on the care and seasoning of cast iron. What I received for advice from others was contrary to their advice which is why my pans weren’t working well. Why then were there so many people still doing it, in my perception, the wrong way?
Keeping it Real
First, a statement to keep this positive. No one is dumb. We all have the facts we have. Those facts may differ from others. Even the word fact is somewhat subjective if it is based on context. We have to start with these tenets or we devolve into unwinnable arguments quickly. That is not a path that helps us.
It’s About Muscle Memory
Growing up, we learned about many things. These things became truths. Those truths became re-enforced. The more we relied on them, the more ingrained they became and the more ‘truthy’ they became. At some point, they became chiseled in stone and could not be changed. That is the problem but that is being human.
Once solidified, these truths become reality even if they are not logical. Unfortunately, there are many times we make illogical arguments. That is life with us emotional humans. Fighting logical fallacies with facts turns out to be problematic as logic is based on facts and usually, the facts are what are being contested. That is still not really where the disconnect of muscle memory is most prevalent.
Breaking The Concrete
Pro-tip, the world changes and adaptation is key for any species’ survival. Just because something was, doesn’t mean it still is. When working in software this was the basis of agile methodologies. My least favorite thing to hear is when someone claims to have been doing something for some extended period as a justification to continue doing it. That argument, to me, is the basis of many animal extinctions through specilization.
Two axioms come into play here:
- We stop learning when we stop questioning.
- We stop adapting when we stop learning.
No matter what is true today, that truth can change tomorrow. Unfortunately learning is usually painful. Learning comes out of trying and usually failing at first. That is why we believe so many of us want to accept yesterday’s truth as non-changing.
But My Great Grandma Used To
As we discussed in another post we started to get back into things like working out and cooking. We had to re-learn many things in that process. We found that over 10 years nutrition, health, and exercise information had changed. Eventually, we simply decided to start over and research our own. We challenged ourselves to not take things we knew for granted. It turns out many things that we struggled with were old information that others had discounted over time. It was an eye-opener.
As we started to talk with others we saw the same patterns. The way they canned food was based on how their great-grandmother did. Same with seasoning their cast iron. Some would talk about how their favorite lake no longer produced the same fish. Others would talk about how it was in the old days. They started sounding old before their time.
It’s a Trap!
We started to see these patterns as a trap as we all have a lot of ingrained knowledge combined with traditions. We don’t want to relearn everything as that takes time. That requires questioning ourselves and possibly failing or finding out we are wrong. While it’s good to have knowledge to rely on and traditions to hand down, it doesn’t necessarily push us toward growth. As the world has grown, not all is as it was whether it be cooking or fishing or any other subject.
In the book Built From Broken, the author talks about how the body protects itself when injured. To rehabilitate something, you sometimes need to acknowledge those signals and create a plan to deal with them. You can recover from injuries and improve mobility and strength if you are willing to work through some level of discomfort to do it. I know, I have personally done it.
The trap we all can fall into is not identifying when we need to re-learn. This is where the disconnect occurs. As time goes by we forget to seek new information.
The Escape Plan
We learned some basics from our observations. These helped us break out of old habits and refresh our knowledge base. In essence, we learned to learn again to adapt to the new world we found ourselves in.
- Trust but verify your information. If you learned something 10 years ago, it usually takes no time to Google it to verify it.
- Don’t think of new information as being wrong or right. The way to view it is by seeing it as current.
- When you find yourself starting a sentence with ‘I have been doing this for a long time so you should…’ question yourself.
- Seek the delta between the past and present to see if what you know is still relevant. Buggy whips are still applicable to carriages but are no longer relevant to getting to work in the morning for most of us.
Bring it Full Circle
We don’t realize that a lot of information has a timestamp. It is easy to fall into the trap of letting what you know get stale. We assert stale information is what is contested in most arguments rather than the other person’s point of view. We can improve ourselves and our interactions with others by learning to re-learn. This opens us to adapting rather than becoming entrenched in defenses. This doesn’t mean you have to throw away traditions or even what you are currently doing. It allows you to make more informed decisions about what is currently correct for you.