How to Search and Find Whatever is Most Important to You - 3 of 3
This is the last in a series of three installations. The first installation is here and the second installation is here. This article was first posted in 2005.
THEORY
Propositional searches are most successful when they are deeply important to the searcher. This is because when something most matters to me, I use my own words, just as someone with an accent will make an exclamation in their native language, or speak in a thicker accent when they are emotional. When I use my own words, and not words that I am imitating (words that other people use), I am making choices that are more “me,” and I am more likely to connect with someone else who is more like me, in the ways that I care about. Likewise, when I hear someone say a word or mention something that is special (the word “passionate” and the Italian town of Siena are two special triggers for me), I react to the propositional meaning of these words and places. There is a logical, literal meaning of the word and the place, and then there is other meaning that I associate with the word and the place. I react to the associative meaning. Likewise, being a logical person, when I hear someone tell a story, I understand the literal meaning, but react to the connotative meanings of all the words. The person who uses the word “passionate” or says they have been in Siena, instantly takes on special meaning to me.
People search for many things. For example, I search to intuit facts and form a “first impression” of someone. I search their characteristics and I ask myself if the characteristics resemble anyone I know. My first impression is based on previous experiences. The key data in my system of knowledge proposes what I am perceiving, how to best experience it, what I am searching for and how to best proceed.
I choose to buy an item of food or a tool, or to use a word. My possessions are the result of my choices within my perceived environment. There is a saying, “You can tell a lot about someone by the food that he has in his refrigerator.” If I list all the items in my refrigerator, and I list all the items in every individual’s refrigerator in the whole world, is it not likely that the more items I have in common with someone, the more similarly we perceive the world? Each item has been bought for a reason.14
Take another example. If I have in my garage all the materials and tools needed to build a motorcycle, it is likely that I have more in common (and could get along better, and make a deeper connection) with someone who has all the materials and tools needed to build a motorcycle, than I do with someone who has all the materials and tools needed to build a computer.
Every item that I make a separate choice to use or buy, proposes a few select choices behind the purchase, and proposes a few select reasons behind each choice. As my number of separate choices increases, more can be proposed about me. If I make one choice, “I will build a motorcycle”, then that reveals less about me than if, over time, as a result of hundreds of separate choices, I unknowingly acquire all the parts needed to build a motorcycle. In the first example, only one thing can be known about me: I decided to build a motorcycle. In the second example, hundreds of things can be known about me, because I made hundreds of individual choices for separate reasons. Therefore, it’s very likely that I’ll have more in common with someone if we both have unwittingly acquired the tools and materials that can build a motorcycle, than I will have in common with someone if we’ve both made a single choice to buy the tools and materials to build a motorcycle. Buying a complete toolkit says less about me than does the separate acquisition of every tool.
—Footnote:
14 To illustrate the symbolic logic behind this theory, picture a map of airline routes. Picture a searcher traveling through each airport, and each airport is a word. New York City has three major airports with similar meaning, which represent three very common, interchangeable words; major “hub” words. Google has 8 billion “people” traveling around. Every webpage is a “person”; every word is an “airport.” There are far more than 170,000 words (”airports”) in the English language to choose from. Imagine that you travel through 20 of these airports on a single trip, and later meet someone who has also traveled through all 20 on a single trip. It is likely that you are propositionally similar. This is a simplified model of what happens when we search large blocks of text in Google.
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