That Randy Brown

Facts

A fact, or what we accept as a true statement, can be summarized as a thing we know about the world and our environment and that we use as a datapoint when acting in our world and interacting with our environment: facts are the mesh of our pattern matching mechanisms. These can be those things that are entirely time and space bound, like the best place to get chicken teriyaki or the highest grossing movie of all time, or they can be based on systems of experimentation like biology, chemistry, physics, and math. Both are facts.

A fact changes because either our environment changes--we relocate to a different area of town with new and closer teriyaki restaurants--or because our understanding of reality changes--we learn that what we have been eating this whole time is not teriyaki, but rather udon. Or something. It's not a perfect metaphor.

Facts change in several cadences.

Some facts are mostly accepted as unchanging. What these are is different to each person, and because of this it is easily the most dangerous categorization. It is the most associated with our identity and sense of self--be it that light is a wave, there are two genders, or that Pluto is a planet. These facts are the bedrock of our understanding of reality because, unlike other facts, these are not subject to change.

We accept that other facts change; taking one example--the balance in our bank account. It is true at a given time, and we estimate its change over time, but we do accept that it will change from some stable past checkpoint, and in a semi-predictable way. This is a much more frenetic fact. Facts that we expect to change often and frequently are the most addictive facts, like news cycles and stock markets. They are also the source of the most anxiety because we cannot pattern match against them readily, unless we aggregate them across a time or area. The best breakfast tacos are maybe not always a specific restaurant, but San Antonio still has the best breakfast tacos. Sorry Austin.

These aggregate facts can sometimes be a part of our identity, and therefore pushed into that prior category of facts--the solid and unchanging ones, or they can be slowed. We don't know what the weather will be like tomorrow--that is always changing--but we know that the next three months will be colder than the last three months, and the three months after that colder still. And then it will warm up again. In this way, we create a third category of facts: facts that change slowly and often predictably.

We even have a means to identify these facts changing--the instability of the weather in October hints at the season to come: it will be cold one day and hot the next; fifty degrees in the morning and eighty-five by the evening. This unsteady oscillation of a fact is not unlike the waves that tell us the earth is shifting underneath us before an earthquake. There's a chaos where reality is shifting before it settles, harmonizes with the rest of our reality even while it reshapes it. This is change management.

Facts change as our reality changes, and as our understanding of reality changes, but we do not treat these two as different really--they both have the same outcome: we stand in land seen for the first time. In the way of Chesterton, sometimes it is to return home and to experience it as a foreigner, and sometimes it is to be in the undiscovered country at the edges of what we know.