I hope that by now you’ve all heard of the “Mcbean Law”. When applied to any situation, it states that the less you know about the situation, the more accurate you can be. You can have the best knowledge of someone, but the more you know, the more you can be fooled. We’re all guilty of doing this. But this law is in fact true. The more you know about something, the more you can be fooled.
Think about it like this. The law in question is how to recognize that you’ve been fooled.
In our case, the more we know, the more we will be fooled about the situation. A more knowledge of the situation will allow us to detect that something “wrong” has occurred. When we come across a situation, we are going to run the risk of being fooled. So the more we know in advance that something is wrong, the more likely we will be to be fooled. We can’t really expect anything to be right with the world.
There is no perfect law. There is no perfect way to recognize a situation in advance that something is wrong. There is no perfect way to make sense of a situation. There is only a way that we are going to be fooled. And, of course, there are times when we are going to be fooled. But even then, we are going to be able to detect the difference between a situation that is going to be fooled and a situation that is going to be right.
We are all fooled often by the way we see the world. For example, I can see in the distance a tree in a forest. It is tall and straight and, if I was a little closer, it would be the perfect tree for a perfect house. But maybe I am looking at the trees in a woodlot, not a forest.
We are all fooled by the way we think about the world. When I look at a house, it is not there. I just see a lot of trees. But maybe I am thinking in terms of the woods a little too much.
Now that we’ve done that little exercise, it’s time to talk about how I see the world. I’m a big fan of metaphors. A lot of my writing, for example, is done with the idea of the metaphor. But I also use metaphors to describe other aspects of the world that are more concrete. It’s not just how trees look like a house, but trees as a species, and how a tree looks like a person.
Trees are not just trees. They are actually one of the most complex species on the planet. It is an organism with a complex life cycle, but it is most familiar to us as a living organism which has leaves that fall off to the ground. Trees have trunks and branches, and all the different types of material from the bark of the tree to the wood of the branches to the wood of the twigs. This complexity is what makes trees so amazing.
In a recent post on the Daring Fireball blog, we wrote about how trees are one of the most complex life forms on planet Earth, but it’s not just plants that have complex life cycles. Even the simplest of animals have intricate life cycles, including the many different kinds of plants and animals that live in their bodies.
A tree is just that. A tree is just a tree. The life cycles of the various kinds of plants and animals that live in a tree are all so complex, so intricate, that it could take hundreds of scientists to fully understand them. Just like the life cycles of the various kinds of plants and animals on earth, there are life cycles in different areas of the tree’s life.