01
People who like to read, everyone wants to build a system of knowledge.
· But why, for most people, is it so difficult to build a system?
· What is a true body of knowledge?
· What are the steps through which a body of knowledge can be established?
Today the main thing is to solve these problems.
Let's first replace the word "knowledge" with "company."
Let's look at the question:
How do you understand a company's system?
To understand a company, there are actually two ways of thinking:
A. From the bottom up
For example, to understand Apple, start with employees, then supervise, regional managers.
Gradually groped to Apple's headquarters, and eventually the CEO.
B. From top to bottom
Find a way to interview CEO Tim Cook directly, and at most let him arrange a few Apple executives to learn about Apple's system directly from them.
Understanding a company system, I believe that everyone will choose the B method, that is, directly starting from the CEO.
However, for knowledge learning, almost 99% of the students use the A method to explore from the bottom up, so the efficiency is too low.
If you think about it, is this the case with reading books?
Slowly nibbling on page after page, you may take some notes and write down some scattered opinions, stories, and cases.
I read dozens or hundreds of books a year, and I can hardly remember anything in the end.
Then think about each discipline, psychology, business theory, economics, thinking methods, communication, and so on.
Everyone has seen a lot, but it is almost impossible to say the system in each field.
This article mainly makes it clear:
How to use the B way, that is, directly to find the CEO of each knowledge field, to build a knowledge system?
02
First, what is a body of knowledge?
To understand the body of knowledge, you need to first understand:
What is knowledge?
For example, look at this sentence:
Bill Gates told a story of the Fight Malaria of african people in his Ted Talk.
This is a complete expression.
But it's information, not knowledge.
Information is a connection between various data or words, which can accurately express a meaning, thereby reducing the uncertainty in information transmission.
But if you say so, 70% of TED Speakers will tell a story in their presentation.
That is, knowledge refers to some kind of stable law in the connection of information.
Information and knowledge are completely different, for example, if you read the book "A Brief History of Mankind":
Homo sapiens fled Africa 100,000 years ago and defeated Neanderthals in Europe. This is information. The information is that you know it, it's ok, you can't use it.
But Harari also explains why humans can beat other species around the world by virtue of strong community organization. And this organizational ability relies on the ability to tell stories.
As long as humans have large-scale collaboration, they need to rely on the ability to tell stories. (This sentence is knowledge.)
Whether it's Buddhism, Columbus's voyages, Napoleon's army, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, you find that these massive organizations need to tell stories.
So, in a book, there is a lot of information; but what can be called knowledge is actually not so much.
Why did it feel so hard to understand a book system before?
Because you want to get the information system, not the knowledge system.
We often see a lot of people summarizing a book's huge mind maps. This is the information system of a book, not the system of knowledge.
-This is the information system-
The information system, summarized once, is basically meaningless except to show that you have read this book. It's still hard to recall in a few months.
So the body of knowledge and the system of information, these are two completely different concepts.
So what is a body of knowledge?
It is a system that connects various laws.
But this connection is not a flat connection like a spider's web, but like a building. The laws of the world have clear hierarchies.
Roughly these four levels:
Principles, models, operations, experiences
Let's take a look at each of them:
03
What are the four levels of the body of knowledge?
1. What is the principle?
It is a field that is absolutely stable, absolutely unchanging, and applies the general laws of that field.
For example, in "Xue Zhaofeng's Economics Class", Professor Xue said in the first sentence of the publication:
All economic problems are scarcity problems.
The concept of "scarcity" is the principle of economics. Of course, if you have read Man kun's "Principles of Economics", the core principle of economics emphasized by the old man is "supply and demand".
The "scarcity" and "supply and demand" theories are the CEOs of the field of economics.
For example, teacher Liu Run said in the "30 Lectures on Business General Knowledge":
To understand the nature of business, you need to understand three sentences:
The first sentence: The essence of business is "transaction";
The second sentence: information asymmetry and credit are not transmitted, so that the transaction process encounters "resistance";
The third sentence: The so-called business progress is to overcome the resistance with lower and lower "transaction costs".
These three sentences are the principles of business.
But we must note that we have the principle, even if we can recite it, it does not make any sense. For you, it's just information that the exam can score.
You have to put the principle to use.
So how to use it?
Two methods:
1. Find various cases to verify.
For example, if you look at all the economic phenomena around you, there will be "scarcity" and "supply and demand".
2. You can use the principle to deduce various models and operations, so as to build the entire business knowledge system.
For example, a person's "needs" are divided into elastic needs and rigid needs.
In elastic demand, there is an important thing called marginal effect.
2. What is a model
Specific solutions to the problem in certain scenarios.
The model is all too familiar, the communication model, the psychology model, the writing model, everyone has a few common models in the brain.
For example, TED's talk model, ramp-discovery-dessert.
- "Ramp" is about telling a story or how to pique the interest of the audience
- "Discovery" is about insight into one's own field
- "Dessert" is a return to sensibility and a call to action
Models and principles are different, and models tend to be only for local scenes.
Principles are general laws, and models can often be drawn in a graphical way.
3. What is the operation
Take the steps of the method to get started.
For example, the "Method of Communication" written without spending money, each method gives a formula, and you can use it when you hold it, which is the operation.
If you want to learn to scramble eggs with fried tomatoes, Baidu search, you can see the clear steps.
There is also a bookcase where you go to IKEA and there will be an installation manual.
For example, the three elements of the speech just mentioned, "ramp -discovery-dessert", cannot be operated, and need to be converted into a more specific method.
4, what is experience
In actual operation or action, the perceptions, cases, stories, opinions, etc. are generated.
The Wall Street Journal wants to write an article about global climate and environmental protection, and at first it will not talk about principles or models, and will often tell you about how life in a slum in India has changed when the climate is abnormal.
Parents who want to persuade you to get married early use the cases of those around you or their own experience.
The experience layer thing is everyone's favorite.
So you will find a magical thing, the knowledge of every discipline, is a building.
Of course, principles include the underlying principles of information: systems theory, information theory, cybernetics, as well as the underlying principles of mathematics and physics, as well as the principles of various disciplines.
Models are mainly models of different disciplines: such as economic models, speech models, psychological models...
Operations include processes, methods, operating manuals, steps, and so on.
There are six kinds of experiences: stories, cases, analogies, experiments, opinions, and data
Of course, there is another amazing thing that you will find:
The knowledge formation of all people in this world often has two paths:
1, in the operation to gain experience, a lot of experience and summarize the point of view.
Public accounts, video numbers, and things shared by a large number of people on Douyin are all such routines.
Plato called these things the world of experience.
2, and the other kind of person, from the principle of deducing the model, and then get the operation of guiding life.
Musk, for example, emphasizes that everything starts with the first principle.
And books like "get", chaos universities, thesis journals, or books, although there are a lot of operations and experience, but only mention the principles and models.
Plato called them the world of ideas.
Therefore, in the matter of knowledge learning, it is actually layered.
People who love to brush vibrato the most prefer the world of experience.
People who like to read and think prefer to explore the principles and models of everything.
Okay, to sum up a bit. Now everyone has a rudiment of a knowledge system in their minds:
It is divided into at least four layers:
Principles, models, operations, experiences.
04
How to use the hierarchy of knowledge to build a knowledge system?
Let's look directly at a case:
Just now we talked about the book "The Method of Communication" written by The Flower.
"The Method of Communication" does not cost you a good communication method for you ¥47.9 purchase
The book describes more than twenty communication scenarios such as how to praise, listen, apologize, and gossip.
In each scene, Hua Jie gave a concise formula and gave actual cases.
But I asked the students around me who read it, and they still can't remember the content, and they rarely use these formulas.
Think about it, what's the problem?
The more than twenty communication formulas + various cases given by Hua Jie are actually the operation layer + experience layer.
Give more than twenty at once, and if you don't do a lot of deliberate practice, it's hard to remember.
And why she said this, you may not understand from the bottom. Things that are not understood are naturally difficult to master.
So you need to make up the model and the principle, and you know how each of her formulas came about.
What is the model of communication first?
Let's assume a scenario where you're the marketing director of a Fortune 500 company that recently promoted an active employee to be the director.
What you will say to them in your usual communication.
We draw two histograms on the diagram, you are very tall, the other is very low,
Then the core of your communication with your subordinates is two aspects:
First, lower your height
Second, increase the height of the other party
Lower your length
The core is two steps:
1. Ramp
It is to build a more equal feeling and relationship.
In every speech, Obama often says, "My daughter said to me when I went out this morning," which reduced himself from a reasonable president to a storytelling father role.
2. Self-deprecation
There is no need to talk about this, many big people like to laugh at themselves.
Increase each other's height
The core is four steps:
3. Chasing light
It is that you shoot out a light and see the advantage blind spot that the other party can't see.
In this way, we can motivate the other party and make them dare to open themselves and improve upwards.
4. Set goals
5. Inform the specific behavior path
6. Provide feedback at each step of climbing
For example, if the other party wants to learn to use Excel to do operational analysis, you must clearly tell what level of learning, which is the goal;
Then how to learn, how to draw tables, how to use functions, this is to provide a path of behavior.
In the end, if someone else does it right, you have to provide feedback.
Well, here comes the magical thing.
At this time, if you look at the "Method of Communication", for the scenes of praise, motivation, counseling, criticism, and impromptu speech, you will find that all the operating formulas contain the six steps of "ramp - self-deprecation - chasing the light..." just mentioned.
So why did I think of drawing two histograms?
Because these five expressions above are actually from high power to low power, that is, the way power is expressed on our side.
In fact, The Method of Communication has only four models out of four, and you don't need to memorize every scene at all.
This is about the "model" part of knowledge.
What about "principles"?
This is derived from the principle of communication proposed by the American sociologist and linguistic semiotician Owen Goffman.
He said:
There are two fundamentally different symbolic activities in human communication:
One is transmission (information)
One is disclosure (that is, the manifestation of social power or resource advantages, and the constant emphasis on oneself having greater power to explain something)
The principle of information transmission, of course, is directly related to a concept of Shannon, the father of "information theory":
The size of the information is not in the amount of information, but in how much certainty it reduces.
For example: You ask your girlfriend what to eat today. This information does not reduce any uncertainty.
But if the girlfriend says she won't eat spicy today, that reduces some of the uncertainty.
And if the girlfriend says that she wants to eat the beef soup pot downstairs today, the information is completely certain.
And the core of the outpouring is power.
In Hobbes's Leviathan, there is a theory of the triangular relationship of power.
I've distilled it a bit:
In fact, there are three types of power, leadership, resources, and interpretation.
To put it simply, status, wealth, knowledge.
As you can imagine, in a mountain village, the village chief has the most leadership, the coal boss has the most resource power, and the teacher has the most right to explain.
Many times a communication is a game of these three kinds of power.
We often say that opening the skylight says bright words, what is to open the skylight, is to let go of these power games. Instead, it simply passes on information.
So it is simpler to use the "principle" to look at communication.
What is the best communication?
1, is to use the lowest information cost to reduce the maximum uncertainty.
Many leaders spoke, and an hour passed, without mentioning any point, but making everyone more uncertain, which is a bad expression.
2) At the same time, you have also established various powers.
That's why, the masters have advised us to be sure to read all kinds of classic works.
Tomes like "Critique of Practical Reason", "The Beauty of Systems", and "First Philosophical Principles" do not speak human words and are very difficult to read, so why read them?
Because they are all books about principles, reading 1 book is better than 1,000 books about experience.
This is to use "principles" and "models" to understand a book about communication.
From the content of the whole book, to the four "models" :( power is on our side, power is on the other side, power is on both sides, power is on three sides)
Then there's "information" and "power."
The whole system is built.
Make content from scratch for ¥5.99 purchase
Author: Cheng Yi Thinks about 100 questions a year.