Logic is an invention

Vipul Agarwal
Bouncin’ and Behaving Blogs TOO
4 min readJan 5, 2024

Yesterday I came across a new quote, the quote was smart and pretty interesting, so here it comes -

Logic is an Invention of mankind and may be contradicted by the universe. — By Will Durant

William James Durant (born in November 5, 1885 — November 7, 1981) was an American historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), described as “a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy”. Yeah, straight from Wikipedia, want to know more about him Click here.

The quote is pretty forward whatever logic we use in our daily life to justify ourselves. To solve complex formulae that need calculation. To justify our decisions, to account for our beliefs, even those that need discussion are guided by some kind of logic. Which is either guided by certain associations, certain restrictions, and certain considerations and they as a whole can be ignored by everyone else, of course, the universe too. since it is our invention and our justification for our rationality and reasonability.

If you are a programmer, you may solve a search method in one way, while others may use a different method and a computer scientist may even use a completely unknown method because they can justify it by their logic.

This is a thought that everyone tries but not everyone succeeds. There are a hundred things that go through the mind and their consequences. Then logic comes in to tell us either to “Keep going you will make it” or to give us a “justification for persuasion to give up”. Most of the time that logic comes from other people or ourselves when we are not getting the result we deserve. Most of us can’t stick enough with it to find the path that will lead us out of it.

Some people are considered emotional because they react illogically to situations. (Straight-up crazy). Because our logic can’t justify their actions.

But being logical every time is not always good because it’s our logic and our invention. It has nothing to do with others and what might seem illogical to us may have more sound logic behind it. That we can ever guess.

A few days ago, I came across the blog posts written by Morgan Housel in which he has shared some extreme examples, I will add it straight from his blog.

Here’s an extreme example.

George Soros says that whenever he sees a bubble, he rushes in to buy it.

If you’re an intelligent person, that might seem crazy. Why would you purposefully want to buy an overvalued investment?

But if you’re a smart person, maybe it makes sense.

You know that bubbles are likely to grow larger and last longer than most people imagine. You understand what’s going through people’s minds, and you know investors will keep frantically buying for some time not because the numbers make sense, but because their neighbor got rich and they’ll spiral down a black hole of jealousy and bad decisions.

“That’s not irrational,” says Soros. (But please don’t try this; you’re not as smart as Soros).

The beginning of Internet bubble started in 1995 and it burst in 2000, many companies were such that their valuation doubled overnight,

Here is another example.

Elon Musk said he had lunch with Charlie Munger in 2009. Munger allegedly told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail.

It “made me quite sad,” Musk Once tweeted. “But I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway.

It’s both sad and inspiring.

Musk is right that some things that will probably fail are worth trying anyway. Can you ever Explain these things with logic? it’s kind of straight craziness.

That’s all for today, Happy reading. Below is a nugget from the Late Charlie Munger.

When asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” 98-year-old Munger replied:

The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.

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