The Goldilocks Approach

Once upon a time there were three bears, now there are thousands of the little buggers....


So I am sure you will recall that in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks committed a series of crimes neatly chronicled as a children’s story, the moral being presumably that breaking and entering, stealing food and the appropriation of assets is ok provided they are committed against a minority group. In this case brown bears (while the colour of the bears to my memory is not explicitly stated presumably there would have been more outrage and police intervention in the story if these crimes had been committed in a white bear neighbourhood. Not to mention a lot more snow in the pictures rather than pine trees) By the way what is the point of this story as it just ends with Goldilocks running away.

But the other aspect of the story was the “too hot, too cold, just right” etc that is a feature of the story as Goldilocks tries out porridge chairs and the beds and always ends up with “just right”.
I was wondering about this in relationship to knowledge and happiness, is there an amount of knowledge that is “just right”.

We have all heard the saying “Ignorance is bliss” but we have also witnessed what happens if people don’t know enough about things they are involved in and how badly wrong things can go. Generally I am a believer in education at all levels to all comers and the barriers to education should be as low as possible.

This is based on the view that higher levels of education tend to be represented in all the good statistics and lower levels in the bad. Eg your chances of ending up on prison or dying young are highly related to your education levels.

And it doesn’t seem to matter what your education is about as long as you achieve a reasonable level, of course to do that you need to have mastered the basics especially reading, writing and comprehension.

On the other hand I can give examples where additional information provides no additional utility in fact sometimes it can reduce your happiness levels. Once I scratched the surface of my eye and part of the treatment (or diagnosis I forget) was some drops into my eye, so with head back eye open and dropper bottle poised to deliver the drop the nurse announced “this is going to hurt”. Information that I can attest was accurate, however was it helpful, the drops still went in, my eye still hurt and the earth went around the sun. However it did make me tense and just a little less happy (when I wasn’t that happy with the world to start with).

A trivial example I grant you, but what about food then, we are bombarded by messages about good and bad foods which has us all living in some sort of permanent neurosis about what we eat. Even kids read packets and worry about food. Is this a good thing? I don’t remember worrying about food as a kid.

Knowledge can take the wonder out of our world, shooting stars are now meteors burning up in the earth’s atmosphere and no longer the recipients of our wishes. A red dawn is now the refraction of light in the atmosphere influenced by dust or water vapour. Or potentially worse as Stephen Hawkins has now discovered too much enquiry into the big bang evaporates the need for god and could profoundly damage humans who seem to have an innate need for spirituality.

On the search for knowledge make sure you adopt the Goldilocks approach, not too much, not too little, just the right amount.