Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers
Grow by Challenging What's Held Dear
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic looks at how to turn sacred cows into delicious burgers. At least that’s the way some have described how Polymathic Being uncovers unique insights. It’s a perception that warrants critique to recognize what we are doing, the techniques, and tools we are using, and whether we are having the best benefit.
Intro
If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you have likely noticed a theme in these essays of targetting what some might call “Sacred Cows.” What we mean by that are ideas, customs, or institutions held to be above criticism. Another way to look at sacred cows is to see them as ideas that are accepted without criticism. You can identify them by their simplistic platitudes, trite tautologies, and semantic aphorisms that permeate our lives at work and on social media. It’s the buzzwords, jargon, and signal words that reflect a belief based on… well… sometimes not much.
I tend to find a lot of my topics on LinkedIn which is a veritable cesspool of simplistic platitudes that, if accepted without critique, can lead to terrible outcomes. These ideas and beliefs can sound great at first blush but when you dig just a little deeper, everything falls apart. The challenge is that many of these common topics have become a sacred cow for some people and they very much dislike being challenged in their beliefs.
After poking at one recently, a fellow aspiring polymath, Jennifer Peters, commented:
“You should write an essay entitled ‘killing sacred cows is my passion’ 👊”
And now you know how many of these essays start; with the brilliant and humorous collaboration with others! But I digress, killing sacred cows isn’t my passion per se. I really am on the lookout for counterintuitive insights that can actually help us in this chaotic and often divisive world. sacred cows just provide really good examples of what we are trying to overcome.
Sacred cows show up in every domain and discipline. Whether on Recycling, Green Energy, Climate Change, Nuclear Power, Organizational Stupidity, Bad Leadership, Feminism, Our Pearl Clutching Reaction to Technology, Healthcare, Professional Insights, Religion, Creativity, Innovation, Beauty, Addiction and even how we Poop Wrong… OK, maybe I do enjoy targeting sacred cows as each one of those is a topic we’ve covered in the past.
Moreso, what I enjoy is breaking down the oversimplified platitudes and challenging the rote acceptance of behaviors that typically result in negative outcomes at odds with the stated goals. I like to improve products, processes, and people and that means we have to think differently so that we can butcher those sacred cows to fully understand and retain the good parts while casting off the waste.
Butchering Sacred Cows
The nuance here is that it’s more than just killing a sacred cow. It’s also not just ignoring them. We have to intimately understand them so that we can effectively work with or around these ideas. One of the first places to start is with humility. We laid out a nice overview of the polymathic mindset on how to embrace our white belts where we can “let go of the desire to be ‘right’ and transition to the desire to learn.”
With that first step, we can begin to apply a portfolio of tools to understand the problem space. Systems Thinking is a great mindset that allows us to take a step back from the problems to ensure we understand the full context. What kind of a cow is it? Steer, Heifer, Bull, Guernsey, Limousine, Angus? What do we want done with that cow? It doesn’t help to butcher a cow that serves a useful purpose like producing milk or providing stud services.
Systems Thinking helps contextualize this by coupling curiosity with intentional reframing to make sure that the problem we’re looking at is properly understood. Not all cows are sacred and not all sacred cows need to be killed.
Once we’ve established better context, we can take a third next step by applying Critical Thinking which we’ve distilled into:
Knowledge gathering (Avoiding infobesity)
Logical Structuring (Forming, unforming, and reforming ideas)
Critique (Steelman, don’t strawman the argument)
With humility, curiosity, a systems perspective, and then critical thinking we are well prepared to butcher a sacred cow. More importantly, we can intelligently slice the cow like a butcher separates the different parts into steaks, roasts, and burger meat, and then extract the core values under those beliefs to make those delicious burgers.
Making Burgers
Let’s start with what making burgers is NOT about. The goal is not to gleefully destroy someone’s belief system without offering any useful frameworks to replace them. Humans have a deeply ingrained religious psychology where we tend to turn anything, even atheistic activities, into religious structures. When we recognize this, we can be much more judicious about which cows to turn into burgers. As my religious axiom goes:
Is what you believe, and where you place your faith, enabling you to become a better person and allowing you to add positive energy to the world around you?
I like to poke at sacred cows but there are many I don’t need to turn into burgers. It’s especially important to recognize that each sacred cow contains a nugget of useful insight whether at work, in society, or within a religion. Some are useful even if not technically correct and more harm can come from attacking them than by leaving them, and the people who rely on these sacred cows, alone.
The most important thing to remember is that the best sacred cows to turn into burgers are your own. It’s essential to look into the mirror and apply these concepts to ourselves first before we look to kill anyone else’s cows.
Making burgers is where we extract the value from those beliefs and turn them into something useful and often counterintuitive. It’s the skillful decomposition of sensitive topics while providing context, logical analysis, and appropriate critique. Making burgers is also recognizing that sometimes a salad is the right answer instead of butchering a belief.
Conclusion
My first goal for Polymathic Being is to look into myself as I write and only then share these ideas. I know I still have burgers to make of my own beliefs but I also retain a nice herd of intentional sacred cows that help me navigate the world and, hopefully, engage with others better.
My second goal is that each essay is served up like a juicy, well-cooked burger, with all the right fixings. Even better, I want it to be a burger enjoyed as part of our larger community of aspiring polymaths like a backyard barbeque with friends and family.
Sacred cows do make the best burgers and we have a lot of tools and techniques to critically analyze which cows to target and how to properly butcher those cows so that we are adding value to the world around us and helping achieve positive outcomes.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
- All-around great daily essays
- Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
- Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
- Integrating AI into education
- Computer Science for Everyone
I think if we can embrace the following two principles for critical/important decisions, we can make better decisions and move beyond reliance on experts and media that often present ideas as indisputable facts:
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar. - Richard P. Feynman
And
The Royal Society's motto is "Nullius in verba," which means "Take nobody's word for it." This motto emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence and verification.
Adopting uncertainty and questioning accepted truths fosters critical thinking. This approach encourages us to challenge our sacred cows and pave the way for genuine progress. It also enables us to explore diverse perspectives and develop more robust solutions.
Moreso, I am going to skip butchering anything and walk away. To where? I'll use that collection of seeds I have gathered while looking at the cow and find the correct type of fertile ground in which to plant and tend them as they grow. Why? Because the cow is an herbivore and also must eat. Ahhh coffee, the dark of an Autumn morning, and philosophical metaphors. Lovely!