Hey it's Leo for actualized.org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about

understanding default positions. It's hardest to see the ground directly beneath your feet.

This concept of the default position is an extremely foundational and critical concept,

which you need to understand because in all the future stuff that I talk about,

this will keep recurring.

This concept will keep coming back and back and back into the big picture of things.

And I want you to know what this concept means, what default position means,

so that when I say that in the future, you can be like, oh yeah, that's exactly what he talked about before and I can see how that fits into the larger picture and all the different examples of how this works.

So what is a default position?

Let me give you a couple of ways to think about it. One way to think about it is it's a position that you hold or a person holds

without acknowledging that it's a position.

Also, it's a natural position

requiring no burden of proof.

Or you can think of it as an overlooked assumption or a belief that one holds

without knowing that it's a belief that one holds.

Or you can think of it as a perspective that one has,

which masquerades as actuality and denies that it's just a perspective.

So as you can tell here we're going down into some epistemology, theory of knowledge.

Again and again we keep coming back to the topic of epistemology because it ends up being so critical

to understanding the obstacles that keep you stuck in life.

That's why we keep coming back to it and we keep looking at it from different perspectives.

In philosophy also, there's this notion when people argue or debate or use reasoning to try to make some sort of progress, intellectual progress, there's this notion that some positions

...