If I asked a hundred people to define twenty words, no two persons would give identical definitions for all twenty. If each word has just three possible interpretations (the actual number is far higher), that’s 3^20 = 3.4 billion possible combinations. Your definition of “intelligence” was shaped by every smart and stupid person you’ve met, every test you’ve taken, every moment you felt quick or slow. Mine was shaped by different people, different tests, different moments. When you read the word “probability,” you’re not downloading my crisp definition into your brain. You’re triggering a pattern in your own neural substrate - I call it a scheme1, the scheme is built from every time you’ve made a bet, avoided risk, or been surprised by an outcome. The word is just a pointer, a shared proxy that lets us coordinate despite having different internal experiences. 1 Most people think words carry meaning like boxes carry objects. They memorize definitions, repeat explanations, quote experts - and wonder why none of it translates into actual understanding or results. The difference between someone who gets it and someone who doesn’t is whether they can build the bridge between memes (the communicable explanations) and schemes (the felt understanding in their bones). This essay is about that bridge.. A lot of “Common Sense” is Wrong A lot of “Common Sense” is Wrong • “Eat protein because muscles are protein2” - This is just like saying you can get smart by eating some brains, but that is not the case as you can catch a laughing disease instead. (Kuru3). 2 3 • “Brave abolitionists ended slavery through moral awakening” • “No knowledge goes to waste” • “Follow successful people’s advice” • “Learn from your failures” • “Connect the dots backwards, follow your heart” The reason these “common sense” ideas are taken seriously is a fundamental category error. You have to stop looking at knowledge as a monolithic block of facts and start seeing it as a substrate hierarchy. The Taxonomy of Knowledge The Taxonomy of Knowledge You can build a computer out of stones, water pipes, dominoes, electrical circuits. And soon, light or quantum particles. Logic is a property of arrangement. You are a computer running on meat. Free markets are computers running on human behavior, and so on. Knowledge runs on three substrates. Most people can’t tell them apart, so they waste years trying to learn things that can’t be taught or teaching things that can’t scale. Genes: Genes: Genes: Information encoded in DNA. You can’t learn genes. You can’t practice your way into different DNA. Schemes: Schemes: Schemes: Schemes are the tacit knowledge embedded in your body. Ronaldo’s footwork. The Shaolin monk’s forms. Warren Buffet’s investing skills. The bone-deep feeling when the basketball shot leaves your hand and you know it’s good before it hits the rim. It runs automatically in your nervous system. You can’t write it down. You can’t learn it from books. Semantic memory is reconstructive, not storage (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985)4. Each time you access a scheme, you’re rebuilding it from distributed neural patterns. This is why masters can execute perfectly but struggle to explain - the execution doesn’t run through the language centers. 4 Schemes die with you unless you figure out how to externalize them. Sometimes you can extract them all using proxies. Sometimes you can only get partial extraction - the “highlights” but not the subtle adjustments that come from proprioceptive feedback loops. Sometimes the scheme is too integrated to decompose at all. The jazz musician can’t explain why that note choice worked. The entrepreneur knows the deal will succeed but can’t articulate the pattern recognition. The proxies don’t exist yet, or there are too many to track within working memory constraints. Memes: Memes: Memes: Meme is a term first coined by Richard Dawkins5, it is transferable, reproducible knowledge (I’m probably butchering the original definition). 5 Code, mathematical proofs, explanations, folktales, a photo of Chad or Pepe etc. It can be copied across eight billion minds simultaneously without degradation. Memes aren’t understood unless internalized back into schemes. Memes aren’t understood unless internalized back into schemes. Just like an internet meme that doesn’t make you laugh is pointless to you. This is how memes go viral: - Someone extracts a scheme into a meme - You internalize the meme into your own scheme - You test it against reality until the scheme is robust - You extract it back into memes, often with improvements (new proxies, better explanations) and share it with others - The cycle continues Knowledge compounds through this loop. Each cycle refines the memes and strengthens the schemes. Why is the world full of wrong ideas? Why is the world full of wrong ideas? A retard is someone that sees a meme around, (he doesn’t get the joke, it doesn’t make him laugh) but he shares it with others anyway because it looks like “smart people” content. Then, when he’s asked to explain it because they don’t get it either, he starts blabbing. Since there is no underlying scheme to draw from, their brain starts throwing shit around: Intuition & Woowoo: “It just feels like the energy is shifting.” Gaslighting: “If you don’t get why this is profound, you’re just not at that level yet.” Roast Comedy: Attacking the person asking the question to hide the fact that they’re hollow inside. Einstein said it: Quoting figures out of context to borrow their “scheme-status” because they don’t have any of their own. Math & Statistics: Throwing around equations or jargon they couldn’t derive. Recitation: Saying what Jordan Peterson said word for word. Intuition & Woowoo: “It just feels like the energy is shifting.” Intuition & Woowoo: Gaslighting: “If you don’t get why this is profound, you’re just not at that level yet.” Gaslighting: Roast Comedy: Attacking the person asking the question to hide the fact that they’re hollow inside. Roast Comedy: Einstein said it: Quoting figures out of context to borrow their “scheme-status” because they don’t have any of their own. Einstein said it: Math & Statistics: Throwing around equations or jargon they couldn’t derive. Math & Statistics: Recitation: Saying what Jordan Peterson said word for word. Recitation: There are a lot of strategies really. This problem arises because there’s the metabolic cost of processing an idea to the point of understanding, so people take shortcuts. How to Be Correct. How to Be Correct. Real understanding requires three things. 1. Can you rebuild it? 1. Can you rebuild it? If you can’t derive the explanation from first principles - from the basic components, the foundational logic - you don’t understand it. You’re repeating someone else’s conclusion. When you can rebuild the idea, you can answer unexpected questions. You can handle edge cases. You can vary the conditions and still make accurate predictions. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.” ~ Feynman. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.” ~ Feynman. But “simply” doesn’t mean dumbed down - it means from the ground up, from components anyone can verify. Most bullshit hides in abstraction. People use complex language to obscure that they don’t understand the mechanism. Ask “how does that actually work?” repeatedly until they either hit bedrock (atoms, forces, verified mechanisms) or start making things up. Don’t ever believe that you can’t understand something because others are “smarter” than you, it is a bad explanation.6 6 2. Can you vary the conditions and it still works? 2. Can you vary the conditions and it still works? A good explanation is hard to vary7. I’ve mentioned this in a couple essays8. You can swap out parts of the story (e.g., "it was Mercury in retrograde" vs "it was my aura") and the "explanation" still "works" because it's not anchored to anything. 7 8 Easy-to-vary explanations are unfalsifiable. They can be twisted to fit any outcome. Hard-to-vary explanations stick their neck out. They make specific claims that could be proven wrong. That’s what makes them useful. Take the explanation and change the context. Does it still work? If someone says “you need to hustle hard to succeed,” do all people who hustle hard succeed? Do all successful people hustle hard? If the answer is no, the explanation is missing variables or is pure theater. If they start adding qualifications - “well, you also need timing, and luck, and the right connections” - they didn’t have a mechanism. They had a story. 3. Can it be proven wrong? 3. Can it be proven wrong? Karl Popper9: good explanations are falsifiable. They make specific predictions that, if wrong, would destroy the theory. Karl Popper9: good explanations are falsifiable. They make specific predictions that, if wrong, would destroy the theory. 9 This is why astrology is bullshit. “Mercury in retrograde will cause communication problems”, or those bullshit fortune cookies and animal spirits and cosmic star Schumann resonance… I’m not familiar with what they’re called. The prediction is so vague it can’t be wrong. Compare to physics: “If I drop this ball, it will accelerate at 9.8 m/s²” - extremely specific. Test it. If the ball accelerates at 15 m/s², the theory is wrong. The prediction risks being false. This is also why most self-help is bullshit. “Visualize success and you’ll achieve it” - if you don’t achieve it, they say you didn’t visualize hard enough. Real knowledge risks being wrong. It says: “Under these conditions, this specific thing will happen. If it doesn’t, I’m wrong.” Unfalsifiable claims are intellectual dead-ends. You can’t learn from them because they can’t be proven wrong. They just accumulate as noise. Falsifiable claims drive progress. When they’re proven wrong, you learn something. When they survive testing, they get stronger. Remember to be intellectually honest. If you don’t see something, don’t pretend that you’ve seen it. Regardless of how many times they say “you still don’t see it??”, seek for more explanations and learn any fundamental components needed to understand the thing. Including what you see in my essays. A lot of people agree on things they wouldn’t have if they thought through properly, and it could cost you the things you build on top of that bad foundation of knowledge. The Cost of Being Wrong The Cost of Being Wrong Everyone can be wrong. Crowds are fallible. Consensus isn’t truth. Smart people believed bloodletting cured disease for centuries. Doctors killed George Washington trying to heal him. “Too much blood causes fever, remove blood, fever goes down.” They didn’t understand circulation, infection, immune response. Smart people believed the sun revolved around Earth. Smart people believed eugenics was scientific progress. Universities taught it. Governments implemented it. Following the herd isn’t safe, its a bigger target when reality hits. Consensus has been catastrophically wrong more times than you can count. This is why the three questions matter. Identify when everyone believes something, and you can’t reproduce it. Identify when the explanation can be twisted to fit any outcome. Identify when no possible observation would prove it wrong. Check out my free newsletter for more essays about schemes: https://crive.substack.com References & Notes References & Notes Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. It explains how we build mental structures to process the world. Muscle hypertrophy is a response to mechanical tension and hormonal signaling (mTOR pathway), not a linear result of protein ingestion. Eating muscle to get muscle is a form of sympathetic magic, a pre-scientific belief that objects have an essence that can be ingested. Prusiner, S. B. (1982). Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie. Science. This research into Kuru and prions proves that consuming brain tissue (common in ritualistic cannibalism in Papua New Guinea) doesn’t transfer intelligence; it transfers misfolded proteins that destroy the host’s brain. McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1985). Distributed memory and the representation of general and specific information. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Memory isn’t a file you open, but a pattern of neural connections that fires to reconstruct an idea. Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Coined the term “Meme” as a unit of cultural transmission. My essay on How Mass Schooling Invented “Smart” and “Dumb” MDeutsch, D. (2011). The Beginning of Infinity. This is the source for the “Hard to Vary” explanation logic. It’s the highest level of epistemology available right now. My essay on how to increase your intelligence. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The definitive text on Falsifiability. If a theory cannot be tested and potentially refuted, it is not scientific knowledge. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. It explains how we build mental structures to process the world. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. It explains how we build mental structures to process the world. The Origins of Intelligence in Children Muscle hypertrophy is a response to mechanical tension and hormonal signaling (mTOR pathway), not a linear result of protein ingestion. Eating muscle to get muscle is a form of sympathetic magic, a pre-scientific belief that objects have an essence that can be ingested. Muscle hypertrophy is a response to mechanical tension and hormonal signaling (mTOR pathway), not a linear result of protein ingestion. Eating muscle to get muscle is a form of sympathetic magic, a pre-scientific belief that objects have an essence that can be ingested. Prusiner, S. B. (1982). Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie. Science. This research into Kuru and prions proves that consuming brain tissue (common in ritualistic cannibalism in Papua New Guinea) doesn’t transfer intelligence; it transfers misfolded proteins that destroy the host’s brain. Prusiner, S. B. (1982). Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie. Science. This research into Kuru and prions proves that consuming brain tissue (common in ritualistic cannibalism in Papua New Guinea) doesn’t transfer intelligence; it transfers misfolded proteins that destroy the host’s brain. . Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie . McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1985). Distributed memory and the representation of general and specific information. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Memory isn’t a file you open, but a pattern of neural connections that fires to reconstruct an idea. McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1985). Distributed memory and the representation of general and specific information. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Memory isn’t a file you open, but a pattern of neural connections that fires to reconstruct an idea. Distributed memory and the representation of general and specific information. Journal of Experimental Psychology Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Coined the term “Meme” as a unit of cultural transmission. Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Coined the term “Meme” as a unit of cultural transmission. The Selfish Gene My essay on How Mass Schooling Invented “Smart” and “Dumb” My essay on How Mass Schooling Invented “Smart” and “Dumb” How Mass Schooling Invented “Smart” and “Dumb” MDeutsch, D. (2011). The Beginning of Infinity. This is the source for the “Hard to Vary” explanation logic. It’s the highest level of epistemology available right now. MDeutsch, D. (2011). The Beginning of Infinity. This is the source for the “Hard to Vary” explanation logic. It’s the highest level of epistemology available right now. The Beginning of Infinity My essay on how to increase your intelligence. My essay on how to increase your intelligence. how to increase your intelligence. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The definitive text on Falsifiability. If a theory cannot be tested and potentially refuted, it is not scientific knowledge. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The definitive text on Falsifiability. If a theory cannot be tested and potentially refuted, it is not scientific knowledge. . The Logic of Scientific Discovery
