Abstract

Most models of learning use some version of the storehouse metaphor: learning is understood primarily as accumulation. That model breaks down when learning requires not addition, but the ‘death’ of an old frame and the emergence of a better one. Drawing on Cognitive Transformation Theory, I examine two obstacles to such learning: knowledge shields and frame blindness. I argue that the real question is not how to induce transformation in favorable conditions, but how to form a learner who can increasingly undergo transformative learning without them. That argument leads to a portrait of the transformative learner, whose revolutionary curiosity is stabilized by identity into character. Everything said up to this point forces a corresponding educational conclusion: foundational education should be judged by the learner’s future capacity for transformative learning.

The Storehouse Model

The typical model used to think about learning is described by Klein and Baxter (2009) as the storehouse model. In their words:

“It assumes that the learner is missing some critical form of knowledge—factual information or procedures. The learner or the instructor defines what knowledge is missing. Together, they add this knowledge via a course, a practice regimen, or through simple study. Instructors provide feedback to the learner. Then, they test whether the new knowledge was successfully added to the storehouse.”

A richer version of the storehouse metaphor1 includes not only stored contents, but also the mind’s operations on those contents: memory, recall speed, procedural fluency, and other forms of processing power. Learning, in this view, is both accumulation and the strengthening of the mind’s capacity to handle what it knows. This is a highly intuitive picture of how minds improve.

This commonsensical metaphor of the storehouse fits with many learning experiences we encounter in life, and in those cases is adequate. As Klein and Baxter themselves draw an analogy to Kuhn’s model of science. And you can compare learning with the storehouse model roughly to the work inside a paradigm that Kuhn (1970) describes ‘normal science’ to be.

But the storehouse metaphor is deeply inadequate in describing many types of learning, including the most significant ones. This is because the model does not include many important affordances.

• Interactivity of knowledge: The storehouse metaphor leads the mind to consider units of knowledge to be discrete. It does not make salient the relationality between different patterns of thought, especially how the arrangement of concepts within a conceptual network can determine radically different outcomes in understanding and receptivity to new information.

• Subtractive knowledge: The storehouse model makes it seem like abandoning knowledge, or unlearning, has a maximal utility of negating a mistake, and does not acknowledge that negating knowledge can lead to positive gains in understanding, and certainly does not recognize the possibility of transformative effects.

• Abstraction and Deconstruction: The storehouse model lacks the capacity to express how many pieces of information can be condensed into one abstraction, nor how an abstraction can be deconstructed into smaller pieces.

• Perceptual Growth: The storehouse model does not invite the mind to consider how pieces of knowledge can alter the capacity for the assimilation of future knowledge.

• Environment: The storehouse model also fails to capture the dynamic relation between learner and environment. As the learner changes, both the quantity of what can be learned and the kinds of things that can become intelligible or extractable from the environment change as well.

These considerations are not impossible within this model, but they involve serious friction.

An Alternative to the Scientist Metaphor

Cognitive Transformation Theory, as presented by Klein and Baxter, therefore rejects the storehouse model in order to emphasize the revision aspect of conceptual networks2 and suggests using a “scientist” metaphor. Klein and Baxter (2009) write:

“Cognitive learning is not simply a matter of adding additional beliefs into the existing mental models. Rather, we have to revise our belief systems and our mental models as experience shows the inadequacy of our current ways of thinking. We discover ways to extend or even reject our existing beliefs in favor of more sophisticated beliefs. The scientist metaphor is much more suited to cognitive learning. This metaphor views a learner as a scientist engaged in making discoveries, wrestling with anomalies, and finding ways to restructure beliefs and mental models…”

I have a few objections to using the scientist metaphor. First of all, consider a person with a storehouse model of learning. By implication this person understands the mind, knowledge and learning to fit that model. For them, a scientist is merely a container of a specialized set of knowledge. Which is to say, for those who do not understand the problematics of the storehouse model, the ‘scientist’ metaphor is uninformative. Hence it fails in the pedagogical task that the metaphor aims to accomplish.

Moreover, while the scientist metaphor saliently captures the idea of experimenting, it drastically fails to evoke the aversive dimension of transformation. Subtractive knowledge, reorganization, and the development of new awareness are all experiences that most people shy from, and for a person with a storehouse model, they seem especially threatening; they appear as a loss of wisdom, a growth in ignorance at worst, and as meaningless at best.

Because of these considerations, I suggest using a death-rebirth metaphor; it better fits the lived structure of the experience. It cannot be subsumed in the storehouse model, the way the scientist metaphor can. Hence, while it may not be immediately understandable for a person who is locked into the storehouse model, at the very least it defends itself from being misinterpreted.

Transformative learning is never a simple swap out of one proposition for another; it is a radical reorganization of the network of concepts that form the mind in a domain. A way of organizing attention, meaning, and expectation breaks down so that a better one can emerge. It is not an overstatement to say that part of the mind has died and is reborn anew. We can label the competing learning metaphors or models storehouse vs. transformative, while using death-rebirth as the metaphor for the lived structure of transformation.

The dramatic aggression of the term is not a mistake either. The threat of transformation, that is, the death-rebirth moment, is typically frightening. Feltovich, Coulson, and Spiro (2001), report the reactions of medical students to the educational procedures aimed at transformative learning:

“A testimony to the degree of discomfort the challenges caused the students was the amount of anger and frustration that was elicited within the experimental procedures.”

But beyond the fear and anger that transformative learning brings, it is also experienced as disorienting and rejuvenating in relation to the importance of the domain to the learner and their inexperience. The joy of the ‘aha!’ is powerful and readers can surely recall moments of ecstasy in which confusion was reconstructed into a comprehensible pattern.

Knowledge Shields

When discordant information that challenges a current frame or conceptual network enters awareness, typical responses that protect the incumbent from threat are invoked. These epistemological responses are analogous to the colloquial psychoanalytical “defense mechanisms”. To avoid destabilization, the mind protects itself by deploying what Feltovich et al. (1994) call knowledge shields. In the appendix to ‘Learners’ (Mis)Understanding...,’ Feltovich, Coulson, and Spiro (2001) list 23 such shields. Among them are (paraphrased):

• Illegitimate subsumption: this anomaly is a special case of what I already know; I can account for it with my current model. The new concept I am encountering behaves just like the ones I am already familiar with.

• Argument from authority: This new data is simply wrong because authority X has informed me otherwise.

• Impertinent Complexification: I will be able accommodate the new material, because there is more to it than what is present. With more data, it will fit my current model. We just won’t go into the details right now.

They also explain why knowledge shields are so problematic:

“If the application of Knowledge Shields is catch-as-catch can, as our results suggest, then conceptual change should be especially difficult for concepts of the kind we have examined. This is because in this kind of structure there are so many places to hide the effects of discrepant information. For example, there can be no such thing as a critical challenge to some key part of the network because of the multiplicity of influences on belief. This kind of conceptual network provides so many sources of resiliency, that some way can be found by the learner to accommodate the implications of a challenge to credibility. Changing belief probably requires a multi faceted, systematic affront, a process of dismantling and reconstructing a large part of a belief system.”

In other words, trying to dismantle a structure of a person’s conceptual network is very difficult because each concept of the learner is reinforced by others, and any attempt to reshuffle the conceptual network is defended by knowledge shields, which are deployed willy-nilly—anything to keep the structure safe.

Frame Blindness

Even if the problem of knowledge shields were bypassed with instructional design, which would be an exceptional feat, this still only deals with conscious and surfaced resistances to the death and rebirth of the mind that is constitutive of transformative learning. Another, perhaps more severe problem is that the salience landscape, or frame, of the mind shapes what becomes visible in the first place.

A mind’s frame, constructed by the learner via their conceptual network3, makes some aspects of reality salient and others negligible. Transformative learning, as I am using the term, is the pursuit of better frames and the abandonment of poorer ones. It is well-structured attention that is the object of education and learning. The implication of the fact that we are always embodying a frame means that certain features of reality never present themselves, and it is particularly the features that would instigate a call for revision that are typically left in the dark.

Hence, before knowledge shields can even be deployed, there needs to be a way for the anomalous information to surface past the frame blindness4.

In the examples discussed by Klein and Baxter (2009) and Feltovich, Coulson, and Spiro (2001), frame blindness is largely a non-problem; the context evaluated is a learner who is being actively taught by an expert. The teacher is able to force the anomaly down the throat of the learner, which evokes the gag of knowledge shields. But the ability to simply ignore the incongruent data is not an option that needs to be addressed.

For various reasons, the assumption of learning involving an active teacher is inadequate in thinking about transformative learning for the present and future state of our contemporary world. For starters, many people today are autodidacts in several domains of their lives. Mediums like YouTube, Substack and various AI bots are used to learn and all of these systems are opt-in; hence incongruent data can be ignored or deflected with knowledge shields. Incongruent data can be avoided by shaping one’s own curriculum in a way to avoid the toil of transformative learning.

Moreover, there are many domains where transformation is highly valuable, but does not even have clear accessible lineages—learning is autodidactic by nature, and authorities that can press do not exist. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as the scientist metaphor suggested by Klein and Baxter implies, an inquirer into novel fields is a learner, but has no authority to rely on. Hence, any resolution to the problems of transformative learning needs to take into account the challenge of both knowledge shields and frame blindness, and contextualize them in a world where autodidactic learning is the norm.

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Institutional Supports for Transformative Learning

Because it is so hard for learners to engage in transformative learning successfully, it is often only done at scale in expert institutions that are specifically designed to accommodate this. Consider the immense effort invested in medical students, or Buddhist monks. While we can be assured that much transformative learning (and perhaps even most of it) happens in the wild, these cases are too diverse and unpredictable to be documented.

These teaching institutions assume learner motivation to progress in their practice, whatever it may be. In addition, they typically filter out any student who is not thought capable of acquiring expertise. So these institutions select for highly motivated and already intelligent students.

Within the motivation to learn generally, the motivation for transformative learning is subsumed. Hence there is no need to inquire what the students’ motivation is to engage death and rebirth. In order to facilitate this difficult learning, instructional design of these institutions scaffold the learning in various ways that are assumed in Cognitive Transformation Theory research typically.

• Identity is retained through transformation and is explicitly not threatened. (You will not lose any sense of identity by engaging in this paradigm shift)

• Peers that have already gone through the process show that what you are learning is both learnable/comprehensible. (This assumes a standardization of the education, which is usually granted.)

• Experts allow one to keep a critical identity frame—trust in authority is legitimate. New authorities do not need to be recognized, nor does the concept of trust need to be reevaluated. (Consider the pedagogy of going through Freudian analysis.)

The research on conceptual change and knowledge shields studies people under relatively favorable conditions: the students want proficiency and have teachers who are trying to transfer their expertise, they have a definite end they know to be accessible, and they trust the relevant experts enough to let themselves be corrected.
But the autodidactic reality lacks all of these things.

Curriculum vs. Character

Even with all of these supports, CTT expresses constant laments at the difficulty of transformative learning. I would like to suggest that an underdiagnosed aspect of their problem lies in the capacity of the learners. This is natural, given that CTT focuses on creating domain specific learning environments. We already recognize a variance amongst learners’ capacity for transformative learning; it is only natural to ask what might contribute to this variance. If this capacity is impacted by experience and history, we can then begin inquiring how to cultivate such a capacity in learners and stabilize it as a character.

So instead of asking how to create an environment where knowledge shields can be bypassed for highly motivated learners, we can ask what the character of a learner proficient at transformative learning looks like and how to cultivate one5.

These questions of curriculum design for a domain and cultivation of a character overlap, but diverge in important ways. The answer for character formation cannot be limited to domain-specific curriculum design; it must involve the cultivation of a more general and stable capacity. This cultivation may be actualized via a curriculum, but it cannot be one aimed merely at the delivery of content. It would be a curriculum for the formation of character, with the learner themselves as the object of inquiry. This is analogous to the difference between trying to explain to a student how to solve a specific mathematical procedure versus giving them a general understanding that would allow them to solve all such questions in the set, or better yet, how to approach new domains in mathematics.

Conservative and Revolutionary Curiosity

Highly structured environments for transformative learning support revision externally by surfacing anomaly, sustaining attention, providing sequencing, reducing the cost of destabilization, and legitimizing the new frame. But if the educational aim is not better environmental design for learners who generally struggle with transformative learning, but the formation of a character who can increasingly internalize revision, then some scaffolding that these environments provide need to be located in the learner’s history, rather than in the present environment. In other words, the learner needs to have internalized mechanisms that drive to transformative learning; the learner needs to be actively seeking the death-rebirth of transformative learning. Below I sketch some of what I think to be the most important parts of the character of a transformative learner.

Curiosity is defined as “a pleasant motivational state involving the tendency to recognize and seek out novel and challenging information and experiences” (Kashdan, Steger, and Breen 2007). Both additive learners and transformative learners can be curious. However, because of the different frames between these two camps of learners, curiosity manifests itself in different ways.

For the storehouse learners, curiosity drives one to seek additive concepts that do NOT require any significant reformation of the mind6. Most school learning fits this category. This curiosity seeks addition, extension, clarification, enrichment, or stimulation without threatening the basic frame. We can call this, additive or conservative curiosity.

However, transformative learners are driven by a different kind of curiosity. They seek information that destabilizes and offers better conceptual networks. This second type of curiosity, at the very least, seeks data to subtract errors from itself and be less wrong; in more sophisticated and fuller versions, this curiosity is driven by the motivation for a radical reshaping of the mind, and strives for novel frames that unearth new affordances from old territories. It is more than willing to endure the negative moment in which an old frame becomes unstable, inadequate, obsolete and incoherent; it is precisely a quest for such experiences. We can call this, transformative or revolutionary curiosity.

Revolutionary curiosity serves to resolve many problems that the educational environments researched by CTT resolve implicitly, as well as obsolete some of the problems they seek to resolve in these spaces.

As explained above, in highly scaffolded settings, the learner does not need to generate the full motive force for transformation from within. But a learner in a state of revolutionary curiosity has the internal motivation that can drive transformational learning.

Earlier, we noted a list of structural features that make transformative learning easier in the institutions researched by Cognitive Transformation theorists:

• Motivation

• Credible end-goal/standardization

• Structure of information

• Identity protection

• Peer normalization

• Trustworthy authority

• Coercive mechanisms for overcoming shields and blindness

Revolutionary curiosity makes motivation for transformative learning endogenous. Because confrontation with anomaly is itself experienced as valuable, it does not need the external motivations of the institution to undergo transformative learning. Similarly, it weakens, or even completely dissolves, the need for a fixed endpoint; the learner who embraces and pursues the death-rebirth cycle of learning does not need the endpoint to be clear in order to seek the information that can trigger such an experience.

Institutions use authority, carrots, and sticks, amongst a variety of tools to make learners confront information that catalyzes transformative challenges. Revolutionary curiosity is a motivational state that seeks out, remains with, and even invites disturbing data rather than flee toward simpler explanations. In that sense it substitutes for forced exposure to anomaly, containment from escape to distractions, and some of the struggle against knowledge shields.

When considering frame blindness and shields, the sophistication of the learner in a state of revolutionary curiosity comes into play in interesting ways. For some individuals, information with transformative potential will still be actively sought. In a sense, an excellent transformative learner will be able to successfully identify and consider alternative frames that emerge from data. While this cannot possibly resolve the problem of frame blindness completely, it is clearly valuable.

As for knowledge shields, a learner in a state of revolutionary curiosity treats them with suspicion. While every knowledge shield is possibly functioning to protect one from degenerating into a worse frame, it is also potentially a barrier to forward evolution.

What it does not replace are the supports tied to structure, peers, and authority. Curiosity does not itself sequence information well, normalize the process socially, or solve the problem of identifying trustworthy guides. It may reduce dependence on these things, but it does not make them unnecessary. Revolutionary curiosity is therefore not a substitute for the whole scaffold of transformative learning.

More importantly, revolutionary curiosity is an unstable motivational state. It must be stabilized as a character trait in order to replace the institutional scaffolding in a reliable way.

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Identity and Stabilization of Revolutionary Curiosity

I suggest considering identity as a stabilizer of revolutionary curiosity. Borrowing from Sfard and Prusak (2005), identity may be understood as a set of significant, reifying, endorsable stories about who a person is and who that person is becoming. In the terms of this essay, the transformative learner comes to understand themself through stories in which being revised is not a humiliation or a threat to selfhood, but an integral part of learning well. These stories form part of the learner’s frame and pattern of interpretation of their own experiences. When revolutionary curiosity becomes part of the learner’s self-understanding, anomaly, disorientation, and the possibility of frame change are actively pursued. In this sense, identity is one of the means by which revolutionary curiosity becomes durable enough to begin taking the form of character.

Identity is not merely adjacent to learning; it is a powerful part of the learner’s frame itself, and thus shapes the learning process dynamically. It affects what the learner notices in the information landscape, how they interpret data, and their emotional responses to threats to their current conceptual network. Recognizing oneself as a transformative learner animated by revolutionary curiosity is a game changer; it reorganizes not only motivation, but the learner’s attention and their whole stance towards revision.

Character of the Transformative Learner

We are now ready to define the Transformative Learner:

The transformative learner is a person for whom revolutionary curiosity has been stabilized by identity into character, and who can reliably sustain revision toward better frames.

The transformative learner matters both inside expert educational institutions and outside them. Such learners reduce some of the burdens institutions typically carry because they do not depend on coercion, externally forced anomaly, and heavy motivational support. A population of transformative learners will ease the job of curriculum designers and teachers. Such a population would also make possible more radical visions of what expert educational institutions can be. Institutional scaffolds will still play a large role in the learning of transformative learners. But if such a character were more common, institutions could spend less effort overcoming basic resistance to transformation and focus instead on other pedagogical functions in order to better leverage resources.

As noted earlier, autodidactic learning is increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception. In autodidactic conditions, frame blindness and knowledge shields are harder to overcome because there is no expert forcing anomaly to the surface. The transformative learner is better able to seek, notice, and remain with threatening information without institutional support.

It is important to discriminate between a genuine transformative learner and its confused imitators. The transformative learner is not merely open to revising their conceptual network willy-nilly; such a character would be easily manipulated or unstable. Novelty addiction is another misleading vice. While it is a close look-alike to revolutionary curiosity, it lacks the discretion to care whether the new frame is not simply shiny, but also better. Another failure mode is a tendency toward skepticism that paralyzes judgment and cultivates disengagement.

Like any virtue, this character suffers from the Gorgias Problem: it is easier to appear to be a transformative learner than it is to be one. Varieties of performative anti-dogmatism or heterodoxy are real temptations that must be recognized as false presentations of the transformative learner.

The portrait of this kind of person raises a new question: how should we judge an education?

A New Standard for Foundational Education

Educational institutions are typically judged by the storehouse model. In that sense, a successful program ends with a learner in command of the relevant stock of knowledge. The transformative learning model and the introduced character of the transformative learner unveil a more sensible criterion: how driven and capable is the graduate at transformative learning?

Cognitive Transformation Theory leads us to judge an educational institution or program by its capacity to successfully induce transformative episodes in a specific domain. Our account here takes it one step forward and asks us to judge the success of foundational education by looking at the graduate’s capacity for future transformative learning, inside and outside of official educational institutions.

Education typically aims to internalize in the learner some knowledge that is currently outside. This can be seen in domains as varied as spelling tests, calculus and philosophy. The description of the transformative learner described here invites us to see the general capacity for transformative learning as a foundational proficiency to be internalized.

We should therefore judge a foundational education not by what knowledge it transmits, nor by what transformations it induces under scaffolded conditions. Instead we should examine whether it graduates a learner capable of meaningful self-revision. The deepest educational question is not what the learner merely knows, but what kind of learner the education has made.

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Open questions

Open empirical and conceptual questions obviously remain to be explored. Below, I list only a few for the consideration of future research.

• What are the domain limits of transformative learning? Can one be a generalized transformative learner, or is one limited to bounded domains? How are these domains best constructed and understood?

• What observable behaviors, conversational patterns, or learning trajectories would distinguish a genuine transformative learner from a merely performative one?

• What kinds of educational experiences most reliably increase a learner’s future capacity for transformative learning, rather than merely inducing isolated transformative episodes?

• What can help autodidactic learners reliably surface anomaly in the absence of expert guidance, especially under conditions of frame blindness and opt-in information environments?

• To what extent can revolutionary curiosity be a vice and not a virtue?

Thank you to Shoshana Gabbai and David Campbell for comments on an earlier draft.

Thank you to my peers at ORI for cultivating an environment that makes me excited to write.

Thank you to Joe Edelman—a constant source of my transformative learning.

Glossary

𝗔𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: See 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆.

𝗔𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: Learning that adds information, procedures, or fluency without major reorganization of a learner’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 or 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲.

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: The dynamically activated organization of concepts, expectations, and relations through which a learner understands a domain. It helps structure the learner’s 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲, and when threatened by anomaly it is often defended by 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱𝘀.

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: Curiosity that seeks addition, clarification, enrichment, or stimulation without threatening the learner’s basic 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲.

𝗗𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵-𝗥𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 / 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗿: A metaphor for the lived structure of 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴, in which an old 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 breaks down so that a better one can emerge.

𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲: The organization of salience, expectation, and interpretation that shapes what a learner notices, ignores, and treats as significant. A 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 is partly structured by the learner’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸, and 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 occurs when it prevents relevant anomaly from appearing as significant at all.

𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀: The condition in which a learner’s existing 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 prevents relevant anomaly from appearing as significant in the first place.

𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆: A set of significant, reifying, endorsable stories about who a person is and who that person is becoming, helping stabilize 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 into character.

𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱𝘀: Defensive maneuvers by which a learner protects an incumbent 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 from threatening anomaly once it has surfaced within the learner’s 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲.

𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: Curiosity that seeks information with the potential to revise the current 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 or 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 toward a better one.

𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 / 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗿: A model of learning in which the mind improves primarily through 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: the accumulation of contents, procedures, and fluencies, along with growing skill in handling and applying them. It is therefore linked to 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆, which seeks extension, clarification, and enrichment without demanding major reorganization of the learner’s 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 or 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸.

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: See 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆.

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗿: A person for whom 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 has been stabilized by 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆 into character, and who can reliably sustain revision toward better 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀.

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: Learning that revises or reorganizes a learner’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 and 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲, rather than merely adding new content.

Bibliography

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

Feltovich, Paul J., Richard L. Coulson, and Rand J. Spiro. “Learners’ (Mis)Understanding of Important and Difficult Concepts: A Challenge to Smart Machines in Education.” In Smart Machines in Education: The Coming Revolution in Educational Technology, 349–375. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT Press, 2001.

Feltovich, Paul J., Rand J. Spiro, Richard L. Coulson, and Jans F. Adami. Conceptual Understanding and Stability, and Knowledge Shields for Fending Off Conceptual Change. Technical Report No. 7. Springfield, IL: Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, 1994.

Kashdan, Todd B., Michael F. Steger, and William E. Breen. “Curiosity.” In Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, edited by Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2007.

Klein, Gary, and Holly C. Baxter. “Cognitive Transformation Theory: Contrasting Cognitive and Behavioral Learning.” In The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for Training and Education, Vol. 1, Learning, Requirements, and Metrics, edited by Jack J. Cohn, Daniel Schmorrow, and David Nicholson, 50–65. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Sfard, Anna, and Anna Prusak. “Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity.” Educational Researcher 34, no. 4 (2005): 14–22.

The Open Research Institute (ORI) is an open and public network of researchers working on anything and everything1.

It’s best to think of it as having an informal and formal meaning. In the informal sense, it is the human project of growing in wisdom, aspiring to perfection. You can count Socrates, St. Augustine, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Newton, and Dawkins as part of the informal ORI. But in the formal sense, it is a collective of people who have organized themselves in order contribute to this project in the best possible way.

Academia, right?

Wrong.

Academia is a gated institution. For example, there is a whole economy credentialization and legitimation that is not defined by the practitioners themselves. This doesn’t make it a bad thing, but these features do contrast it with ORI. ORI, is not gated in any way. Each node in the network is accessible to each node, and is responsible for its own filtering of noise and signal.

Currently, there are two chapters of ORI2, each in a separate discord, with an overlap of some people. But Discord isn’t the homebase for ORI—the whole idea is that ORI is not medium bound to any form. Some can create a chapter of ORI using Slack, a Whatsapp group, and if it tickles their fancy, a physical republic of letters.

So in one sense, every researcher is part of this network as far as their research is public, and this would include academics. But in a narrower and more formal sense, there are people who identify as ORI researchers, and benefit from being part of the formal network. This network has both active researchers who self-identify as part of ORI, as well as a network of supporters. I, personally, fit in both buckets.

The Researcher Profile

As someone who strives to make this network as powerful as possible, it needs open organizational structures that support it. Below, I’ll walk you through what a researcher can do in order to fit the form of ORI in a way that will help them and the whole network wisen.

As a researcher, the most important thing is to be able to connect to other progress that has already been made. The method for ORI is for each researcher to have a public profile page that helps us find each other. That’s how we actualize the power of ORI. (Otherwise were just a bunch of people with three capital letters in our twitter and substack bio, hardly something efficient in moving human towards greatness.)

This profile page needs to be quickly legible, and have all the information so any person, be it researcher, funder, or student, can discern if your research is what they are looking for.

This is not as simple as it sounds. It’s not easy to be properly legible. Luckily, all we need is for the researchers to be legible enough, to enter an efficient positive feedback loop.

There’s two parts to consider in what to include in a profile page. On one hand, you want enough information so that you don’t miss anyone important. On the other hand, you don’t want any information that’s irrelevant. There’s no way to do it perfectly; the point is to be as good as possible. Good as possible means that we don’t want a researcher to be wasting time optimizing for publicity over their actual work.

I’m going to walk you through as I write my own ORI Researcher Profile and show you how easy and fun it is.

C’mon, let’s go!

WRITING PROCESS

Northstar

What is your ultimate goal, or the best concise description of your research trajectory? This will work best if kept to 40 to 200 words.

The first thing I’ll write is my Northstar. Writing this up is really fun, because it forces me to see myself as the bright light I am. What am I trying to do? What do I care about? Who am I as a researcher?

Seeing another person’s Northstar is a great vibe check, as you can imagine. Just look at mine!

Shadow_Rebbe’s Northstar

The deepest educational question is what kind of person we should be trying to form and what kind of pedagogy would make that formation real. My work focuses on aspirational human excellence, especially forms expressed in unusual wisdom, curiosity, power of thought, and intellectual excellence that carries across domains and across a lifetime. From there, I am interested in the qualities, habits, and patterns of mind that constitute such excellence, and in how they can be taught, cultivated, and spread.

A central obstacle is what I think of as the Gorgias problem in education: a system that rewards seeming over being, substitutes shallow metrics for reality, and trains people to outsource judgment to external authority. Part of my work is therefore both pedagogical and epistemological, exploring whether and how Socratic conversations, epistemology for children, and accelerant habits can help form people who are exponentially wiser than ourselves. This is part of a larger vision in which humans can consistently generate individuals and societies that are consistently more capable and producing more intelligent and beneficent humans.

Live Questions

Now that my Northstar is articulated (SO MUCH F**KING FUN!) the next thing to track are those live inquiries and questions that I am working on. Of all the information I’ll be plugging in, these are the most dynamic.

Seeing someone else’s live questions lets you orient yourself to their research. They might tell you that this researcher is way beyond yourself and that you can learn from them, or that they are way behind and you can help them.

In fact, one way of thinking of these live questions are like requests for an answer from the collective human intelligence. Any fellow ORI researcher who sees these live questions and has something to contribute to a response will be happy to do so!

For some researchers, the list of live questions and inquiries are very tight and concise. It could literally be just one item. For others it might be tens of questions.

My suggestion is just to write down what you think are your live questions and start with that. This list is meant to be very dynamic, and change as you progress3.

Here’s my list, with the most passionate inquiries in bold:

Frame

• What is the right unit of analysis for intellectual excellence: virtues, habits, dispositions, moves, attentional styles, discourse practices, identity structures, stages, or something else?

• Is intellectual excellence better presented as tools, habits, stages, or some combination?

Core cognitive patterns

• Which patterns of thought most accelerate future learning?

• Are introspective epistemic skills built first by noticing structure in others and only later in oneself?

• What distinguishes fruitful questions from shallow, performative, vague, or inert ones?

Schooling and its distortions

• What educational practices do not merely fail to cultivate understanding, but actively block it by rewarding the wrong inner signals?

• What exactly is the schooled mind as a coherent structure to surpass?

• What would a pedagogy of vigor, freedom, and agency look like as opposed to a pedagogy of submission and neutering?

Environments and formation

• What kinds of initiation produce seekers rather than conformists?

• How can environments of high intellectual formation be made accessible to ordinary parents and non-elites without becoming formulaic and dead?

People and traditions to study

• Who has given a serious account of the excellent human that does not reduce excellence to shallow productivity, credentials, or conformity?

• Who has tried to identify traits or habits that produce long-term learning gains rather than short-term intervention effects?

Defining the Domain

The next step is to use my Northstar and my Live Questions to articulate my domain. In universities this is easy because of all the institutional mechanisms like faculties, certifications and journals. These are a source of strength as well as a weakness; some forms of knowledge are not pursued simply because they don’t fit any box.

In ORI you can use key-words that will make it clear what you are doing, just like many academic abstracts do. Personally, I like hashtags, maybe because I missed out on the craze when it was happening. But nobody is limited to what they use as keywords or how many. The function is to make yourself immediately legible with regards to your domain. You don’t want people wasting time looking for you nor wasting time trying to figure out if you are relevant.

Tier 1:

#Philosophy-of-Education #Epistemology-for-Children #Metacognition-for-Children #Developmental-Psychology #Socratic-Method #Intellectual-Virtue #Human-Excellence #Educational-Theory #Schooling

But besides my main domain, there are other facets of my research that are important enough to mention, even if they aren’t core, these secondary features get mentioned in a (drumroll) secondary tier list.

Tier 2:

#Virtue_Epistemology #Cognitive_Transformation_Theory #Educational-Psychology #Institutional_Critique #Live_Players #Qualitative_Cybernetics #Straussian_Esoteric_Education

For me, this seems like enough to cut out my space. But there are other ways to do this. You might want to list your lineage as a way to define your space. That’s what Neo-Freudians and Jungians do, right? Or you might want to list the people you are paying attention to and why.

What You Want

Lastly, you might want to include what you are looking for: funding, collaborators,or whatever. I don’t have anything clear on my profile, because while I’d always like some $, right now I’m just looking to be more visible. What’s nice is that that you can always update your profile.

PUBLIC WORK

ORI’s ethos is that the research is public. Hence, to be part of ORI’s network you should display some public research, and contact information.

This work doesn’t need to be an academic article. Here are a few examples to show you how broad the range of public research can be.

Here’s my latest essay:

The research I want to make accessible is on my substack. That plus my X handle should be enough to make me accessible to anyone that wants to reach me.

All done! THAT WAS FUN!

Now, look at my final version: as PDF!

If you want to collaborate, DM me here or on X!

Other Profiles

Here are two more examples of ORI researchers.

https://othmangbad.substack.com/about

https://observertheory.substack.com/about

Naturally, they didn’t follow my exact formula (they made their profile pages before this post!). That’s ok!

The ORI Network

Imagine seeing another researcher’s keywords. Just from a glance you can tell if they are relevant. Even better, in a database (not yet existent) it would be easy to search and find the people who are working on the things you need.

The idea is that keywords help you find the people working in the domain you care about, so you can filter out what’s irrelevant. The higher resolution Northstar, Live Questions and public research allow you to get higher resolution on how you can collaborate.

If this piece helped you notice that you are a researcher, then welcome to the club! Now’s a great time to create your profile page and accelerate towards a more beautiful world. Or maybe you already know you are a researcher, but you’ve never put in the effort to make yourself legible. For you too, now’s a great time to make yourself a profile page.

Once you have a profile page, (or if you already have one), please feel invited to respond to this post with your page. The next step is to start creating directories—and that can only be done with visible artifacts.4

ORI is here to help open you up to to knowledge that you are reaching for.

So, watcha waitin’ for?

C’mon les go!

Stay Tuned…

In my next post, I’ll discuss what happens when this doesn’t work—we already have an anti-fragile model that will make every unfruitful onboarding into a data piece that helps us improve our system.

Update May 1st 2026: My next post was actual research, and this is not likely to be written up in the near future. But in one sentence: imagine researchers of community building using you as data to solve problems. Your problem is their problem. In return for the right to document you as a case study, they help.

Open and Insulated Discourse

Nobody is born inside a discourse. We are initiated into them by the communities already practicing them. We are exposed to basic numeracy and literacy by our parents, and more complex discourses as we grow. These discourses1 were born to help us grasp at something real as a community. There was something that hurt the world and an antidote was found; a way of seeing was made accessible and could be communicated. These real points of contact with the world made this discourse so fruitful and valuable, hence participating in these new discourses meant learning to see what we could not yet see or do what we could not yet do.

But discourses do not remain unchanged as they grow. Each participant and each utterance is a small mutation from the previous state. The discourses accumulate terminology, commentary, rituals of entry, and internal hierarchies—it’s not just the content of the discourse, but the internal structure that is ever shifting. These mutations are often evolutions, where patterns of discourse are chunked and made quicker with new jargon, or explicit rules are transformed into implicit culture. But evolution and degeneration are two sides of the same coin; where change exists, it can be for the better or for the worse. What began as a way of making contact with the world can drift into a discourse that is severed from reality and serves insulated power structures. This essay is about that drift, and about what it means for initiation into a discourse, both for the teacher and the learner.

Being fluent in a discourse proves that one is a peer, but it says nothing about the value of the discourse itself. Even a sophisticated discourse can be an insulated one—a discourse that has close to zero representation in reality. In fact, it is likely that as a discourse gets more and more sophisticated, it drifts away from reality and becomes insulated, layering itself with self-referentiality, and losing contact with the extradiscursive world.

Think of Sigmund Freud’s first discoveries in psychopathology. They were valued because they were effective for extradiscursive use; his practice healed people. As his theory developed, it still had extradiscursive functionality, often in its explanatory power of lived experience, or its predictive power for dealing with psychic problems. But as the psychoanalytic discourse gained prestige it accumulated interlocutors and commentators who focused on mastering the discourse, without regard to the reality that was supposed to contact it. This process accelerated until psychoanalysis is hardly a field of psychology. Observing the current situation of psychoanalysis and Freudian literature one cannot but be impressed that it has drifted away from reality and has become a closed discourse. Empirical, extradiscursive utterances are hardly used to invalidate theories, and most intellectual energies are devoted to textual inquiries.

A similar process can be said to have happened to Socrates2. It is rare to find a direct discussion asking if Socrates is correct. The discourse of most Classical Scholars is focused on understanding what Socrates said, and the context of his utterances; the most ambitious may draw implications or point out conflicts between Socrates and other thinkers. Rarely will we find in the discourse a thinker challenging Socrates. In fact, much like some psychoanalysts or Marxists, many members of the discourse openly proclaim that they are scholars, not philosophers3.

One might argue that this is a new field—the historical analysis of Socrates. But the scholarly discourse is exactly the drift that is so concerning. Astronomy used to be a unified field with astrology, and rightly so. There were good reasons to consider these astral beings to have influence on our lowly earth4. But as we made progress in considering the movements of the planets, astrology was generally dropped. To be an astrologist is not the same things as being an astronomer5. And yet, to be obsessed with the person of Socrates at the expense of the ideas of Socrates, is analogous to astrology instead of astronomy. The research is about who said what, has little empirical rigor, and does not ask what is true, but what was said.

The degeneration into an insulated discourse begins with good intentions, and even with good deeds. If we look at those insulated discourses, we can see that the genesis of a discourse and its initial value is always rooted in contact with reality. It is as more individuals join the conversation that the discourse itself becomes an object of mastery. As this discourse develops it creates a loop that expands it, demanding more energy to master. Hence, new members are barred from joining the conversation until they have mastered large bodies of commentary which focus exclusively on interpretation of texts and are isolated from contact with reality. By the time one is considered by the community of the discourse to be qualified to have a voice, the training has done its job. The individual has mastered a prestigious literature, and to subvert it all would be costly. More so, they themselves have found a functionality of their discourse, namely to communicate with other masters of the language. The degeneration of the discourse to mere fancy is hard to see once one has invested so much effort and has gained a fluency that gives access to peers.

Note that the genealogy of insulated discourses presented here points to their parasitic nature; there is something valuable at the root that the insulated degeneracy is able to feed off of. Socrates and Sigmund Freud both had valuable contributions to the world, and it is precisely because of this that they can bear so much weight of empty words. Similarly, vast mystical corpuses have been written, expanding a few worthy insights into a sea of incestuous texts.

The spectrum between insulated and open discourses has infinite shades, but by presenting a fictive binary, we can get a better sense of how they function. Open discourses are ones where new utterances regarding extradiscursive facts are valued when they have implications for the discourse. The open discourse invites these moves in order to anchor it down into reality. Over a long enough time period, facts and assumptions are added to (and others are removed from) the discourse, helping make the discourse congruent with reality6.

If you think about mathematics as an open discourse, and perhaps one of the most intellectually honest discourses that we as humans know, you’ll notice that there are mountains of self-reference. Division turns into fractions, negative, imaginary and irrational numbers turn from imaginary procedures into objects that are referred to. In fact, we often start our learning by thinking that these things are ‘real’ first, and only later come to understand that these nouns are a strange shorthand for verbs!

This is the same type of recursive discourse that refers to itself in order to become more efficient. However, in math, the sophistication of the discourse is rooted deep in reality, and hence drift is minimal7.

The challenge in maintaining an open discourse is that the sophistication and distancing from the immediate reality and most primitive elements is often a good thing, as mathematics makes evident. Layers of abstraction allow for conceptual development and make communication more effective. The problem arises when the previous utterances of the discourse itself become an object and this recursive action continues until there is a rupture between discourse and reality. When taken too far in a reckless manner, a rift appears between theory and reality. As long as the discourse maintains a chain of substantiation that returns to the original contact, the tower can be constructed. Ironically, the discourses that have avoided contact are the ones most protective over their lack of touch with the ground.

Each discourse has its own particular angle on how it sees itself answerable to reality. What I mean, is that until a discourse becomes fully insulated8, the contact it posits with reality is considered to be verified or disputable, but these extradiscursive facts need to fit the form of the facts posited. This is a reasonable situation, where neurological facts shouldn’t be considered significant for trying to relate to the Oedipus complex. However, it is exactly in the negotiation of the shape of the pathways extradiscursive facts need to fit that a discourse can deceive and isolate itself from its own destruction or major upheavals. If neuroscience cannot say anything significant to a psychoanalyst, what can? The question should always be at the ready: “What kind of information would make you change your mind about this?”

The plurality of discourses combine into a broad social structure, and a measure of the health of this society is their response to outsider critique. What is the legitimacy of critiquing a discourse from ‘outside’ entirely? Critics often attempt to present why the origins of the discourse are either unimportant, misinterpretations, or simply false by extradiscursive measures. A healthy society will protect its discourses by demanding some sort of proof of familiarity of the outsider. If it demands full expertise, we rightfully suspect the emperor is naked. If it demands none, we suspect that the society has poor epistemic norms, and is pulled more by fads and convenience than rigorous inquiry.

Upon Entering

No discourse is an island, but the bridges that an individual might have access to when they are still newcomers to a certain domain may be scant and may be rich. Compare an individual who is immersed in the Bible, Mishna and Tosefta and begins studying the Babylonian Talmud to another person who has never even heard of Jews. Naturally, the ability of one person to become a participant in the discourse will be different.

The way a person enters a discourse will have an impact on their entire trajectory. Did they enter the discourse seeking a solution to a problem or confusion? Or did they enter the discourse due to social pull? In the first case, the newcomer is continuously sniffing for hints that lead to the contact that will solve his mystery. In the second, it is about acclimating oneself to the discourse and mastering the rituals that lead their progression.

Someone who enters a discourse without a passion for finding the contact will likely never find it. The points of contact are hidden in the dark. Even those discourses that have managed to maintain strong contact with reality don’t usually reveal these points to the novice9. This can happen in even the most physical of science: one can be introduced to Newtonian physics without ever moving an object and measuring anything! It is precisely at these points that the whole conversation can be overturned. And it is often at these points that the beginner can see things that the expert cannot. Their vulnerability is the reason to keep them hidden.

But it is also true that it is often at these points that the beginner fails to see the value of the purposeful blurring of the expert. The expert has already encountered and can practice using extrapolations of the base knowledge, and has found it beneficial. Whether their judgment is correct, and whether they are sacrificing a better opportunity with their commitment is a question left open. Regardless, because the expert knows the value of the structure, they protect the base from attack.

How to Invite

One of the signs of a pedagogical master is to introduce new participants to a discourse, beginning from the closest point of contact to reality accessible to the newcomer. By beginning there, all future discourse is rooted in a place of sanity.

As I wrote, these points of contact are the most vulnerable and precious pieces of knowledge in any discourse. It is in striving to make them visible that one makes enemies of the experts who fear their expertise, built from layer upon layer of words, will collapse upon inspection. And the experts who never cared for prestige, but for truth, are the rare voices who admire and invite the beginners to inspect the foundations of their palace.

For a seeker of truth, an illusory palace is best left deserted with a sign that says “look closely before entering.”

Thank you to Sam Senchal for feedback, David Campbell for both discussing and helping me articulate these ideas, as well as helping make this essay better, Omar Shehata, CEO of Open Research Institute for generating and hosting a special space.

In the beginning,

Elohim created the heavens

and the earth.

The School of Shammai declares that the heavens were created first, before the land, just as a king first sets up his throne and afterwards the footstool to match it. One can attempt to imagine the splendor of the sky invoking amazement in these sages; to do so, you must have a taste of that same amazement yourself. And looking at the dome of stars hanging above them, they knew,YHWH, the truth of being, can only be recognized as the regal terror he is when we attend to the sky. We humans are the ants that furiously and anxiously scurry on his footstool, trying to make sense of our lives. As Plato said, “It is tragic, but we must take man seriously.” The School of Shammai would partially agree with Plato. They would likely retort that such is the inevitable lot of man to take himself seriously, for ants should be concerned with the dealings of insects, and it would be ludicrous to be involved with The Great King and Creator. But why call this tragic? Ants can live meaningful lives as ants.

It was also the School of Shammai that praised life, and said it is better to be created than not. This is no riddle. It is especially puny man who should be grateful for his sweet existence.

I bombed. I bombed so bad. Because what I was giving a structure, but that is not how you write an essay. You write an essay by taking the reader on a journey. That means starting from a point they can actually enter, so they can feel what you are trying to do from the beginning. You have to place them in territory that is at least somewhat familiar. You cannot start in the middle. It’s like giving directions to

This is one reason academic papers are often not very good for beginners. You do not know the territory yet. You do not know what problem the paper is really trying to solve, even when the abstract tells you. Academic papers often make sense only once you are already deep inside that jungle. Then they can point out a specific path that leads to some fountain or treasure. But unless you are already deeply entrenched in that domain, you are not starting from a place where that path means much.

Beginners gain more from walking through a gate to wonderland, than from starting off with a map of the discourse. The map is meaningless if you don’t even know where you are. You know how you can be in a mall or airport, and they have a whole map? Well, the first thing everybody does is look for the “YOU ARE HERE!” The first orientation needs to be about taking the first step.

That is why it does not really make sense for a Philosophy 101 course to be just a history of philosophy or a broad overview of philosophers. A Philosophy 101 course should probably just be reading the Euthyphro and the Apology, and that is it. Then you begin to feel what hurt humanity so much that made them hungry for philosophy. Then, when you read your next philosophy book, you have some sense of what is going on.

You realize there is a serious mission here. You are in a place where you want to question things, because all of a sudden you realize you are in a cave. That is what all philosophy is trying to do: get out of the cave. And then, you see that some people thought philosophy wasn’t about caves at all. That makes this conversation much more interesting! All of a sudden Newton is a philosopher and what does he have to do with Socrates? These questions are beautiful, worth gazing at and being swallowed into.

But sometimes, you get teachers (or essaysists) who start from the middle. They build these intellectual structures, and what they are really trying to say is: you are in the cave, you are in the jungle, you may already have noticed a few possible threads, and now let me show you the palace I think exists. But usually you cannot just jump straight to that palace, because it does not make sense from where you are. You are not in that place at all.

What I was often trying to do in my essays was simply build that palace and show you the inside of it, even though you were nowhere near it at the beginning. What I have to do instead is start where people are.

So my new way of writing an essay is this: first write something like a quasi-academic article that builds the palace, and then step back and ask, how do I guide someone on the journey that would make them realize why I wrote this, why this is needed, and why it matters for them?

This process is dialogical, and it is much harder to do in an essay than in conversation. In conversation, you get constant feedback, and you can begin from whatever shared space you and the other person are already inhabiting.

So I have to write an essay and then dismantle it. I have to ask, what comes first? Not what comes first in my theoretical structure, but what comes first for the reader. What comes first from where they are? I need to place them as close as possible to the heart of the matter, while still making sure they are starting somewhere they can actually reach.

In a sense, this essay is about itself. After writing the first draft, I had to take it apart and put it together again. What you have read is that rebuilt version.

If there is a ubiquitous facet of global culture, a water we swim in that is at once unique to our time, yet so pervasive that we can hardly see it, it would be schooling. Especially considering that our most formative years are spent in that institution for many many hours, that most of our life trajectory is determined by what happens in it, and that these institutions are nearly identical in structure around the world.

It’s worth noticing what is strange about schools. Well, the truth is, there are so many bizarre things about schools that such an inquiry would be beyond the scope of a simple substack essay. But one really weird thing about schools that I want to talk about is grades.

Grades function as a shallow metric for our capacities in specific domains. But notice that we are trying to give numbers to the kinds of things that don’t fit shallow metrics at all. It’s true, one person can be competent at math, and another ignorant, call the first 100 and the second 0. but ask any mathematician to give scores on math research and he’ll laugh you away. What grade would you assign the godel incompleteness theorem and the Pythagorean theorem? How can you turn something so rich into a one dimensional vector? lol.

The solution is to fit the knowledge that is tested so that one number can capture it. so math becomes solving problems, and never about comprehension and discovery, which is what you would focus on if you wanted to cultivate mathematicians. Spelling and vocabulary tests can have a simple number, but literacy cannot; so we simply do not attempt to measure a person’s capacity to deal with rich texts, and focus on those questions that have a simple right or wrong.

So one crazy thing is the idea of giving one number to capture a capacity that is rich. Another crazy thing about grades is how they function. For a student, they are ways of understanding yourself. Who am I? How should I see myself? Where do I fit in society? all these are answered by your grade, which lets you know who you are. but notice that these grades are given to us from an outside source. we don’t create the tools for placing ourselves. Instead we give an input and the authority-number-complex pops us an answer that is legible for ourselves and others. “this is who you are”

So here we are, adults, trying to figure out where we belong and who we are (essentially the same question), and it’s no wonder that we are attracted to those high legibility makers we grew up with. even those that complain that the “test isn’t fair” show their marks. Nobody asks what the function of a test like this is, and why they took it. what they hoped to get out of it. and of course we do not ask. we, the world, have schooled minds.

To be told who we are with a number is a comfort, a warm cozy cabin in the wilderness of the modern era that consistently denies us the pleasure of simple answers.

A public research project to identify the habits of mind that make learning compound.

The stakes: A vast majority of humans spend their most formative years of life in schools, where the explicit aim is to instruct them how and what to think. Taking this institutional situation for granted, it’s imperative to ask how schools are performing as a whole. The answer is “not good.” This proposal is not the place to go into depth into the specifics of the critique of schooling as is practiced now.

In this proposal, I want to start by discussing schooling on its own terms as a starting point, and from there the critique and possible ways of upgrading the whole of humanity (via education) will begin to sketch out, if still only fuzzily.

Problem

Most educational interventions do not create lasting effects. They might produce gains for a year or two, and often less, and then fade to dark.

An effective intervention causes students to improve on a specific metric, often a standardized test, or a test designed for the specific intervention; but there is no permanent shift in their trajectory. This is a scandal!

If educational interventions don’t stick inside schools then they likely have zero effect on the cultivation of the child into a better adult, in any meaning of the word.

Explanation

At the very least, this should make it clear that an important underresearched question needs to be examined. What interventions actually stick?

My hypothesis: the reason interventions fail is because they improve performance without changing the learner’s operating system.

By “operating system,” I mean the habits of mind that shape how a person notices, interprets, questions, understands, and updates information. If those operational patterns don’t shift, then the gains will only be short lived.

Education is a societal issue; how it’s done has extreme implications for politics and culture. Our current schooling reliably cultivates the kinds of minds that can’t understand, reason, and agentically learn and self-develop. Hence, sets up a system where masses of people live in a hubristic illusion of intelligence, while acting as stooges for more sophisticated manipulating elements. To improve education in any meaningful way, we need to know what habits of mind create compounding returns on learning over time?

I christen these Accelerant Habits.

An Accelerant Habit is a habit of mind that changes the conditions of future learning for the better. Literacy is a basic example: once reading and writing are acquired, they exponentially increase the quantity and quality of future learning. My bet is that there are other habits like this—especially in the domains of metacognition, epistemology, and understanding itself—but we do not yet have a clear enough map of what they are, how they differ, how they can be cultivated, or how they might scale.

Note: Hypothesis—once these accelerant habits (numeracy is a good example, too) are clearly articulated, they are not likely to be forgotten, the way literacy is likely to survive almost any world disaster. I’m not sure about the details of this, but I think that this is true of many goods acquired that become stabilized and entrenched in a society.

The problem: education rewards seeming over being

A central obstacle here is that education systems are very good at producing the appearance of learning. All the incentives are set up for this.

A student can memorize multiplication facts, follow procedures for adding fractions and pass tests while lacking real understanding. This gap will be present when the child needs to go beyond the direct sequences the child memorized.

This ‘seeming’ over ‘being’ is not a side issue, to be regarded lightly. Schools are heavily incentivized to optimize visible metrics, because those metrics are legible, comparable, and cheap. Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes the target, systems learn to produce what looks like success rather than the real thing.

It gets worse.

In education, this often means training students in symbolic performance rather than understanding.

A simple example: a child answers 1/4 + 1/4 = 2/8. The common correction is, “Remember: when you add fractions, add the top number and keep the bottom the same.” The child then gets all the next problems right, scores well, and is praised. But what has actually happened? In many cases, the student has not come to understand fractions at all. He has learned to manipulate symbols according to authority.

The real invisible disaster is much worse than a misunderstanding about math. The student now confuses successful rule-following with understanding itself. They are blocked off from the actual capacity to understand things, because they are constantly being bombarded with data that pushes them to see these two things as the same.

This is the kind of fake learning that current systems systematically reward. It does not just fail to build deep competence. It can actively distort a student’s picture of what knowledge is.

Educational discourse needs to shift from “Which curriculum works?” but “What kinds of minds are we producing?”

The moonshot

The moonshot is to help education shift from optimizing for short-term performance to cultivating the underlying habits that make real learning compound.

I do not claim to already know the final answer. The first problem is more basic: we do not yet have a strong public map of the candidate habits that might matter most. Different thinkers point to pieces of this problem from different angles—metacognition, epistemic humility, intellectual self-monitoring, concept formation, theory of mind, transfer, sense-making, self-explanation, error detection, and more—but these literatures and traditions are scattered, poorly integrated, and rarely framed around the central question:

Which habits change the long-term trajectory of learning itself?

In other words, we have lots of literature on the specific skills, but no answer on if they are actually important, and if so in what way.

My goal is to found a more serious inquiry around that question.

What I will do in the next 1–3 months

I will build the first phase of a public research-and-publishing project around Accelerant Habits.

1. Build a candidate map of learning accelerants

I will collect and organize possible candidates for learning accelerants from a variety of intellectuals: educators, psychologists, philosophers, developmental theorists, and more from very different traditions. The goal isn’t to pretend these people all mean the same thing, but to start mapping out possibilities. By doing this preliminary map, we can then begin to see which possible learning accelerants feel most promising.

Of course, this includes investigating what already exists in the academic literature, where evidence is stronger or weaker, and where genuine gaps remain.

2. Publish a public collection to spark discourse

Step 2: assemble a collection of essays or invited responses from serious thinkers on this question: what habits of mind, if cultivated early, would most accelerate future learning?

The aim beyond contributing to the map above is to force a high impact question into public view in a way that is serious enough to attract better collaborators, sharper criticism, and eventually better experiments.

3. Articulate my own framework

Alongside the broader collection, I will publish my own account of the problem. This will include:

• why most interventions fade

• why schools systematically reward seeming over being

• what fake learning is

• what I mean by understanding

• why understanding may itself need to be treated as a central educational target

• why metacognitive and epistemic habits are especially promising candidates

• and how some of these habits might eventually be implemented and tested at scale

I think I can contribute significantly to the project with my perspective.

Long-term vision

The first phase is conceptual and field-building, but the long-term goal is practical and high-stakes.

If this work succeeds, we turn the most promising candidates into testable research programs and eventually into scalable interventions.

That means asking questions like:

• Which candidate accelerant habits correlate with long-term learning gains?

• Which can be intentionally cultivated in children?

• Which are cheap and high-leverage?

• Which can be taught in ways that survive contact with real classrooms?

• Which collapse into shallow performance when schools operationalize them badly?

• Which could be embedded into assessments, curriculum, teacher training, or classroom culture without being instantly Goodharted?

If we can identify even a small number of habits that reliably improve the quality of future learning, and if those habits can be cultivated early and at scale, then the returns are compounding. A child who becomes better at noticing confusion, distinguishing understanding from performance, updating on evidence, or forming real concepts rather than pseudo-concepts will become easier to teach in every year that follows, across many domains, for life.

What success looks like

In the short term, success would mean:

• a clear and compelling public framing of Accelerant Habits as a neglected educational question

• a curated body of responses from serious thinkers across disciplines

• a preliminary taxonomy of candidate learning accelerants

• a stronger synthesis of existing academic work and open gaps

• a well-articulated proposal of my own, including possible implementation paths

• a visible enough body of work to attract further collaborators, critics, and researchers

In 6–12 months, success would mean:

• a more mature research agenda around the most promising candidates

• collaboration with people stronger than me in academic research, experimental design, and educational measurement

• identification of one or more candidate habits that are concrete enough to test

• the beginnings of pilot designs or observational studies aimed at long-term learning effects

In the longest horizon, success would mean helping shift education toward a better target altogether: away from short-term symbolic performance, and toward the cultivation of minds that can genuinely understand and keep learning.

Why me

I have spent years circling and deeply thinking about what makes a person ‘wise’ and how it can be cultivated. Beyond the theoretical talk, I have over 17 years of experience in educational capacities, both in schools and out.

My passion has always been the cultivation of greater humans. We should leave this world with a generation more capable and wiser than us.

What I need

I need time, legitimacy, and runway.

Funding would allow me to dedicate serious time to:

• research across academic and intellectual traditions

• writing and publishing the core essays

• outreach and correspondence with thinkers who should be part of this inquiry

• building and organizing the candidate map

• creating a body of work substantial enough to earn further collaboration

Just as important, support from a funder would provide enough signal of seriousness to help me get a foot in the door with academics and intellectuals who might otherwise not engage at this early stage.

He proclaimed that a divine nation would act as judge between nations. A space designated for justice, but not between mere men, but between collectives. Tribes and empires taking counsel of peace.

The result of this pure justice: mankind destroys their own weapons and turns them into tools of agriculture. Methods of flourishing, rather than destruction. Nuclear energy, instead of nuclear bombs.

It feels impossibly distant. I think I might feel even more distant from this prophecy than Isaiah himself did. Maybe he imagined that this utopia was just years or decades away. I’ve seen it wait some twenty-five-hundred years; it’s unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime. It’s a bitter pill. People will continue to kill people at scale.

But a nagging hope persists. Maybe, just maybe, all the acceleration in technology and culture of the last centuries point at world peace not being just the empty stuff of Miss America competitions. Maybe the fact that it’s even reached the lips of Miss America is a sign of its progress, even if incomplete.

The land Isaiah describes is one where the aims of technology are transferred from means of violence to peaceful cultivation. Can such a transition be an effect of a technology itself? Or must it come from a shift in society? It’s not easy to cleanly split these from each other. For example, the internet is clearly a physical technological achievement, one that wasn’t feasible in the 16th century. That said, is it not a societal shift? Aren’t Wikipedia, Twitter and Claude cultural technologies? They reorganize the way we think about the world. Like Isaiah’s prophecy they tempt us with possibilities of the world. Unlike Isaiah, their integrity is unclear.

The Cold War impressed on humanity that there is a possible game over. There is an end, of which there is no return. But Isaiah’s vision tells a different story—there is a type of wisdom of no return as well. It is hard to imagine the literate world losing its capacity at reading and writing, even with the visual media that abound and the TikTok meth drip. What if the brotherhood of humanity was as functional as literacy? The vision of universal justice is one where the concept of war is as ludicrous as throwing a human into a volcano for better rains.

Alas, we have yet to destroy all incentives for wars. Our wisdom has not climbed enough.

What can I do but carry the torch and echo Isaiah’s words? Some person, or scenius will reach that stability where harmony is the norm. I’m a weakling. I have no power to bless the world with. I am just here, repeating blessed words. That’s something important.

The grapes we can’t reach yet are not sour, but the sweetest in the world. Life is too beautiful and glorious to be spent on destroying the lives of others.

a heart thumps gratitude

for every love, from birth

to now

even the dead — and the memories of love

spill into my chest

light – a gentle glow lightly

permeates the vast hall of humanity

and touching souls

I am touched as well

piercing barriers

my love shines on the

beasts, the plants, the minerals

Stars bask and gurgle in my sparkle

rays reach the dark infinite

and void beauty is a vehicle for G-d

love touches the edge of the world,

oh! my heart!

bursting with wonder

such a feeble body can radiate

power unfathomable

I often find myself confused when I think. My thoughts seem to lead me to places that seem new. And I think to myself “But surely I’m not the first person to think this?!”

Now with AI I can often find out who the people are who’ve already touched these topics. And I almost always find that they kinda suck. This is bewildering, to be honest. I know I’m not so smart. But I also know I’m not so dumb. I think I must be missing some sort of basic skill other people picked up.

It feels like I’m seeing one-hundred dollar bills all over the floor everywhere! So many great ideas, how am I the first to see them? If it was just one, I’d say I’m lucky. But now, I begin to wonder if I’m hallucinating.

Sometimes, my ideas feel so ‘out there’ and divergent from the conversations around me. I look at the world, and nobody seems to see what I’m seeing. Then, I share my thoughts to other people and they just nod and say “of course, that makes sense.” As if my thoughts are these dim and dumb banalities.

This makes me very confused. Why am I so bad at judging the novelty of my thoughts?

There is the possibility that I’m a genius. But that seems highly unlikely. Another possibility is that I’m a lazy researcher, and my ideas have either been exhausted or proven obsolete and I don’t get that far. This one seems likely.

One of the things that helps me think about this is the fact that the people I judge to be highly intelligent treat me as an intelligent person. I’m highly confident of this judgment. So I guess I’m smart. Yay!

And yet… my ideas don’t seem to go anywhere. Sometimes, I myself don’t really know where they can go. My hunch is that there is this crazy weird skill that seems impossible for me right now—transforming ideas into energy waves that reshape the material they flow through.

It’s a pretty metaphor. But it also shows how ignorant I am. There must be a better way to talk about how to activate a good idea.

Learning circles. The whole point is that we are learning together. Experts and novices together. It’s totally fine to make it exclusive: only people who’ve done the reading, can solve these kinds of problems or have x years of experience are invited. Most importantly, every circle has one fundamental rule of exclusion: only those that come to learn are welcome. These are fine gates. But once we enter, the students need to be as entitled as the teacher to think and explore.

Imagine it like this: by acts of thinking, asking, provoking, explaining, challenging, conjecturing, guessing, answering, demanding, claiming—a web of energy is formed between the learners, each contributing their own magic. When the spell is properly cast (and the same spell cannot be cast twice), a portal is opened. Now the influx of wisdom from on high comes and overflows into the circle, pulling the mages into an ecstasy.

If you’ve ever been in a circle like this, you know this is hardly a metaphor.

Compare it to the domineering lecturer, who cannot handle an exchange that lasts more than three minutes, because “we have material to get through”. Is there any greater slayer of wisdom than rushing? Is understanding so whimsical that it can be pushed aside in order to whoop an empty victory?

Not only do we mourn the wisdom that is lost, and the contact with reality that flees the halls of the blind and deaf. There is also the loss of mages. If you’ve been in enough circles, you can cast spells with a child. And you can train them to be a wizard, too.

What good is a life without magic?!

A world without mages will quickly become a world of beasts.

And knowledge of a skill feels like something inside us. We have mastered a skill and can deploy it, perhaps analogous to the way a master can command a loyal and competent slave.

To teach is to give another person knowledge. Something we own knowledge and give it as a gift. Like a fire being passed on, we lose nothing.

Alternative Story:

We are in the world and look around, amazed and in wonder of what we see. Knowing something means looking at it and seeing. If we really know it, we know where it is in the world, and can find it, following the subtle trails in the jungle to see it again.

Knowing a skill means being able to shift our attention salience and see reality in a different lens.

To teach is to walk along with our students in the world, stopping and pointing at things worth noticing.

Is knowledge in us, or are we immersed in it?

A third story:

We are in the world and look around, amazed and in wonder of what we see. But sometimes, we need to climb a mountain. So we bring other knowledge with us—boots, water and so on, to help us reach the summit and look.

And then we can see.

The Gorgias Problem: Why Seeming Is Cheaper Than Being

My main focus is still on the Gorgias Problem:

It takes less energy to make something seem than it does to make it really be.

With regards to information movement this becomes:

It take less energy to make a person convicted of a belief than it does to make them understand.

Gorgias Problem = Shallowness Discounting

This problem needs renaming as and have argued. For now, I’m thinking of naming it ‘Shallowness Discounting’ because shallowness is an apt metaphor for seeming, and discounting points to the fact that it costs less resources than depth. I’m not sure it’s the best name because shallowness implies a weakness, but one can have incredibly strong conviction without understanding. All suggestions welcome.

Richard Skemp on Shallowness Discounting in Math Education

In the context of education I’ve been reading “The Psychology of Learning Mathematics” by Richard Skemp. Good book, I’ll probably read some more of his work. You can get the gist of his direction by reading this great paper on mathematics. He makes a distinction between automatic vs mechanical skill. The idea is simple. At first, there is a big gap between someone who is trying to understand and gain conceptual knowledge and someone who is working on sheer symbolic manipulation. The conceptual learner is much slower, spending lots of time and energy to understand what is happening here. In contrast, the symbolic manipulator will quickly be able to solve problems that fit the structure taught; they are gaining a mechanical skill. But the conceptual learner, with practice, will gain such fluency that they will be able to do the skill automatically. The Shallowness Discounting at work in math education! But notice another mess, that for an unsuspecting observer, the automatic and mechanical mathematicians look identical. And even tests won’t catch who is doing which. It’s only when you raise the bar and ask a new type of problem that the difference surfaces. But just read his 8 page paper above and enjoy.

Vygotskyian Pseudo-Concepts—Good or Bad?

I’m also always circling back to Vygotsky’s concept of pseudo-concepts1 and how shallowness can serve the creation of depth. My hunch is that pseudo-concepts can be useful in discovering a concept, but that there is a difference between pseudo-concepts that are reality formed vs those that are symbolically formed. Two different kinds of pseudo-concepts, if you will. So as you are trying to figure out a concept and watching reality, you’re likely to conceive of pseudo-concepts on the way, and this is fine (what Vygotsky noted). For example, you might come to think that emotional resonance is the criteria for good decision making. And then later on, you’ll see that this concept is actually false, and that it’s only one factor to be weighed, but not the actual criteria for a good decision. But if you are building pseudo-concepts through symbolic manipulation, there’s some sort of block that makes your mistake not only misleadingly conducive, but also restraining for getting to the true (or better) concept. I get stuck here with some hunch that people who use symbolic manipulation end up distorting their operating system in a way that makes their contact with reality worse. Really not sure what to make of that.

Socrates, Egan and I

I am convinced that a method for educating past the Gorgias Problem is via Socratic Conversations, as pioneered by Socrates! And as a tool for teaching children by Michael Strong. I designed and taught a Socratic Parenting Course with Michael in the past, and I have been thinking about how to create a better and more user-friendly presentation of the craft. For that, I’m working with Alessandro Gelmi, and using Egan’s ideas to help map out what is going on here.

Metaphors for Knowledge

Lastly, (but actually quite frequently,) I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of knowledge and how different metaphors capture different aspects. I’m currently enjoying this contrast

1. Seeing vs. Having

2. Being immersed in a knowledge field vs. containing a knowledge field

3. Standing in wonder/awe/horror vs. pride

4. Boundlessness of knowledge vs scarcity

I greatly encourage you to go out and see if you can apply these metaphors to yourself and your own stance towards knowledge.

Well, that’s most of it. Any feedback, encouragement, critique, or whatever welcome!

Judge: How can you steal from people that trust you?

Criminal: It’s actually much harder to steal from people that don’t trust you.

6. As a rule, we have a hard time understanding anyone who is far above or below our intelligence1. It would be nice if the more intelligent interlocutor would always be able to match the level of the dumber one, but they can’t. Case: my 9yo, bless him, often has a hard time saying things that make sense to his 5yo and 3yo siblings. And he doesn’t have enough intelligence to understand how different they are. Not his fault; simply put, not all people have an advanced enough theory of mind with regards to the plurality of manners of thinking2.

7. For an educator, the question of how others think is one of the most important ones. And it is in the how that stupidity lies. This is important.

8. Neil Postman wrote an essay titled The Educationalist as Painkiller. The rundown is that instead of focusing on cultivating wisdom, which is hard, we should focus on stupidity and try to root it out, because it’s easier to spot stupidity than wisdom. Interestingly enough, everybody will generally agree that it’s easier to identify stupidity over wisdom—HOWEVER(!!!) the word ‘stupidity’ means very different things to different people. In fact, one of the stupid symptoms is thinking that everyone who disagrees with me on things that I cannot imagine otherwise is stupid. At a slightly higher level, one considers that anyone who is not in the know (You didn’t know that the Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell?! Retard.) The wiser version is that stupid is as stupid does, and what matters more is how you think, not what you think. And I would make the case that a good educator needs to know this, at the very least implicitly. There is possibly an even better definition of stupidity, but alas, it is hard to identify wisdom, and this is my ceiling right now.

9. If the job of the educator is to snipe stupidity, then he or she needs to develop a sensitivity around what the typical process errors are. There are oh, so many. I do not have a clear list, and most educators don’t, because we are performance artists, and because making a list like this is damn hard. A great research project would be to get excellent educators, have them teach things (to a broad variety of capacities) and record their interventions and make this list. It would be great.

10. Neil Postman’s list, sadly, does not impress me. Much like lists of cognitive biases and the like, they are only useful for people who already have an intellectual digestive system that can process that information into new practices. For that sliver, it’s great. For the vast majority, it simply doesn’t do anything. For an educationalist, this list would be useful for a specific high-quality level of students who are at least sixteen years old.

11. What would be useful is a ladder that starts with “Can you do A? Can you do B?” where A, B, C… are next steps on the process of the most serious ailments of stupidity to the most subtle ones. A, B and C, are not facts, but processes or habits of thought3.

12. See this and this. And the question is if when you see stupidity if you can understand what is wrong? And here’s where Postman fails again. Not all stupidity is a type of illness ailing a healthy body. Many types of stupidity are simply from bad eating and no exercise. Which is to say that you need to add something positive in order to make someone less dumb.

13. And while some people who can’t do cognitive tasks are lacking information, more often than not we are actually lacking a stance. The whole ecology of our mind is simply unable to deal with the task at hand.

14. And so, with regards to our advanced version of Theory of Mind, an educator needs to understand that a way of thinking that is obvious for him or herself is not accessible for the pupils. A simple example: not everyone can notice if they understand something. Some people are so insensitive to their own reading comprehension, that they can read something, substitute the meaning of the words for whatever sorta, kinda fit, and have no clue that this is what happened. Of course, we all can make this mistake, but for some people, the ability to realize that this is a type of mistake they can make is simply beyond their grasp. For them, the text says whatever came to their mind when they read it.

15. I agree with Michael Strong that hereditary IQ is not the problem here. It is a problem of education institutions that simply do not understand the nature of stupidity nor wisdom. Because even well-schooled people can be idiots.

16. If you agree that how people think is more important than what people think, ask yourself which parts of schooling were focused on the how? Did you have classes that focused on reasoning skills in real life situations? Were there any incentives in the structure to actually make you better at thinking and not to regurgitate facts and mathematical algorithms?

17. And with this in mind, it should be clear that the relatively harsh judgment of the current state of many people’s intellectual capacity is not a verdict of despair but of hope. Because we haven’t even tried fixing it yet, not on scale at least.

Thank you to for Inkuary and useful comments on my rough draft!

1. Sometimes I meet an emotionally mature person, with high intelligence and a lust for life AND that same person is not raising a family. I get bummed out from that.

2. Changing diapers is a practice in gratitude. Somebody did this for you, many, many, many, times.

3. Cultivating the love of your own parents is underrated. There are usually obstacles in the way. Sometimes like bad guys in a dark alley (possible real danger), sometimes like ghosts of an abandoned castle (fictitious danger).

4. Parents should brag about their children more, the way entrepreneurs brag about their successful start-ups. “That killer is my genes AND my education, with more than 10,000 hours of investment, thought and worry. YEAH! THAT KID KICKS ASS!”

5. Hence, it is also beautiful to compliment other people on their wonderful children.

6. Bitching about your kids and how hard it is might be honest. But maybe your second-order desire should be figuring out how to change that. Honesty and wisdom do much better together than separate.

7. Don’t be disingenuous with the compliments you give your kids. And if you aren’t able to find real successes, either help them become more capable, or help yourself see beauty!

8. When my children were born, I did not have that ‘I will die for you’ epiphany. But long-term, I have a very strong voice in my head commanding me to stay safe because I have people depending on me for a flourishing life.

9. Don’t let schools or homework steal your children from you, or you from them. It’s not fair that your interactions are labor instead of play.

10. Your children are likely to have your own flaws, and this is usually fine. They are also likely to have your spouse’s flaws, and this is a much trickier problem. Be kind, as you would be to the younger version of your spouse. Help your kids grow up without the scars your spouse probably suffered at the hands of his/her own parents.

11. Clowning has been one of the biggest parenting upgrades for me. PLAY MORE! LAUGH MORE! EVERYTHING IS SILLY!

12. Kids are much funnier than you think, but you might need to look sideways.

13. Don’t let your kids embarrass you in public. This does not require discipline. This requires loving them, and being OK with growth being a process (duh!). It also might require you to stop judging other people and their kids.

14. Parenting advice is usually good for some people, and bad for others, and it takes discretion to know how it will play out for you. It also takes trial and error. You might need to clown to mitigate the damages. But that might also make it worse.

15. I have a hard time trusting people who investigate what a human is (cognitively, emotionally, developmentally, etc.) that don’t spend a lot of time around kids. It’s kind of like investigating the current state of a government without doing any history research.

16. We lie to kids, because the truth would be just as dishonest. That’s ok. I often tell my kids ‘When you’re older I’ll explain it, or you’ll understand yourself.’ It lets them taste the wonder and excitement of life.

17. Children are beautiful. Adults are beautiful. People who can only see the beauty in one are missing out. Help them.

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But that’s not what I observe. Instead, I notice that I can pretty quickly tell from a quick interaction with somebody else (and sometimes just from reading their writing) what kind of conversation they are capable of. Certain types of communication make it evident that other types are available or not. That’s why it seems to make more sense to me to talk about epistemic stages instead of tools.

This is strange at first glance. After all, we can imagine a person who is good at detecting one fallacy but blind to others. We can imagine a person who knows all the names of biases but cannot introspect accurately. The popularity of podcasts and books about these things implies some sort of toolkit for sale. But then, why does my experience ring true? And I know it’s not just me–I can tell that certain people can immediately tell about me that I have good epistemic game.

My answer is elitist in a sense: people in lower epistemic stages systematically misinterpret these supposed tools. They don’t integrate them as tools at all. They absorb them into an entirely different operating system. Their vocabulary might have the same symbols, but what they refer to is drastically different. And the things you are trying to refer to don’t exist as hard items for them.

Let’s call the lower level “Q’s” because they think in quotations that feel right. For Q, the categories true/right/good collapse into one bucket. The opposite false/wrong/bad is also one bucket. A Q hears something and put it into a bucket. They check if it fits well with the good one or the bad one.

So when you introduce a critical-thinking concept to a Q, like a fallacy, they don’t hear “This refers to a structural error in reasoning that I might commit,” because they don’t have a truth bucket. And errors are BAD. Instead you get: “this is a bad thing that bad people do. The other team.” In those rosy places where there is no other team, its little kids, or just uninteresting and dropped.

The point is that Q’s cannot imagine themselves committing a fallacy, because their epistemic structure doesn’t have a space for truth independent of good/bad. So “fallacy” is just a moralized tag. It’s not introspective.

This explains why, when you inhabit S-thinking (that what I call the higher tier, where you think in symbols, with awareness of the symbolic nature of thoughts) you experience Q-thinking people as having a low conversational ceiling.

You might say something like: I know people who are great lawyers/engineers/doctors/scholars etc. And you need to be smart to do that, and Q people can’t do that! So they must be S!

Sucks to be wrong.

Q people can learn tools of rationality and apply it to specific domains. But they stink at carrying it over. At least that’s the research I found,but would love to be proven wrong. I would need to rethink all of this.

If I’m right then the pedagogy changes. You realize if you want to help Q → S, you need to smash the collapsed buckets. Knowing if something is good is not the same as knowing that it is true. And knowing that it is false, does not mean it is bad to even entertain seriously. Until you break this frame Mr. and Mrs. Q will misinterpret every epistemic tool you give them. It won’t mean what you are trying to say. At all! (This explains the misinformation slop)

Once I realized this I noticed how awesome it is that Maimonides starts The Guide (Section 1 chapter 2) by distinguishing between things that are “true/false” and “good/bad”. Essentially, he knows that without clarity on this, you won’t be able to read his book. (Or any other book for that matter.)

But Q’s need scaffolding. You need to give them stepping stones. But note: the stepping stones are about creating the distinct category of truth/false. They need their own feedback loop that uses different tests than good/bad. This is not the same as teaching them about fallacies. That does not help this split.

The base is a freakish introspective metacognition:

• Knowing what you actually know vs. what you merely affirm. Understanding vs Belief.
  

• Recognizing that you can believe something without understanding it. The nature of belief.
  

• Distinguishing “I understand this because I can reconstruct it” from “I believe this because it feels familiar.” Feeling the difference between explanation and mere recitation. The difference between Understanding and Belief.
  

Once a person can do that, then teaching them fallacies works and makes them think better. You’re giving them good shortcuts that will make them more effective. And without it, you might not be doing much. An interesting research question is if it’s easier to first teach people to identify this in other people or with themselves first1.

If you mix this with the Gorgias Problem, it should be evident to you why schools will consistently push for Q thinking in almost all domains (including math!). This is actually an important fact, because it makes it seem more plausible that people don’t need to wait until they are in their 20’s to get out of Q thinking. They just need a different environment. I have some reason to believe this, because I’ve seen different environments (like my home) that makes a 9yo’s S-level put most adults to shame.

Final note: I kind of hate this, because I’m rooting for Egan’s tools over Kegan’s stages. It also means that my idea of creating a tool that would help identify fallacies would be useless at cleaning up the epistemics of a space.

I used a lil’ AI to take my notes and put them as an essay, and then went over it and changed it a bunch. But if some of it’s annoying voice comes out, it’s not me!

If that makes sense, great. Otherwise, go read a bunch of things from or get a copy of ’s book. Not really sure who else has written coherently on this. To be honest, not really sure they have either. It’s an emerging field.

Maybe you’re thinking- “Oh! I know this! This is about fighting misinformation!” Well… kinda. Lots of people talk about fighting misinformation and there is a whole field of academic research on this. You would think they are doing what OMI is trying to do. However, if you look into it, you’ll see that this field is overwhelmingly biased towards how to make people believe legacy narratives or place trust in people who the author places trust in. In other words, it feels marginally related to dealing with the question of objectively upping the network epistemology, and much more like a psyop with a few rainbow sprinkles. I love rainbow sprinkles, but not when they are trying to cover up the taste of shit.

So—what am I working on?

The Gorgias Problem

Socrates makes a simple distinction in the dialogue “Gorgias”. He describes ‘make-up’ as being a way of seeming to be beautiful, while athletics is the way to truly be beautiful. Similarly, a pastry chef makes food that seems better, but a nutritionist would give you food that actually is better for you.

All of this is a way of pointing at the fact that there are rhetoricians whose skill is in making arguments seem better. They don’t actually instruct you or give you understanding, only sheer belief and conviction.

Inspired by this part of the dialogue (there’s more and it’s really good, and you should read it), I frame the Gorgias problem thus:

With regards to the passing of information this becomes:

What I’m currently doing is keeping the Gorgias Problem front and center in my mind. Inspired by Eviatar Zerubavel’s work, I’m trying to keep the seeming/being dichotomy in my awareness, so that I can recognize cases in the wild. I’m especially focused on believing/understanding, and their counterparts when one is still in a state of seeking data ignorant/nescient. This probably doesn’t make sense to you, but that’s ok. I’m working on writing it up in a coherent matter. If it did make sense to you, please tell me! That means you’ve probably thought about this and can help me understand this better!

Drumroll…

The other project I’m working on is very exciting. It’s also hard for me, and I want to commit to it in public as an incentive not to give up.

I’m designing a Custom GPT that takes for input any information, and interrogates you to understand what aspect of if you want conceptually mapped out with OMI concepts. What an ugly sentence, but beautiful idea.

This is hard because this is the first Custom GPT I’m making. I’ve seen awesome ones like ’s Values GPT. So, I know this is possible. It just might take a lot of work.

Another reason this is hard, is that it’s not like I’ve got a clear glossary of concepts I’m working with. I’m kinda making it up as I go along, and am hoping that once this proto-type gets out, people will be more excited to contribute to OMI, with the knowledge that it might get added to the Custom GPT.

The Future

The only way to find out is to go there. Wanna join my journey! DM’s are open! Or comments here too!

What good are muscular arms

While my face–

Chunks of putrid flesh fall

Roll down

My shirt soiled from mucus and blood

Pieces of my face sink into the mud that has already begun swallowing my shoes

—-

I prostrate

Before you–my Lord!

My Source! My Father!

The Womb that holds me!

—-

Accept me as you created me

With the capacity to sin, repent and sin again

Nighttime Meditation

A cloud shaped like a lion

Then—not

Exuberant muscular body

Now—rot

Salvador Dali- L’amour de Pierrot

A skull, symbol of death. When you look closer you see a duet of clowns, romancing. This painting is an invitation; when death stares at you, with utter and devastating finality, look deeper at the tragedy. Does it not stem from the beauty of life? Is not death evil because life is good? Life—full of whimsy and love.

Poetry

Charles Baudelaire- The Carcass

I recently ordered “Fleurs du Mal” (Oxford edition), and so far The Carcass is one of my favorite poems. “The Albatross” is another.

A meditation on beauty and rot. Maybe something can be salvaged.

Walt Whitman

O Living Always, Always Dying & A Noiseless Patient Spider

I have a deep appreciation for these two poems, both from Leaves of Grass. Both of them gift us with memorable imagery. The metaphors are truly bridges. They give us a new way of imagining; Ourselves and our past and future; ourselves and the exploration to the meaning in the world around us.

Short Stories

Donald Barthelme- A shower of Gold

One of my favorite short story authors. Always surreal and funny.

If you like Salman Rushdie, Etgar Karet,or Rick and Morty. (Rushdie and Karet have both read and discussed Barthelme’s stories on The New Yorker podcast.)

Here’s one that tackle’s modernity’s loss of meaning in the chaos.

Film

The Truman Show

Maybe you’ve seen it already. I recently rewatched it after 20 years. Very dark, in a way I was not able to fathom when I was younger, but also made me laugh out loud.

This is probably one of the more ‘discussable’ films. It provokes many thoughts on authenticity. Some people think of themselves as Truman, my thoughts are always led to consider that I might be an unwitting cast member.

NonFiction

Charles Taylor- Responsibility for Self

I cannot find this essay online, but I highly recommend it. Taylor makes a compelling case both against Sartre’s arbitrariness of values, as well as the Utilitarian ‘flattening’ of the quality of values.

Underlying his whole argument is an appeal to human intuition about meaningfulness.

I’m not too keen on putting anything from Substack here— you probably know how to find things you like yourself.

Zekaria Tamer

I haven’t been able to find much online in English from Tamer. He’s a political writer, but it comes out in Aesop-esque fables blended with modern absurdity and a dark comic sense.

This is his most famous text: Tigers on the Tenth Day

https://mslaurieenglish.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tigers-on-the-tenth-day-by-zakaria-tamer-_-wadistocracy-d988d8a7d8afd98ad982d8b1d8a7d8b7d98ad8a9-copy.pdf

Spencer Holst

Another master of the short story. Described as a mix between “Hans Christen Anderson and Franz Kafka.” He’s funny. I see him more like a modern Oscar Wilde blended with some post-modern meta vibes. When I say Oscar Wilde I’m thinking ‘The Happy Prince’ more than ‘Dorian Gray’ I’d recommend starting with the Zebra Storyteller or The Language of Cats

https://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/holst_spencer/00index.html

What a Thought, Shirley Jackson

This is a favorite of mine. A blend of horror and comedy. In many ways the perfect short story in my opinion. One scene. If you read only one thing from this list, read this.

https://biblioklept.org/2024/11/23/read-what-a-thought-a-short-story-by-shirley-jackson/

Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House

I mean, you’ve heard of Vonnegut, right? He’s the best.

A wonderful collection of short stories including the famous “Harrison Bergeron”. Vonnegut dives into deep topics with a story telling vibe that feels esoteric; you can simply enjoy the surface level story as a funky sci-fi adventure and/or piece of literature OR you can notice the deep underlying questions that don’t have an easy answer.

In “The Report on the Barnhouse Effect” the question of how to differentiate between happiness and goodness is provoked, but no answer is given. “Unready to Wear” gets us to consider what it means to enter a world of new norms, especially in the realm of what’s now called trans-humanism. It also points at interesting theological/metaphysical questions about the bodiless afterlife.

If you’ve never read Vonnegut (loser!), I’d recommend starting with the novel (my personal favorite) ‘Cat’s Cradle’. But if you want easily read, thought provoking short stories to meditate on— ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’ is fun and serious at the same time.

Honestly, I’m just trying to bully you into reading him.

Poetry

Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes

https://allpoetry.com/hawk-roosting

This poem reminds me of a meditation I used to do. I’d turn off the lights, put on headphones on max volume and play horror ambient playlists from Spotify. My main practice was to (1) stay completely calm and (2) play the role of the predator in the situation. It was essentially a way to shift perspectives from victim to criminal— with trust that this would play out for me in life as a shift from tension to playfulness.

This poem by Ted Hughes feels something like that practice in words.

The Hammers by Ralph Hodgson

A poem about impermanence, or from how I see it, how whatever is not actively maintained rots.

I learned this one by heart, and it’s quite fun to play on repeat.

https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/hammers-1

James Ensor

This is his art. I love it. I think of it as Sesame Street if Thomas Ligotti was the producer