Idea black holes

You are a rational thinker.

Ever since you were born, you’ve been racing through a universe of ideas: creating, evaluating, disputing, engaging with, and being bombarded by…

Ideas.

Like a particle from the Big Bang, you have bounced around the universe until you found yourself here.

Reading, pondering, considering.

Thinking is the foundation by which we establish our reality.

Over time you should master this skill, and yet people seem to get stuck on ideas. People stumble into ideologies and then keep falling deeper into them. These can be ideologies of philosophy, identity, interests, career, or beyond.

Just as a particle whizzing around in the universe can fall into a black hole, people too can get stuck on an idea, cross an event horizon, and never come back.

You see this phenomenon often, and it frequently manifests as a part of someone’s identity.

For me, this raises some questions. You and I think of ourselves as rational thinkers, so:

Why do people fall into these idea black holes and get stuck?
How do we know when this is happening to us?
Is there a way to climb out of a black hole?
Is there a way to never get stuck in the first place?
Should we aspire to get stuck on an idea if it’s the best?

Before we start, it’s important to understand how our trajectories in the universe start in the first place.

In his book “How We Learn”, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explores the innate ways babies behave like statisticians and scientists. Each child has genetically instantiated priori, and they then learn with experiments to prove, disprove, and augment their mental models.

In an unadulterated environment, with eight billion people on the planet, we would have eight billion unique idea trajectories. Yet, we somehow settle on similar paths, and not just because someone uses good rhetoric against us.

Some ideas are just simply good (an objective property), and these rightly attract our attention, but just as many are bad ideas, and we yet still subscribe to them. We fall into black holes.

Question 1: Why do people fall into these idea black holes and get stuck?

Evaluation gravity.

Rational thinkers will, or should, have some criteria or rubric to evaluate things in their lives. This could be a principle, ranking, or algorithm. A notable phenomenon occurs when someone is falling into an idea black hole: they don’t seem to mind. Their evaluation criteria has shifted to match the black hole into which they are falling.

Most people would start off with a fairly standard evaluation rubric when they begin to approach a new idea. As soon as that idea begins to convince the thinker, maybe by landing a few good points, the thinker’s rubric will likely have shifted to value that idea more.

As any idea presents itself to someone, they may begin to augment their idea-evaluating rubric, depending on what they are evaluating. It is an inherent conflict of interest; it creates vicious cycles and instantiates idea event horizons.

The crypto excitement phenomenon is an example of evaluation gravity.

Decentralized finance is interesting, and I don’t doubt that there are compelling use cases, yet I think the vast majority of people have become overly fixated on this technology. Their original rubric was augmented to be more focused on decentralization, and so therefore any other spaces of technology became entirely unexciting to them; crypto represented a grand vision of the future. Crypto was not just a possible solution either, its positioning as the future of finance became an “accepted truth”.

Once the rubric shifted enough, and certainty was found, it took shape in the form of identity. All of a sudden, there was a fanatical group of tech workers acting as ‘crypto-bros’.

What starts this spiral can often just be good rhetoric, which would exist symmetrically with truthful and untruthful ideas. A perfectly rational thinker would still be able to move towards better ideas by only focusing on the pursuit of truth (an idea with truth on its side will be able to consistently prove itself to be more credible and have more facts that support it). Alas, we are not perfectly rational thinkers.

We suffer from evaluation gravity, where ideas we accept through our evaluatory framework then inform the next iteration of our framework.

Paul Graham says to “keep your identity small”. Currently, people first identify with a group, and then incorporate that group’s larger beliefs into their own personally held beliefs because it is now their “identity”. A self-identified crypto-bro may find themselves defending even the most ridiculous of projects simply because they feel personally affiliated with the crypto name. These defenses work to entrench themselves even deeper within the gravitational pull.

This was the final phase of people completely buying into the crypto vision for the future. Will it one day be the industry standard? Perhaps, yet a significant number of investors and speculators have experienced great losses, simply because they were sucked into an idea black hole. There was excitement, and then there was nothingness.

It’s easy to recognize when others are falling, but it is notably much more difficult to notice when you are the one falling.

Another example: hypermasculinity and “alpha-ness”. In the past decade, these ideologies have been positioned as solutions for disaffected young men.

When role models and influencers in the “alpha” space were increasing in popularity, the media attention they garnered was predominantly ridicule. The media would focus on their most outlandish views; however, the media failed to see what real “alpha” fans were witnessing as they approached the event horizon. These role models presented a modern and success-driven version of stoicism, meaning that many of their messages discussed working hard and turning yourself into a ‘valuable’ person.

These messages were not what people found disagreeable.

For a lot of the viewers, these messages represented not just good rhetoric, but unimpeachable logic. They framed this strong logic as a trait of being an “alpha”. The rubric shifted. The viewer now places slightly more value on “alpha-ness” than before.

This repeats and repeats until the viewer is now finding certainty within an idea.

Their evaluation gravity is stronger than before, so much so it might just pull them past the event horizon. They are lost to an idea black hole.

From an outside perspective, it seems ridiculous. However, if you consider how many views and ideas you see as ridiculous, you might begin to consider how many ideas you hold that someone else might consider ridiculous.

Our goal should be to approach ideas slowly, so…

Question 2: How do we know when this is happening to us?

I use a heuristic of my own invention that I call the “personal horizon”.

The personal horizon is the amount of time ago when you were substantively unrecognizable from who you are now.

Yesterday’s Logan seems fairly similar to Today’s Logan, but if you walk that logic far enough back you eventually find a version of yourself that makes very different decisions, has wildly different thoughts, and does not feel like you at all.

That amount of time is my personal horizon. It is the line between you and someone who doesn’t resemble you anymore.

At various points in my life, my horizon has had variable lengths. Sometimes it would be years, other times it would be months, weeks, or days (in particularly impactful situations). Monumental change shifts your horizon in monumental ways.

The personal horizon is an important tool to determine if you’re in or approaching a black hole.

Since somebody stuck in a black hole would make similar decisions over long periods of time, then if you don’t feel very different from a past version of yourself, it can be a sign that you’ve been, and still are, engulfed in a black hole.

Question 3: Is there a way to climb out of a black hole?

Yes.

I propose three solutions to prevent getting stuck:

Fallibilism—To fight against hubris and overconfidence
Hill-climbing—To fight against indoctrination in a specific direction
Shrinking your identity—To fight against evaluation gravity

Fallibilism

You are wrong often. Confidence can be imagination.

You should approach every ideological debate as a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀.

It may be much easier to continue with a long-held perspective than it is to change one, but you shouldn’t strive for easy ideas, you should strive for good ones.

Within a black hole your beliefs are unquestionable. You are certain.

This is a dogmatic way of thinking.

Any idea, no matter how “good” or fundamental, must be able to be questioned. It is in this challenge that we may find flaws and reaffirm our beliefs with more rigorous analysis.

If the ideas you have are not fallible, then you will remain fixed in one way of thinking.

Good ideas will stand up to the best research we can throw at them.

Bad ideas will eventually break down as we find better and better tools to explore them.

Viewing any idea as fallible is in your best interest. Aiming for certainty and concreteness will only guide you into the grips of a black hole.

Hill-climbing

Hill-climbing is a classic math and computer science optimization problem. You are placed in an initial position and the goal is to reach the highest hill. The difficulty is that there are many hills nearby, and it’s difficult to algorithmically determine which is the highest peak given the constraints of the problem. There are many possible hills, but only one hill is the highest.

In hill-climbing, the solution is the algorithm you use. A naive solution would look around from the starting position, take a step in the direction that is steepest upwards, and repeat until you can no longer go higher (you have reached the summit).

However, unless you started on the highest hill through sheer luck, you would never reach the highest peak or even begin to explore other options. We need something more clever.

For this essay, you can think of hills as being idea black holes, trapping you in a set of ideas that may not be the true “highest peaks”.

Currently, the hill-climbing algorithms that seem to perform best introduce an element of randomness. If you are too narrow-minded and hyper-focused on your immediate circumstances, you are in a prime position to slip past other options and fall into an idea event horizon.

In hill-climbing, randomness means what it sounds like: rather than just going and climbing the first hill you see, you should probably go and wander first.

Applying this to ideas, you should frequently be completing random walks and stepping far beyond your current position. This allows you to explore and test a variety of ideas.

This should ideally introduce a more balanced idea evaluation rubric; it will compel you to grow and accept new ideas and expose you to more of what the universe of ideas has to offer.

One of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had was a two-week meditation retreat in Nepal. Not only was it valuable in and of itself, but it was also a complete ideological culture shock. It forced me to reinterpret and reanalyze the “truths” I had previously held. Even if I came to some of the same conclusions, the rigor I had used to analyze them was far stronger.

A good example of growth from the retreat was my expansion and change of view on the concept of freedom. I previously valued freedom, and while this view remains, my foundation for this belief has changed significantly. Meditating on this idea allowed me to further explore my views on freedom and agency. This was captured in one of my favorite essays ‘where freedom comes from’.

Many of my other ideas were recontextualized and built upon from this experience.

Part of the reason I attended this meditation retreat (and went on the broader trip in general) was to do things that were uncomfortable to me. I chose to travel solo, go to unfamiliar places, do a meditation retreat, go sky-diving, and more, based on a simple premise: the extreme discomfort I found would be the single most important step in achieving growth.

It was the experience of diverse cultures and participation in activities that were ‘unlike’ me that made me encounter new ideas and explore them fully.

Introduce randomness into your life.

Shrinking your identity

Or, make yourself less “massive”.

Finding ways to minimize your identity and instead evaluate each idea separately is critical. Any ideology or “black hole” should be able to be broken into a series of ideas, and that series of ideas can be ranked from good to bad. Meaning, a good evaluator and a rational thinker should view these sub-ideas independently.

I used to value myself by labels. For some reason, many people seem to obsess over these as well, using quizzes like Myers-Briggs or the Political Compass to tell us who we are.

Myers-Briggs is pseudo-science.

The Political Compass test is un-nuanced.

Yet, we love our labels and we love our categories (and Buzzfeed quizzes).

If we identify with less and attach ourselves to fewer ideas, we become a less massive particle. With less mass, we find ourselves attracted less significantly to these black holes.

We can drift through space more easily without feeling the pull of these traps.

In effect

If you are on the track into a black hole:

Fallibilism and understanding that all ideas have flaws will minimize an idea black hole’s pull

Hill-climbing will jiggle your path away from falling, allowing you to explore a vast variety of ideas

Shrinking your identity will make you less massive and less likely to attach to any ideologies

With all this effort to prevent stickiness, wouldn’t it be nice if we could avoid all this work in the first place?

Question 4: Is there a way to never get stuck in the first place?

No.

Just as all ideas should be viewed as fallible, so are humans.

It’s impossible to know what misconceptions you hold when you don’t realize you hold them. A fish does not know it’s in water.

Any observation we make is indeed theory-laden. We automatically assess our observations using the knowledge we have gained thus far from the world, and since our knowledge is flawed, our observations will be as well.

I explore leveraging this power with the frequency illusion in an earlier essay.

These bad observations will lead us to dogmatic beliefs. Unsubstantiated, underdeveloped, and rife with evaluation gravity.

Could my approach be an idea black hole of its own? Could the pursuit of fallibilism, randomness, and attachment minimization be a new dogma to fall into?

Let’s consider what happens within dogmas.

Dogmatic beliefs tend to be convergent. They limit your beliefs, ideas, principles, or actions to those that are “true” or “righteous”.

These limits are the edges of the idea black hole you may find yourself in. To be within an event horizon is to be convergent. To be racing around the universe is to be divergent.

So do my prescriptions promote convergence in themselves?

Fallibilism

Proper use of fallibilism is inherently anti-dogmatic. Rather than viewing something as incontrovertibly true, it views knowledge as inconclusive and worthy of evaluation.

Fallibilism doesn’t instruct you to believe in fallibilism, it suggests that you examine things and assume them to have misconceptions. Fallibilism is the asymptotic approach to truth, not the achievement of truth.

Even fallibilism itself can be recursively examined with itself.

This belief does not ensure you converge into itself, it allows you to be a free thinker.

Hill-climbing

The introduction of random explorations into your life is also divergent.

Randomness doesn’t exponentially promote more randomness.

Randomness will promote repetition at times because that would be a random thing.

Engaging in randomness will allow you to explore and re-explore ideas, and if you find yourself transfixed, you can let yourself explore a new set of ideas properly.

This randomness helps increase the bandwidth of ideas that you can explore and evaluate.

You don’t converge into a dogmatic randomness.

Shrinking your identity

Less identity means you are less attached to specific ideologies.

Assuming an identity forces convergence. When you allow yourself to be without identity, you can participate in actions or ideas relating to any identity without being locked into that system.

In practice, you can act entirely like a specific identity, but you do so because of its own merits rather than because of the convergent prescription that the identity has forced on you. So, rather than identifying with some group or belief and needing to act accordingly, you can act accordingly simply out of want. Identity necessitates, and being identity-less enables you to chase what you desire because you are free of need.

In effect

Each of these prescriptions does not promote an exponential rise in themselves, which dogmas tend to do.

These ideas resist converging you into some given set of truths.

Instead,

they give you the freedom to diverge.

Question 5: Should we aspire to get stuck on an idea if it’s the best?

No.

A “best” idea is best relative to the authority that the idea has.

Throughout history, authority has been given by literal authorities. A fact can be deemed accurate by a governing body.

Now we have scientific systems in place that are far better at approaching better ideas, and the authority of an idea, theory, or explanation, is determined by the soundness of its reasoning and the criticisms that we levy against it.

Read Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch to explore this further.

In this regard, even our most fundamental (and correct) ideas should still be viewed with fallibilism, just like the newest ideas that we are most skeptical about. We reach better explanations by creating friction with an idea, rather than letting it rest on the sidelines unscuffed (even though I’ve argued against this in certain circumstances).

In practice, most people would probably benefit from falling into some ideas. Like “exercise frequently”, “work hard”, or “eat healthily”. Yet, even those ideas have faced problems throughout. Some thought exercising would use up your lifetime battery of energy. Working hard on things that don’t matter will not create the success you think it will. Our understanding of healthy eating is very flawed and changes constantly. You can choose to take shortcuts and fall into ideas, so long as you understand the nuance and accuracy that is sacrificed in doing so.

For this reason, while a wonderful idea can be appreciated, it should never be seen as final. Knowledge has always warped and shifted over time, some things that were once viewed as axiomatic (the flatness of the earth) are now disproven. It would involve intense hubris to truly believe that we are any different from past mistake-making humans.

In practice

If an idea seems compelling:

Try to determine if it’s creating evaluation gravity for you.

If your personal horizon is far:

Try to identify the beliefs you’ve held as unwaveringly true.

If you are trapped:

Understand that ideas are flawed, explore randomly, and decrease your attachment.

If you want to never fall in:

Know that this is impossible and do your best to avoid convergent ideas.

If you want the best ideas:

Recognize that this is a flawed aspiration, and then do your best.

The big bang

Ever since you were born, you’ve been racing through a universe of ideas: creating, evaluating, disputing, engaging with, and being bombarded by…

Ideas.

A black hole of any kind is destructive, it deletes and prevents any further movement.

You, a rational thinker, are just another particle whizzing around the universe.

I urge you to not fall into any black holes, idea or otherwise.