equivalent to an evaluation of somebody’s intellectual ability
No
equivalent to … the internal complexity of their thoughts
Closer
I think there’s going to be a higher minimum bar for higher magnitudes; I think that there are fewer people who can cut it wrestling with e.g. fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of existence (a 100,000+ day question) than there are who can cut it wrestling with e.g. questions of social coordination (a 10-100 day question in many cases).
But I think that there are a very large number of people who could, in principle, qualify to be higher-order monks, who instead apply prodigious intelligence to smaller questions one after the other all the time.
So, like, higher orders will have a higher density of smarter people, but there are ~equally upper-echelon smart people at all levels.
The 10-day version of a 10,000-day idea is an unusually valuable thing; as the old adage goes, “if I had had more time, I would have composed a shorter letter.” Distillations are difficult, especially distillations that preserve all of the crucial elements, rather than sacrificing them.
So to the extent that I might sometimes write 10-day distillations of 10,000-day ideas, this is a pretty > high-status claim, actually. It’s preserving the virtues of both orders.
A 10-day monk is wrong more often than a 1-day monk, yes? A 100-day monk is wrong more often than a 10-day monk?
It’s more that they are wrong about different things, in systematically different ways. A 10-day monk is right, about 10-day concerns viewed through 10-day ontologies, about as often as a 1-day monk or a 100-day monk, in their respective domains.
No
Closer
I think there’s going to be a higher minimum bar for higher magnitudes; I think that there are fewer people who can cut it wrestling with e.g. fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of existence (a 100,000+ day question) than there are who can cut it wrestling with e.g. questions of social coordination (a 10-100 day question in many cases).
But I think that there are a very large number of people who could, in principle, qualify to be higher-order monks, who instead apply prodigious intelligence to smaller questions one after the other all the time.
So, like, higher orders will have a higher density of smarter people, but there are ~equally upper-echelon smart people at all levels.
The 10-day version of a 10,000-day idea is an unusually valuable thing; as the old adage goes, “if I had had more time, I would have composed a shorter letter.” Distillations are difficult, especially distillations that preserve all of the crucial elements, rather than sacrificing them.
So to the extent that I might sometimes write 10-day distillations of 10,000-day ideas, this is a pretty > high-status claim, actually. It’s preserving the virtues of both orders.
It’s more that they are wrong about different things, in systematically different ways. A 10-day monk is right, about 10-day concerns viewed through 10-day ontologies, about as often as a 1-day monk or a 100-day monk, in their respective domains.