It’s about lifecycle of theory development, confronted with incentives of medium-term planning. Humans are not very intelligent, and the way we can do abstract theory requires developing a lot of tools that enable fluency with it, including the actual intuitive fluency that uses the tools to think more rigorously, which is what I call common sense.
My anchor is math, which is the kind of theory I’m familiar with, but the topic of the theory could be things like social structures, research methodologies, or human rationality. So when common sense has an opportunity to form, we have a “post-rigorous” stage where rigid principles (gears) that make the theory lawful can be wielded intuitively. Without getting to this stage, the theory is blind or (potentially) insane. It is blind without intuition or insane when intuition is unmoored from rigor. (It can be somewhat sane when pre-rigorous intuition is grounded in something else, even if by informal analogy.)
If left alone, a theory tends to sanity. It develops principles to organize its intuitions, and develops intuitions to wield its principles. Eventually you get something real that can be seen and shaped with purpose.
But when it’s not at that stage, forcing it to change will keep it unsettled longer. If the theory opines about how an organizational medium-term plan works, what it should be, yet it’s unsettled, you’ll get insane opinions about the plans that shape insane plans. And reality chasing the plan, forcing it to confront what actually happens at present, gives an incentive to keep changing the theory before it’s ready, keeping it in this state of limbo.
It’s about lifecycle of theory development, confronted with incentives of medium-term planning. Humans are not very intelligent, and the way we can do abstract theory requires developing a lot of tools that enable fluency with it, including the actual intuitive fluency that uses the tools to think more rigorously, which is what I call common sense.
My anchor is math, which is the kind of theory I’m familiar with, but the topic of the theory could be things like social structures, research methodologies, or human rationality. So when common sense has an opportunity to form, we have a “post-rigorous” stage where rigid principles (gears) that make the theory lawful can be wielded intuitively. Without getting to this stage, the theory is blind or (potentially) insane. It is blind without intuition or insane when intuition is unmoored from rigor. (It can be somewhat sane when pre-rigorous intuition is grounded in something else, even if by informal analogy.)
If left alone, a theory tends to sanity. It develops principles to organize its intuitions, and develops intuitions to wield its principles. Eventually you get something real that can be seen and shaped with purpose.
But when it’s not at that stage, forcing it to change will keep it unsettled longer. If the theory opines about how an organizational medium-term plan works, what it should be, yet it’s unsettled, you’ll get insane opinions about the plans that shape insane plans. And reality chasing the plan, forcing it to confront what actually happens at present, gives an incentive to keep changing the theory before it’s ready, keeping it in this state of limbo.