Why Bad Ideas Follow Predictable Scripts (While Good Ones Don't).

[DocWatts]

I thought I might share a portion of a long-form essay I wrote on Low vs High Quality perspectives. The essay is a subsection of a book I'm writing called 7 Provisional Truths, which is an effort to make in-depth epistemology accessible for non-specialists.

In the writeup, I explore a type of Anna Karenina principle for perspectives: where Low Quality perspectives tend to follow predictable scripts, rooted in a shared set of psychological ploys for Reality denial - while High Quality Perspectives tend to be adaptive and effective in their own unique ways.

The full article itself can be found here:
https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/evading-the-harbingers-of-distortion
 

EVADING THE HARBINGERS OF DISTORTION



Living Well And Thinking Clearly

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike while each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way, he was intuiting a broader pattern about human happiness that's proven remarkably durable. This same pattern not only explains why some approaches to happiness succeed over others - it provides important clues for why some perspectives work and others don’t. Embedded within the iconic opening to Anna Karenina (1878) is a type of practical wisdom about human flourishing, grounded in time-tested insights that are surprisingly transferable.

If living well and thinking clearly seem like apples and oranges, the overlap between these domains runs deeper than you might expect. Research consistently shows that people are far less likely to get sucked into conspiracism or recruited into cults when their lives are going well. Moreover, those who are secure in their identity and grounded by healthy relationships are far less likely to become vessels for hateful ideologies that prey on isolation and resentment. Understanding this connection between our inner compass and our viewpoints is thus crucial for sound sensemaking.

When this compass is underdeveloped or brittle, we become highly vulnerable to distorted patterns of thinking that are a projection of our unmet psychological needs. Maybe it’s corrosive anxiety about one’s social status, a gnawing hunger for the emotional closure of rigid certainty, a frantic scramble for control amid a changing world, or contemptuous impatience for relevant complexities. Whatever the specific trigger, these psychological vulnerabilities become the fault lines along which our thinking departs from our shared reality. Taking a page from Tolstoy, we could say that low-quality perspectives share common flaws, while high quality perspectives are adaptive and effective in their own unique ways.

For all of the implications that can be wrung out of it, Tolstoy’s insight is disarmingly straightforward. What’s being hinted at here is that happiness flows from just a handful of reliable sources. While misery, by contrast, stems from the countless ways these same wellsprings can become clogged or contaminated. As it turns out, this simple observation echoes an ancient happiness hypothesis - one whose core premise has been substantiated by decades of empirical research.

So what do sages and psychologists keep discovering? They find that when our circumstances allow us reasonable access to safety, connection, and purpose - and crucially, when we can be present enough to savor what’s available - happiness tends to follow. And when these pathways are blocked we tend to suffer in ways that have spawned the type of diagnostic manuals that dwarf Tolstoy in their scope and complexity.

Remarkably, it’s often this final ingredient - our capacity to be fully present - that proves to be most elusive. Understanding why is a key component of recognizing when our perspectives have gone off the rails. As we'll see, the same conditions that undermine presence also erode the quality of our perspectives in predictable ways.
 

Developing Our Inner Compass

So why is presence the exception rather than the rule? Partly, it’s because walling ourselves off from painful or unpleasant realities can genuinely protect us. Sometimes it’s the least bad option when we’re wading through a stressful or dangerous shitstorm and escape isn’t possible. Other times, it’s because our cognitive and emotional resources have been strained to the breaking point - like when we’re trying to navigate a major life crisis without an adequate support system.

Yet this defensive response can lead us badly astray when it outlives the triggering crisis, or when it becomes a habitual response to uncertainty. More fundamentally, presence isn’t our default state - it’s a capacity that we dip in and out of with varying degrees of skill across different contexts. We’re more likely to access it when our basic needs are met and we’re in a supportive environment. And we’re more prone to abandon it when we’re under stress or weighed down by emotional baggage.

Put simply, our capacity for presence directly shapes our ability to exercise sound discernment. It’s not just about what we know - it’s combining our knowledge with situational awareness and adaptive responsiveness. Or put even more simply:

Sound Discernment = Knowledge + Situational Awareness + Adaptability

But what’s the connection between discernment and sensemaking? When our capacity for sound discernment is diminished, we become more vulnerable to distorted and inflexible patterns of thinking. Moreover, we stop responding to what’s actually happening and start reacting to our stories about what’s happening. Rather than adapting our approach to fit the terrain, we try to force the terrain to fit our outdated maps. Needless to say, such rigidity leaves us woefully unprepared for picking a lane that actually works in the real world.

So if presence isn’t a fixed trait but a capacity - one that can be developed, but still inescapably ebbs and flows with our circumstances - this complicates advice that focuses solely on what we can control. Such advice isn’t wrong, exactly, but it has clear limits. These limitations come into sharp focus when we lose sight of the fact that individuals don’t exist in isolation - the systems we’re embedded in form the backdrop against which our agency plays out.
 

Why ‘Touch Grass’ And ‘Clean Your Room’ Both Miss The Mark

Take, for instance, the refrain to stop obsessing over whatever’s bothering us and ‘touch grass’. Sound counsel in some circumstances - but it misses the mark in situations where the real problem isn’t our mindset, but hard realities that require more than a change of scenery. Emphasizing what we can control can be useful when the larger systems that we’re embedded in won’t budge. That said, we don’t have to meekly accept that broken systems are neutral and inevitable. History is littered with ‘unchangeable systems’ - from child labor to Jim Crow - that eventually gave way. Not because the arc of history naturally bends towards justice, but because real people were willing to put in the hard work to bend it so.

What this points to is that playing the hand you were dealt doesn’t mean pretending that the deck isn’t stacked. Genuine empowerment, then, isn’t purely a matter of individual discipline. It has an inescapably social dimension - and that includes working to address the conditions that keep people stuck.

Take a concrete example: the path out of poverty, and how escaping it requires far more than a simple attitude adjustment. It also hinges on structural realities that hard work alone isn’t a substitute for: necessities like affordable housing, quality education, and work that pays a living wage. Given these realities, we can acknowledge that there’s a middle path between ‘pull yourselves up by your bootstraps’ and ‘the system’s rigged, so why try?’. This path entails working on both ourselves and with others to change the systems that exclude people from opportunity.

A similar dynamic shows up in the admonition to ‘clean our room’ before engaging with the wider world. Seemingly reasonable, yet often tone deaf to the ways that our ‘room’ is shaped by forces beyond our immediate control. It also assumes a tidy separation between inner work and outer engagement. As though there’s a point where all of our personal issues have been solved, and the world will idly refrain from impinging on us while we get our shit together. Just ask anyone whose healthcare got yanked due to decisions made in Washington, despite their lack of interest in ‘politics’.

Of course we can and should step back from our problems from time to time, and there’s wisdom in focusing on what’s within our immediate sphere of influence. When expanded into blanket prescriptions, however, they exemplify something else entirely. We might call it the ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ principle, based on the Spencer Johnson book of the same name. A dynamic where well-meant guidance - in this instance, on adapting to change - is contorted into a quiet form of gaslighting. Whether it’s touching grass, cleaning our room, or adapting to change, the line between sound counsel and dismissive platitudes is a matter of understanding someone’s lived reality. It’s not enough to simply give a damn - you also have to know what the hell you’re talking about.
 

Getting Our Shit Together ≠ Dropping Out Of The World

While ‘it’s not your fault but it is your responsibility’ is a perfectly reasonable starting point for navigating adversity, without an understanding of the actual barriers that people face, it can morph into something far more insidious. When we overemphasize individual agency and lose sight of the systems that individuals are embedded in, this can lead to its own kind of distortive pattern: internalization. If projection externalizes our flaws onto others, internalization does the reverse - turning external problems into personal inadequacies. Instead of recognizing the structural or circumstantial sources of our struggles, we end up blaming ourselves for forces that we have a very small degree of influence over.

So if sound discernment isn’t just about knowledge, but reading situations accurately and responding appropriately, what does this mean for how we approach our own perspectives? It’s a question that’s further complicated by the fact that these assessments are never neutral or purpose free, but are inevitably colored by both our baggage and our aspirations. The crucial pivot comes when we give up the futile effort to transcend these constraints and instead learn to work within them skillfully. The answer, then, isn’t to withdraw from the world until we’ve gotten our shit together - it’s to engage with a realistic appraisal of our blind spots. This begins with understanding the factors that influence our judgement, and accepting the inherent messiness of our sensemaking.

As we’ve seen, a horizon of circumstances beyond our immediate sphere of influence will help determine whether we read the room or miss the mark entirely. Whether it’s due to a lack of experience, emotional baggage, or systems that are stacked against us, we’re all working with limited information and imperfect judgement. So while there’s a place for getting our house in order, as a prerequisite for sensemaking it’s both unrealistic and counterproductive. Whether it’s the teacher undergoing a personal crisis who still manages to connect with her students, the activist with unresolved trauma who fights for systemic change, or the researcher who makes a world-changing discovery despite glaring blind spots - we all contribute from a place of imperfection.

 

Pillars Of Practical Wisdom

So if getting everything sorted first isn’t the goal, what is? The path forward, then, isn’t to withdraw until we can engage with perfect clarity - it’s to practice skillful engagement with whatever reality we’re facing. That calls for practical wisdom - the art of adapting our approach to the situation and context at hand. Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no perspective worth keeping survives contact with the world unchanged. Practical wisdom means seeing our viewpoints as works in-progress that are capable of bending without breaking when the world inevitably pushes back. If only it were that simple in practice.

The reason that this form of adaptive thinking is easier preached than practiced is that we’re not anthropologists to our own perspectives - our viewpoints have an inertia to them which has little to do with rational analysis. The crucial complication is that the bulk of our attitudes and beliefs aren’t the product of careful deliberation. They’re organic outgrowths of our life experience - background assumptions that we naturally accumulate just by participating in daily life. A horizon of intelligibility that’s built up brick by brick over the course of a lifetime, quietly shaping how we think and behave.

Our everyday epistemology, then, is mostly driven by emotionally intuitive hunches about what rings true, with intellect stepping in when this pre-reflective flow hits a snag. Social norms are a good example. When someone stands too close or too far away from us during a conversation, for instance - our mind will work backwards to articulate what we’ve already grasped pre-reflectively.

If we’re aware of how much we lean on these automatic responses, we can see why attempting to construct our entire worldview from first principles is a fool’s errand. Leaving all of our assumptions at the door might sound profound in theory, but beyond being impossible it would be utterly paralyzing in practice. Usually, these automatic responses work just fine. Questioning whether the food in front of us is edible or the chair we want to sit on is really there isn’t a prescription for wisdom - it’s a recipe for psychosis. A basic level of trust in our perceptions, unless there’s a good reason to doubt them, is a feature rather than a bug of human cognition.

Skillful discernment, then, isn’t about questioning everything - it’s about questioning the right things. What ‘the right things’ are isn’t predetermined - it depends on the situation we’re assessing, what our goals are, and where we stand in relation to the world. That said, there are some reliable indicators for whether we’re on the right track. Not rules that can be plugged into an algorithm, but practical heuristics - open-ended guidelines that we can adapt to our own situation.

 

What This Looks Like In The Real Life

For starters, we won’t get very far without a clear sense of who we are and what we’re about. No shortcuts for this one other than participating in life - making mistakes, learning from them, and gradually figuring out what matters to us. Having trusted people in our lives who can offer us honest feedback helps enormously - as does a regular practice of stepping back to examine our assumptions. With a clear sense of who we are and what we value, backed up with people willing to call us on our bullshit, we can develop the type of inner compass that serves as an early warning system for when our viewpoints have become liabilities rather than assets. When this inner compass is underdeveloped, we’re much less likely to recognize when our perspectives have gone off the rails. And when we do notice, we remain equally clueless as to why.

Next, we want coherence between our purposes and the terrain we’re actually navigating. Coherence just means that we want our expectations to be in sync with the approach we’re using and the circumstances we’re actually facing. When any of these elements are badly out of alignment, we find ourselves paddling upstream with a craft that’s poorly suited for the journey. Two examples illustrate this clearly. Science can turn into scientism when it attempts to pave over questions of existential meaning and purpose. And spirituality can turn into magical thinking when it ventures into empirical domains that it’s not equipped to navigate. The takeaway, then, is that even the most sophisticated tools become liabilities when applied to the wrong problems.

A third essential element is epistemic humility - having a well-calibrated sense of what we actually know, what we don’t, and how to tell the difference. While Socrates might exhort us to acknowledge that we ‘know nothing’, a more practical take on this age-old recognition might be summed up as: ‘be confident where you have expertise, be tentative where you don’t, and know how to tell the difference’. The point, then, isn’t to second-guess everything - it’s to calibrate our confidence with our actual competence. This involves being willing to learn from those with expertise that you lack, figuring out who’s a credible authority within a given domain, and salvaging the partial truths of viewpoints that otherwise miss the mark.

Lastly - and this one’s huge - is learning how to hold onto our attitudes and beliefs as works-in-progress rather than sacred commitments. This means taking steps to disentangle our viewpoints and our identity. While some degree of identification with these working hypotheses is healthy and natural, problems arise when questioning our assumptions is tantamount to ripping away essential pieces of our sense of self. If we’re clear on our values and actively seek out people and practices that keep us grounded in reality, this makes it much less threatening when the world pushes back against our ideas. In fact, it gives us room to correct course without feeling like we’re losing face or betraying our principles.

Edited September 23 by DocWatts

[Leo Gura]

Most bad ideas are just group-think and conformity, so of course it is a predictable script. No actual intelligence was applied to get the idea in the first place -- it was unconscious and mechanically obtained.

Real intelligence (good ideas) requires infinite requisite variety and live consciousness, not parroting others.

Bad ideas come from mechanicalness. Good ideas come from live consciousness. Mechanicalness is easily predictable, live consciousness is unpredictable because it is truly mentally free and genuinely creative/novel.

In short, there's nothing novel about being a Nazi, it's just an unconscious script.