consider building a cathedral

or, ‘how to find god if your mind works close enough to my own’

It has yet again come to my attention¹ that many of my peers are still fixated on relative intelligence – maybe this includes you, dear reader. It is understandable; intelligence is significant currency in some social circles. But unless you thrive on anxiety or something, this sounds like unnecessary suffering and you should consider trying to switch to my framework.

I’m of the thought that intelligence is kind of like happiness and current events, in that, despite the hubbub, nothing bad happens if you stop actively thinking about it. In fact, not thinking about it generally makes life better, maybe because there seems to be little to no effective control knobs at this level. Because, what is ‘intelligence’ anyway?

‘Intelligence’ is one of the nebulous words that is full of conflation, and there is at least two connotations worth distinguishing here for our purpose: 1) giftedness, quick-witted, witty; an innate trait 2) studious, disciplined, well-read; a learned trait

What if you are neither of these things? What if you are average, a mean or median, who cares – maybe below average, lazy, curiously bereft of common sense, undistinguished, a platonic ideal of an idiot, etc? Poor, poor, you, what are you goinng to do?

Some seem to wallow, resigned to an uninspired life – this is unexciting. Others try to fake it, and invest their efforts into signaling intelligence without substance to back it. This sounds stressful and many kinds of ugly. And just plain hard². I would like to politely shake them and patronizingly ask, ‘did you know there is another way?’ (Jesus died for your sins).

I say: Build a cathedral.

A cathedral, as in an awe-inspiring structure, built of from a marriage of practical ideals and inspired engineering, a concrete implementation of abstract ideals, of fractalish details, a curation of art and design and pretty things.

A cathedral, as in a kludgey assemblage of abstractions, frameworks and heuristics to navigate the world, containing after-thought extensions, winding pathways, and unexpected backdoors.

A cathedral that is your own, and you are its chief architect.

Because no one (I don’t) really cares how intelligent you are³. I think the real question is, are you satisfying your own aesthetic/god? What do you fundamentally care about?

I only stumbled across it accidentally, and was about mad that I almost missed it and adults didn’t tell me about it. But now, as an experienced adult, it appears that most adults just don’t know about it.

To be fair, I think it is alluded to. This is related to what independent thinking is, as I understand it.

But I do not think it is discussed enough as a thing you can do. At least, I’ve yet to see it discussed explicitly. Perhaps it’s like a cliche, where you it makes sense when you first encounter it, but you don’t quite realize how superficial your interpretation is until you obtain the right perspective, something slides into place, and then you understand.

Several elements that I think are important in understanding it:

1. Some frameworks are better than others. For me, it began with “The Selfish Gene”. Something shifted when I realized it’s not just about accurately embedding information in your head – there is such thing as better arrangements of information. This was the start of a concept I call ‘mental interior design’, what I use to reference how you can curate and organize how you think about things; reading is an excellent way to go ‘shopping’ for improved tools and objects. It took years to be able to first try and put this shift into words: I first settled on ‘thinking about thinking’.
2. To do the work, to think about thinking, you need introspection. Planes, trains, and automobiles are great for this. It is a quiet voice, relative to societal expectations and norms; identifying it is a skill to develop. A friend once introduced me as someone who ‘is unusually poor at modeling other people but understands herself unusually well’. I wonder if it is related that I don’t learn from other people very effectively; I have a much harder time internalizing knowledge that is not extended from an existing part of my own frameworks. I wonder if it’s like chronically having software installation issues, and so to reach a semblance of competency, I need to build my own. And of course, my own implementation does worse than the ‘professionally’ implemented one, but at least it runs. God is also sometimes passive, in that information will not generally be freely volunteered, but provided in response to specific questions. Trying to understand god is like doing research, where you need to set up experiments (listen to your own intuition), do them (even if it’ll probably lead to failure), and analyze the results. I think this takes you a long way, but this is not enough to have a cathedral.
3. If you go deep enough, there can be isomorphisms between seemingly unrelated domains Maybe it’s when you hit a critical point, that no one talks about, where backdoors and shorcuts between ideas between different domains begin to form. And then you begin to see coherence, and you begin to hope for a theory of everything. Or maybe it’s when you realize that science is not so different from art, that ‘all models are imperfect, but some are useful’ (and/or just beautiful).

I do not think this is for everyone – there are argubly better uses of your time and attention; it can be uncomfortable, and I do not know of a shortcut. So I suspect that this will not be broadly applicable. But people are compelled to scupt, paint, make music, etc. I think it is a similar kind of compulsion, but with frameworks.

But it is a possible path, a scenic path, and I recommend it highly⁴.

To my younger self, who felt uncharacteristically indignant that the adults didn’t mention this – this is my attempt to remedy it.

1. This time, being privy to a figurative dick-measuring contest.
2. I barely needed to contemplate whether or not to go down this path because I’m so inept at BSing that it just wasn’t a real option for me.
3. If they do, they have poor taste and should also probably find god.
4. It is especially for finding nice and interesting people.