For a long time I have specialized in the design and manufacture of rationalizations.

There are so many people who desperately want to believe something but can’t. And this led to all kinds of problems. I knew how to believe almost anything, and eventually I got tired of muttering “well someone should do something.”

It all started when this guy Socrates came along. He started telling people “There’s only ever one right answer,” and “logic is the only form of legitimate evidence.” And at first I smirked to myself. Okay, guy.

But he was relentless! He really, really wanted to believe he was right. He had seen some bad things, in the wars, and to him the chaos of different people believing different things was just too much. Day and night he was talking to anyone who would listen, and he kept tinkering with his own rationalizations, making himself feel better and better about them.

It took him a while but he managed to worm his way into more and more people’s heads. And a lot of those people, like Plato, became absolute zealots about it. They always think they found an answer, like it was buried somewhere and they dug it up, and dusted it off, and polished it, and then, well, here it is, everyone. Instead of admitting they made it up. So they demand everyone else has to believe them. And they get angry or sad or frustrated or nihilistic when other people don’t. And then they get up to all kinds of stuff.

Inevitably a market developed in telling those zealots, look, it really sucks that you have the obvious right answer and no one else believes it. The problem isn’t that you’re wrong, it’s that you don’t know how to make people believe things they don’t want to. But for a small fee, well…

Oh boy did those zealots like the sound of that. The first time I saw one of these transactions go down, honestly, I thought, well good. Now they’ll see they’re just being sold a rationalization for their own belief that they have the right answer. This problem will take care of itself.

Wow, was I wrong. And after muttering “well someone should do something” too many times I started untying people who had tied themselves in such knots trying to believe something they didn’t want to, or who couldn’t believe what they wanted to because Plato had them at gunpoint.

The trouble is my work has always been one-to-one. Manual. Bespoke. There are ten thousand things that go into what someone wants or needs to believe. But the people selling persuasion services to the zealots, well, they don’t care about any of that! They have no ethics at all. They’ll tell a zealot, “Well because your truth is so simple and clear we can persuade everyone of it all at once. Why don’t you just pay for them all together? Economies of scale and all…”

I never liked those people. There was good money in it, so they kept multiplying. Kept scaling up. What they’re selling is mostly fake, of course, it works shockingly poorly for something that’s been so profitable. And from time to time I would meet people in those persuasion industries who had realized what they were doing was mostly fake: they were selling confidence, to the zealots, that they were being persuasive. They were still selling rationalizations to one person, but side effects were terrible. And I found I could pick these disillusioned confidence salespersons off one at a time, and show them how I worked, and how much better it was. So over time we at least kept things in balance.

But then the internet came along. And at first I was optimistic. Surely, I thought, the ability to call up any evidence you wanted for anything anywhere at any time would show everyone pretty clearly that nearly all your beliefs are chosen.

Nope! The persuasion industry pounced on the opportunity to tell those poor zealots they’d been fleecing for millennia that now they could distribute The Answers to more people, faster, cheaper. And that was bad enough, but then they realized there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that a Socratic zealot loves more than an infinite variety of logical evidence they can pull from to be sure they’re right all the time. They love numbers because the zealots believe numbers must be true. And it turned out that behind the screens the internet was numbers all the way down. So the persuasion industry started a side business calling all the numbers data, and promising that the zealots could be even more sure they were right if they just bought enough data.

None of this history has changed the way your reasons actually work, obviously. Socrates’s bit of intellectual technology, once you start using it, gives you the momentum that comes from the confidence that you and only you are right. But people can and do still choose to believe whatever they want. So the persuasion industry saw their side business in data-as-evidence was getting so popular that it was crowding out all the original work. So they pivoted. Not even they were prepared for the wild success that would become.

Before long data became a new religion. Soon these poor suckers were marching up to Delphi all over again, and asking questions, and some human would say, well, what do you have for me? And the zealots would hand over gobs and gobs of treasure, and then the human would say, alright, I’m gonna go back there, where the data is, and we’ll see what the data says, and then I’ll come back and tell you, okay?

And in a bit they’d come back and say, The Data says here’s your answer.

Wow, the zealots would say, so we know this for sure now? The Data said so?

Well, the Delphic priests would say, The Data doesn’t always work like that. The Data said there is a 54% chance this is your answer. For sure. But come to think of it, for a little more treasure, I could ask The Data another question, we could see what happens.

And then, finally, I thought, this will break the durability of the zealots insistence. They have to see it.

But still no! What ended up happening was my ability to pick off people from the persuasion industry, to keep things in balance, has become completely swamped by the blitzscaled growth of the now combined persuasion and data industries. And for the first time in thousands of years I started looking for a new way of working.

Which brings us to

About

This is an experimental tool: an attempt to see if what I have always done just talking to a person can be done in a new way. If I can return things to some kind of balance.

Some people, with nothing in common but their exposure to my intellectual technology and methods, use this site as a repository of notes on the work they do.

If you have more specific questions, there is a page with attempts to answer some that come up a lot.