Glossary

Action

An implemented decision.

Arbitrary life goals

A conjectured desired state that an individual chooses to pursue.

"Arbitrary" does not mean random or unimportant. It means that no goal is prescribed from outside the individual.

From a neo-Darwinian perspective, human consciousness is a product of the natural selection of "selfish genes" (Dawkins). There is no external source of meaning or purpose that prescribes what an individual's goals should be. The answer to "Why do we exist?" is that replicators in the form of genes underwent selection pressure over millions of years, and we are the result of that blind process. Therefore, life goals cannot be grounded in an absolute. They must be individually conjectured, criticised, and refined through error correction, like any other misconcept. A first principles approach can still be applied to arrive at your own arbitrary life goals. For example, because time is finite, you may decide that time freedom is an important arbitrary life goal.

This is not a nihilistic position. The absence of externally prescribed meaning is the starting condition from which the framework's optimism derives. Because no goals are cosmically correct, and because we are always optimising towards something, conjecturing and improving them is one of the highest ROI activities available to an individual.

Properties

• All arbitrary life goals are conjectural, fallible, and subject to error correction.
• Better arbitrary life goals are harder to vary, have greater reach, and more closely reflect what the individual actually values as they work towards them.
• Arbitrary life goals are a high level misconcept and the logical starting point for all subsequent misconcept prioritisation.

Bad explanation

An explanation that is easy to vary, has limited reach, and reflects reality less closely, resulting in a reduced ability to explain phenomena of interest and solve problems.

• Easy to vary — its components can be arbitrarily changed without reducing its coherence
• Reach — it solves and explains little beyond what it was created for

Properties

• Rational criticism creates selection pressure against bad explanations.
• Worse explanations tend not to withstand criticism because of their inferior explanatory structure, which results in less accurate predictions and a weaker ability to solve problems.
• Worse explanations are conjectural and fallible.

Better explanation

When comparing two good explanations, one is better than the other if it is harder to vary, has greater reach, and is closer to reality, which lets it explain more phenomena and solve more problems. A better explanation has fewer errors than its rival.

Clarity

The state of knowing both what you are compounding towards and that you are in fact compounding towards it. The presence of clarity leads to internal feelings of peace and contentment.

Clarity has two components:

• Goal clarity — a sufficiently refined arbitrary life goal that reflects what the individual actually values
• Path clarity — confidence that current misconcepts, decisions, and actions are compounding toward that goal

Closer to reality

The direction of travel for better explanations. Explanation improvement always moves toward a better approximation of reality — fewer errors — even though direct correspondence with reality can never be verified.

In practice we can only assess this through proxy metrics. An explanation is closer to reality than a rival if it:

• Corrects specific errors in the rival
• Accounts for the rival's explicanda while also accounting for new phenomena the rival could not
• Allows more problems to be solved and new transformations to be made

These criteria do not confirm that an explanation is reality; they confirm that it is a better approximation of it. The explanation remains conjectural and fallible, and a closer approximation is always possible.

Compounding

The process by which outcomes accumulate non-linearly over a lifetime rather than adding up in a straight line.

• Implementing misconcepts compounds outcomes. Every pass through the Misconcepts-Decision-Action-Outcome sequence is one step on a compounding path. The outcomes from one sequence form the base for the next.
• Improving misconcepts compounds misconcept quality. A better misconcepts set improves every future decision made with it, which in turn improves the ability to improve the set further.

Characteristics

• Direction — guided by the arbitrary life goals the decisions are made under, whether those goals are self-defined or inherited
• Rate — set by the quality of the misconcepts applied. Better misconcepts lead to outcomes closer to those intended, so fewer life resources are expended per unit of progress towards the goal.

Because compounding is non-linear, small differences in misconcept quality produce large differences in outcome over a lifetime. This is why improving a high level misconcept early has disproportionate lifetime value.

Conjecture

A creative guess about how the world works, what to do next, what the world should be like, why something is a problem, or why something is a solution.

Criticism

An argument for why a given explanation is problematic.

Commentary — Arguments are themselves theory-laden, conjectural, and subject to error. Moreover, like explanations of the world, we can discover entirely new modes of criticism — deeper and more constraining criteria that our ideas must meet in order to be regarded as unproblematic.

Decision

The output of applying misconcepts to either implement existing misconcepts or improve them through error correction, based on available information and the problem to be solved. Every decision involves the expenditure of finite life resources.

Multiple misconcepts are invoked at each level to make a decision.

The misconcepts set used depends on whether the decision is:

• Conscious — produced by the deliberate misconcepts set through active reasoning and reflection
• Unconscious — produced by the default misconcepts set automatically and without conscious effort

Default misconcepts

The set of misconcepts accessed automatically and without conscious effort (System 1 thinking).

Characteristics

• Fast, automatic, and intuitive
• Minimal mental resource required, which suits the volume of decisions and assessments faced in modern life

Advantages

• Speed and efficiency across the majority of decisions we make

Limitations

• Tends to contain worse explanations than the deliberate set, producing outcomes further from those predicted, and compounding in the wrong direction or more slowly

Why they matter disproportionately

• Because default misconcepts are used in the majority of our decisions, they disproportionately shape our external results via compounding
• Because they are accessed without conscious effort, they disproportionately shape our internal experience

Sources

• Inherited — evolutionary (nature) and developmental (nurture)
• Intentionally cultivated — through error correction

Commentary — Inherited sources, particularly evolutionary ones, remain part of the default set regardless of intentional cultivation. Progress in our default misconcepts comes from cultivating as many good-explanation misconcepts into the default set as possible, prioritised for the highest ROI, while acknowledging the influence of evolutionary and developmental defaults.

Deliberate misconcepts

The set of misconcepts accessed through conscious mental effort (System 2 thinking).

Characteristics

• Deliberate and analytical
• Slow and resource-intensive, so not practical to implement continuously in modern life

Advantages

• Can override default misconcepts
• Tends to contain better explanations than the default set, producing outcomes closer to those predicted and enabling faster compounding toward goals

Limitations

• Consumes significant mental resource
• Challenging defaults can be uncomfortable, e.g., when they are reinforced by ego, social identity, or group acceptance. This discomfort is a common source of resistance to both improving and implementing deliberate misconcepts.

Directed learning / experience

Learning or experience deliberately pursued to improve priority misconcepts with the highest ROI relative to self-defined arbitrary life goals.

Prerequisites

• Self-defined arbitrary life goals
• An inventory of the current misconcepts set and the quality of misconcepts relevant to those goals
• An identified priority misconcept to improve

Easy to vary

An explanation whose components can be arbitrarily changed without reducing its coherence.

Example — the seasons are caused by the sadness of Demeter, goddess of harvest, when her daughter Persephone is taken by Hades.

Error

A flaw or limitation in an explanation that results in inconsistency, conflict with reality, or a reduced ability to explain phenomena or solve problems.

Error correction

The open-ended process of identifying and eliminating errors in explanations through conjecture and rational criticism.

It produces better explanations, solves existing problems, and reveals new and more significant problems — which become the starting point for further error correction and progress.

Experience with error correction

The implementation of misconcepts, followed by rational criticism applied to the discrepancy between predicted and actual outcomes, and subsequent error correction of the misconcept.

Commentary — Experience with error correction closes the Misconcepts-Decision-Action-Outcome loop. The gap between predicted and actual outcome becomes the input for rational criticism and misconcept improvement.

Explanation

A conjecture that attempts to account for phenomena (explicanda) by describing the underlying reality that produces them.

Commentary — All explanations are conjectural and fallible. Their quality, however, is variable.

Explicanda

What an explanation purports to explain. (Singular: explicandum.)

Financial resource

All assets an individual owns that can be converted to purchasing power.

Financial resource can be:

• Acquired by providing the marketplace perceived value
• Invested to generate more financial resource
• Expended or consumed for mental resource, physical resource, and control of time

Commentary — Perceived value reflects what the marketplace is willing to pay, which is influenced by the buyer's misconcept quality, cognitive biases, and marketing. Perceived value may therefore diverge significantly from actual value delivered, in either direction.

Fit-for-purpose explanation

An explanation that is sufficient to solve a specific problem within given constraints.

What counts as fit-for-purpose depends on the problem to be solved and the constraints that apply (the resources available and the opportunity cost).

Example — general relativity versus Newton's theory for deciding how long a car trip will take.

Fit-for-purpose misconcept

A misconcept that has been improved to the point at which further improvement yields diminishing marginal utility and unacceptably high opportunity cost. This is assessed in the context of current life resources, arbitrary life goals, and the priority of other misconcepts to improve.

Because context can change over time, a misconcept that is fit-for-purpose at one point may require further improvement later.

To paraphrase Einstein, a fit-for-purpose misconcept is the simplest misconcept that achieves the highest ROI at a point in time, but no simpler.

Good decision

A predicted high return on the finite life resources committed to improving or implementing particular misconcepts, relative to sufficiently refined arbitrary life goals.

Assessment of a good decision is based on the quality of misconcepts available at the time. In retrospect, a good decision may appear suboptimal simply because the misconcepts set has since improved.

Good explanation

An explanation that is hard to vary, has reach, and by more closely reflecting reality explains the phenomena of interest (explicanda) and allows specific problems to be solved.

• Hard to vary — its components cannot be arbitrarily changed without reducing its coherence
• Reach — it solves problems and explains phenomena beyond those it was created for

Properties

• Rational criticism creates selection pressure favouring good explanations.
• Better explanations tend to withstand criticism because of their superior explanatory structure, which enables more accurate predictions and a greater ability to solve problems.
• Good explanations are still conjectural and therefore fallible. There can always be a better explanation.

Hard to vary

An explanation whose components cannot be arbitrarily changed without reducing its coherence, or its compatibility with other well-established explanations.

Example — the seasons are caused by the 23.5° tilt of the earth's axis as it orbits the sun.

Knowledge

Explanations that reliably solve problems and withstand rational criticism, while remaining open to future refutation. Knowledge is usually made of better explanations.

Learning

The acquisition of misconcepts from external sources, e.g., books, teachers, conversations, media, and other content.

More precisely, we conjecture misconcepts from the external sources we consume rather than passively absorbing them. The quality of what we conjecture depends on the content's delivery, the quality of our existing misconcepts set, and our capacity for rational criticism applied to the source.

Level of misconcept

The level of a misconcept depends on the percentage of decisions in which it is invoked.

A decision is made using multiple misconcepts. Individuals may or may not be conscious of the misconcepts they invoke. Regardless of how good or bad those misconcepts are, they influence the decision, the action, and therefore the outcome.

The categories below are for practical purposes and use arbitrary percentage cut-offs.

High level — 100% of decisions

• Implemented with every decision
• Includes the idea of misconcepts itself, life resources, arbitrary life goals, and opportunity cost
• Why these are high level:
  • Misconcepts — everything we do reduces to improving or implementing misconcepts, so understanding their epistemic qualities and how they influence our lives is inherent in every decision.
  • Life resources — to improve or implement misconcepts we expend finite life resources. There is always a cost.
  • Arbitrary life goals — every expenditure of life resources to improve or implement misconcepts compounds internally and externally toward something, whether defined or not.
  • Opportunity cost — because life resources are finite, there is always a next best thing we could have done with the resources we expended.

Mid level — 1–10% of decisions

• Implemented with decisions in major life domains
• Often in health, wealth, relationships, and career

Low level — under 1% of decisions

• Implemented with specific decisions in day-to-day life
• Just as important to make fit-for-purpose as the others, since the action taken is derived from decisions based on these

A good decision uses fit-for-purpose high, mid, and low level misconcepts. It is difficult to make a good decision without good high and mid level misconcepts because without them, the low level misconcept is unlikely to be fit-for-purpose for that individual, who is unsure what their goals are, what resources are available, and what the opportunity cost is.

The practical implication of defining misconcept level is to derive which misconcept has the highest ROI to improve next. Improve high level misconcepts first to make them fit-for-purpose. By using the four high level misconcepts, an individual can then draw on their conjectured arbitrary life goals, current life resources, and existing misconcepts set to determine the next best misconcept to improve, applying opportunity cost and marginal utility.

Example — if time freedom matters to an individual as defined in their arbitrary life goals, the mid level misconcepts to develop are naturally those around earning, spending, saving, and investing financial assets.

Life optimisation

The ongoing process of maximising lifetime value from the expenditure of life resources relative to sufficiently refined arbitrary life goals.

Three equivalent framings of the same optimisation problem:

• Maximal ROI from the expenditure of life resources, in terms of lifetime value
• Lowest lifetime opportunity cost from the expenditure of life resources
• Highest marginal utility per unit of life resource expended

All three are assessed relative to sufficiently refined arbitrary life goals and the current misconcepts set. Life optimisation is therefore not a fixed endpoint but an open-ended process of error correction applied to life resource allocation.

Life resource conversion

The process by which life resources are converted into other life resources.

Characteristics

• All conversions involve opportunity cost: converting life resources into others forgoes alternative uses of them
• The efficiency of conversion depends on the quality of misconcepts applied to the conversion decision
• Primary resource conversion, particularly of time, is irreversible. Once expended it cannot be recovered, only partially offset through secondary resource conversion.

Examples

• Job
  • Inputs: time, physical resource, mental resource, misconcepts set
  • Outputs: financial resource; potentially social capital and misconcepts set
• Basic consumption (groceries, housing)
  • Inputs: time, financial resource
  • Outputs: physical resource, mental resource

Life resources

The finite resources we expend to improve or implement misconcepts.

Categorised into

• Primary life resources
• Secondary life resources

Lifetime value

The net value in life resources across a lifetime — short, medium, and long term — from expending life resources to improve or implement misconcepts.

Net value is the difference between the life resources gained in the short, medium, and long term and the life resources expended to improve or implement the misconcept.

Lifetime value operates differently depending on the type of decision:

• Implementing decisions generate lifetime value directly, through the outcomes produced by the Misconcepts-Decision-Action-Outcome sequence.
• Improving decisions generate lifetime value indirectly. By improving the misconcepts set, they compound across all future implementing decisions, making the lifetime value of a good improvement decision disproportionately large relative to the resources expended.

The compounding nature of medium and long term resource gains means lifetime value can grow non-linearly, making early investment in high ROI misconcepts particularly significant.

Marginal utility

The incremental gain in lifetime value per incremental unit of life resource expended.

Marginal utility operates differently depending on the type of decision:

• Implementing decisions — the incremental outcome improvement from committing additional resources to a single implementation.
• Improving decisions — the incremental improvement in misconcept quality from committing additional resources to a single improvement, which then compounds across all future implementing decisions.

Marginal utility eventually diminishes, and opportunity cost increases, as more resources are committed to a single misconcept improvement or implementation. This is the basis for the fit-for-purpose misconcept threshold.

Mental resource

The ability to creatively conjecture, rationally criticise, and focus.

To simplify a complex idea, we can think of it as a subjective level on a continuum from 0 to 100:

• At a high level (e.g., above 80), you have easy access to your deliberate misconcepts. Your mind feels clear, and you can think creatively and rationally without much effort. Mental resource regenerates faster when starting from a higher level.
• At a low level (e.g., below 20), you experience cognitive fog, making it difficult to think clearly, creatively, or rationally. You rely predominantly on default misconcepts and may experience feelings of overwhelm. Mental resource regenerates more slowly when starting from a lower level.

In the short term, mental resource oscillates with work and rest. However, improving or implementing misconcepts toward a sufficiently refined arbitrary life goal tends to increase mental resource over the medium and long term. This is the key reason we use medium and long term mental resource trajectory as the metric guiding the iteration of conjectured arbitrary life goals.

Misconcepts

Misconcepts are the explanations we hold about how the world works, synonymous with mental models but named deliberately to acknowledge their fallibility. Unlike a misconception, a misconcept is not necessarily wrong. The name reflects the fallibilist principle that all mental models are provisional and subject to improvement.

Misconcepts shape two things:

• Internal — they heavily influence our internal experience and interpretation of the world, as our brains, locked in a pitch-black vault, receive only electrical impulses.
• External — they drive the decisions and actions through which we interact with the world.

We can only ever do two things:

• Improve our misconcepts
• Implement our existing misconcepts

Misconcepts are improved through error correction, via conjecture and rational criticism. The new misconcept may have fewer errors, but it remains fallible.

Misconcepts have the same properties as explanations:

• All are creatively conjectured and fallible, and so can always be improved.
• Quality is variable. Better misconcepts are harder to vary, have more reach, and reflect reality more closely, allowing more phenomena to be explained and more problems to be solved.

Misconcepts set

The collection of deliberate and default misconcepts we hold.

It is a secondary life resource, as well as an important functional representation of the misconcepts we possess.

The deliberate and default sets can each be divided further into high, mid, and low level misconcepts.

Misconcepts-Decision-Action-Outcome sequence

The process and result of implementing misconcepts to interact with the world.

The sequence in detail:

Misconcept(s) applied → Decision (with predicted outcome) → Action → Actual outcome

This is one of only two fundamental things we can do: implementing misconcepts. The other is improving them through error correction.

Characteristics

• Decisions and actions are derived from the current deliberate and default misconcepts sets.
• The better the misconcepts applied, the closer the predicted outcome will be to the actual outcome.
• Each implementation of this sequence represents one step on a compounding path. The rate and direction of the compounding depend on the quality of misconcepts applied.

Commentary — When current misconcepts are applied to a problem, they generate both a decision and an implicit prediction of the expected outcome. The gap between predicted and actual outcome is a measure of the quality of misconcepts applied. A smaller gap indicates a better explanation and a closer approximation to reality.

Non-directed learning / experience

Learning or experience undertaken to improve misconcepts without self-defined arbitrary life goals.

Misconcepts are improved based on inherited life goals, or on no clear goal at all. Both cases are suboptimal relative to directed learning or experience, because the misconcepts being improved lead to compounding in an unclear or externally prescribed direction.

Opportunity cost

The lifetime value of the next best alternative forgone when expending life resources to improve or implement misconcepts.

Because life resources are finite, opportunity cost is present in every decision, whether acknowledged or not.

Physical resource

The function of our biological machinery.

The typical trajectory across a lifetime rises during early life and growth, peaks in early adulthood, then gradually declines with age. There is meaningful variation in this trajectory:

• Some variation is outside individual control, e.g., genetics
• Some variation is within individual control, e.g., nutrition, exercise, sleep

The practical implication is that physical resource is finite, and its trajectory is partially but not fully modifiable.

Primary life resources

The life resources we are born with. They are expended to improve or implement misconcepts, and to acquire secondary life resources.

Includes

• Time
• Physical resource
• Mental resource

Problem

A conflict between an explanation and reality, between two explanations, or between an explanation and a desired state it is not good enough to transform the current state into.

All problems, including practical and day-to-day ones, arise from gaps or errors in our explanations of how to transform the world from one state to another.

Implications

• Problems are inevitable. Explanations, no matter how good, remain fallible, and cannot solve the problems that come after the ones they have solved.
• All problems are soluble unless prohibited by the laws of physics or logic, through developing better explanations by error correction.

Commentary — In common parlance, "problem" has a negative connotation. On the contrary, problems are the starting point of all progress.

Progress

The acquisition of knowledge that enables more problems to be solved, and states to be transformed in ways that better achieve desired outcomes.

It occurs by improving explanations through error correction, and thus acquiring the knowledge that solves problems and enables new transformations.

Progress applies to individual lives and to society as a whole, and to explanations and knowledge across all fields.

Rational criticism

Criticism aimed at identifying errors in an explanation through open, logical, and evidence-based argument.

Key aspects

• Clarity — is the explanation stated plainly and unambiguously?
• Assumptions — are all hidden premises made explicit?
• Testability — could the explanation, in principle, be shown false?
• Internal consistency — is it free from logical contradictions?
• Fit with reality — does it conflict with well-corroborated facts or observations?
• Alternatives — are there other explanations that fit the same facts?
• Error detection — are there known counterexamples, anomalies, or weaknesses?
• Improvement — can it be revised to remove errors without losing explanatory power?

All rational criticism is criticism, but not all criticism is rational. Only rational criticism reliably contributes to error correction and the improvement of explanations.

Reach

The ability of an explanation to solve problems and explain phenomena beyond those it was created to solve and explain.

Secondary life resources

The life resources we acquire after birth. They are dynamic resources that can be converted into primary resources, or into other secondary resources.

Includes

• Financial resource
• Social capital
• Misconcepts set

Social capital

The value of your relationships, built on trust, shared understanding, and support.

It provides companionship, influence, and opportunities.

Time

Our lifespan. The number of weeks in our life.

Until ageing and disease are solved, this will be finite.

Time freedom

The state in which you can sustain your desired consumption level indefinitely without any further input of primary life resources (time, mental resource, and physical resource).

As a consequence, you are not obligated to be in a particular place, at a particular time, doing a particular activity in order to sustain that consumption.

Wealth

The transformations we can perform with life resources. Transformations allow problems to be solved, value to be created, and results to be obtained.

Wealth is a measure of transformative capacity, determined by the quality of our misconcepts. Better misconcepts enable greater compounding from the same life resources, toward both the individual's desired internal experience and external results.