life

Back to Basics — Metacognition as Dark Matter

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Two therapy dogs, Ghillie and Cecilia, getting ready for a child client

One of the most frustrating parts of what I write about is getting people to realize that they don’t know stuff, and the real solution when you don’t know stuff — at least to start — is to realize you don’t know stuff. You can’t effectively harness new modes of understanding until you get to the point where you realize that all the old answers you used to think might explain stuff just aren’t going to cut the mustard. Too many contradictions, and such, means you have to accept your ignorance and move on. It is only then that enlightenment can occur.

This is hardly a new idea, and the Zen masters — my favorite go-tos — were big on this. One of my favorite stories from Paul Reps’ collection, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, is below, and deals directly with my line of employment.

Once, a university professor went to visit a well-respected Zen Master to learn about Zen. The Master first invited him to sit for a cup of tea. The professor sat down and started talking about Zen. The Master quietly prepared and poured the tea. When the tea was filled to the cup’s brim, he kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s full! No more will go in!” blurted the professor. “The same with your mind. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

But changing adapted mental models is hard. Why, for example, would you bother to learn what I talk about on this blog? You really have to be tortured by your own confusion to sit down and spend the time to instantiate all this stuff. And you’re likely not going to get much community support dwelling on what some rando on the Internet says might change your life. (That Rando would be me, of course.)

In short, you have to possess the developed ability of metacognition — knowing what you don’t know, and having a sense that there is stuff out there that you’re not even aware of.

Why is this so challenging? As I said in this piece, once you open your mind to the notion that maybe the truth is really shared information that different, active sentient agents use for inter-agent coordination (read the piece for details — it’s a little complicated) you realize that if you adopt a different mental model than your friends, you risk alienation and loneliness from your cohort group. And humans no likey that kind of thing, at all. Being alone means that tigers are gonna eat ya. And if you think you’re going to retreat from some likely 10M years of evolution just to figure out how to help pilot our society out of its current mess, I’ve got news for you.

Metacognition — or admitting that you don’t know — in a group is going to have also other active agents rush in to fill you up with their views, which probably aren’t any better, and likely worse than your own. It’s how we get those mass psychoses we’ve got going. And the more externally defined/emotionally available you are to what others think, it’s going to get ugly fast. Corrections in this kind of peer pressure are long-term. People just don’t want to hear your bullshit confusion.

Some things we don’t know are also profoundly comforting in not knowing, especially if you already have a narrative figured out that makes sense with the surrounding sensory inputs in your environment. I used to be a big Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocate. But as time went by, and, well, the seas didn’t swallow New York City, I became more and more of a skeptic. And then when people in the IPCC threatened something I happen to love very much — in this case, vast swaths of native forest, which at least some of them wanted to cut down to make the planet more shiny (that’s the albedo thing) I woke up. There are more things in heaven and Earth than my philosophy can know, Horatio.

And then I continued my journey with meeting people like Judy Curry, the former chair of atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, and someone that had made the jump herself a couple of decades ago. Judy’s book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, is dense — but a classic. Only someone like Judy could go through the probabilistic analyses of what actually is going to happen in the climate space, as a risk management and probability expert. It was one piece in the puzzle that convinced me we actually have a memetic problem with climate science — not so much a scientific one. Status elevation in the field was (and still is) tied to how catastrophic the narrative one creates, instead of anything resembling a grounded reality. Those louder voices have seized the megaphone, and they’re screaming. And if you don’t fall in line, it’s only tigers for you.

And what do those loud voices do? That’s where my expertise kicks in. Some very famous loud voices in the climate science community are also connected in a very closed-loop feedback modality to the insurance industry. If they’re all saying we’re gonna wash away in the next big storm, someone has to sell us insurance so we can rebuild back in the same place. That’s what insurance is all about. And that means they have to raise their rates, because business is business, don’tchaknow? Or the government has to cover the house. Or something. Short answer — the real problem is brain worms in the scientific climate community.

So to understand all of how this might be connected, you gotta start admitting you don’t know stuff, and looking for other signals that people are lying to you. The biggest would be insurance company profits. Which is downright metacognitive-y. Because now people are paying increased premiums for things that didn’t happen. And our news media stream is not about reporting things that didn’t happen. You didn’t read a piece recently “China didn’t invade Mongolia this week,” because that wouldn’t have much signal value. Or emotional value either.

But just because I wasn’t aware of insurance profits, didn’t mean that the signal wasn’t there. That’s the whole Dark Matter part of metacognition. Dark Matter is the stuff in the universe that doesn’t reflect light, but it’s still there tugging on all sorts of other stuff through gravity. Considering that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, though, you can’t just ignore it. And that’s what is happening in the memetic-sphere with our thoughts. Metacognition is accepting that it really does exist, and then starting the process of adjusting our worldview to understand it.

My friend, and atmospheric scientist at UC-Davis Joe Biello sent me this picture. Once you understand where that Dark Matter is, it’s not surprising that the picture it gives of what’s going on starts becoming more coherent, or in the colloquial, making more sense. Here’s insurance industry profits.

I used to use the signal that the insurance industry was raising their rates as proof that AGW was real. But it turns out not so much. It turns out the same people spreading the AGW hysteria are also looped into the money-making machine. And it’s not that some level of GW is happening (and some is caused by humans) it’s that the hysteria signal prevents more reasoned debates from occurring on what actual solutions might be. Or on what scale we should respond. I’m extremely pro-environment (spent my entire life working on various issues) and totally believe humans can fuck up stuff locally, as well as regionally. Big time. Anyone can see a clearcut. Or an urban heat island. But actually grounding yourself to changes in the global system needs lots more research.

Which we should be doing. But when the hysteria meter is off the charts, instead of understanding how our natural systems, which are obviously complex, modulate the climate, through vegetation, circulation and growth (see my buddies Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on the biotic pump) we end up with people demanding we turn Siberia into a parking lot. We still don’t know exactly how all this works. But we won’t even study it if all the money is diverted into computer time and large models. It’s like sticking our fingers in our ears and saying “Nyah nyah nyah!” Not very metacognitive-y. Nor wise.

It’s no surprise that human brains work like this. Yeah, I like my work on knowledge complexity. But you’ll also find me recognizing Michael L. Commons’ work on hierarchical complexity as well. Not quite as system-y as mine is but spot on as far as understanding what humans are capable of knowing. And here’s the key. One of the hardest things for humans to process is cross-paradigmatic complexity. In our example case here, the cross-paradigmatic complexity is how AGW research feeds into insurance industry profits. There are at least three jumps across physical to social systems that reveal the relative truth of a lot of this stuff. Most human brains no likey. And even if your brain DOES like it, you’re likely to be missing something. I know I certainly was. The easiest immediate proof that storm intensity and frequency are NOT increasing is found in insurance industry profits. Because if it actually was, you better believe the insurance industry would be howling more than they already are. And there’s also ancillary cause-and-effect (like building more cheap houses in places like Florida) that are also potentially causal in insurance industry profits going down, if there actually were a hurricane. It’s all part of the metacognitive puzzle — not just looking at the connections, but also looking at how, and which are the connections that matter.

This kind of analysis (or really, meta-analysis) can leap all over the map. I’ve been going back-and-forth on the risks of AI tech, for example. And one ALWAYS ends up with the “correlation is not causation” tropes, like increasing ice cream prices are tied to tiger predation, or some such icks. You can look those up yourself.

If there is any answer to all this, it is awareness and your agency. So walk around and think about stuff you really don’t know much about. And then investigate. The worst thing that can happen is you become a more interesting cocktail party guest. Even if no one wants to invite you.

P.S. Judy’s latest contribution to the DOE’s climate report is here. They did a great job in pulling apart a very confounded body of work that is mostly nonsensical. You’ll hear the usual hue and cry about the oil industry blah blah blah, but I really encourage you to read it. It’s good mental exercise.

The L.A. Riots and Memetic Coherence

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

It’s always the ear with that damn borzoi

For the last couple of days, riots have been building across the poorer parts of Los Angeles — supposed protests of ICE actions to deport illegal aliens. The riots had been escalating, to the point where Trump called out the National Guard, going against the will of both Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. It’s hard to know exactly what is going on in LA right now. I have solid friends on the ground, who don’t live in the various neighborhoods (majority Hispanic and poor) where these types of actions would take place, and they say “nothing is happening.”

But something is happening (they also confirm that) and it’s important enough to consider the dynamics. We know enough to know that Karen Bass, the mayor in most need of replacement in all of our urban centers, was a former organizer for a variety of groups tied to actors like USAID, and most importantly the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA-cutout organization famous for organizing overthrow of legitimate governments around the world. We also know that while Bass has a history of sucking up to governments like Fidel Castro’s in Cuba, (all this could be construed as some kind of bizarre LARP if it weren’t so) she’s obviously woefully incompetent as any kind of manager. We know she hasn’t learned much in her 40+ years of political activism by watching her appalling performance during the recent Palisades fire in LA. Sometimes having no coherent political philosophy other than proto-socialism will gain you a sinecure in one of our corrupt, government-funded NGOs. But you still don’t know what to do when excrement hits the respective ventilator.

But there are other actors afoot in this. It’s easy to focus on Bass and Newsom, who only yesterday evening backed off from their encouraging the public to confront ICE in the streets. Yes indeed — that is bad enough. But there are other coherences and convergences that are interesting. In the spirit of “follow the money,” who stands most to lose if ICE eliminates the potential for importation of large numbers of illegal aliens into the U.S.? The various Mexican gangs (they are numerous) who are making bank literally rounding up people, mostly young males, from around the world to transport to the US. I’ve read articles before the current crisis that this business of human transport was equivalent to the drug trade in terms of raw dollars. Think they might have opinions? Especially if the mayor and the governor were throwing down on the side of the rioters?

And speaking of those gangs, one thing they know how to do is buy politicians and run a shadow government behind the scenes in Mexico. We chronically ignore the social sophistication required to pull off the fact that Mexico is essentially run by gangs, because our news media feeds us polemics about how that would work. The portrait is that if an area is run by gangs, there are constant public executions and whatnot.

But the reality is that the gangs, like any organized force, can only deal with so much chaos in any given time. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to some level of organized economic activity. And people can be poor, and if the weather is good (as it so often is in Mexico) they can get by. But any population is only nine meals away from anarchy, as Alfred Henry Lewis once said. Make no mistake — they are still violent. But psychosocial evolutionary lines must be drawn. Or there is mass death. It’s the reason folks can still fly into Cancun and have a pleasant vacation. Life must go on.

Here’s the point. Those gangs have learned how to buy politicians, and to a limited extent, manage the civil society that matters to them. They bump up against this in LA, where there are poorly organized, but at least legitimate political organizations at work. So they seek out the various tribally aligned politicians, and court the psychopaths running the American side of the show under a variety of guises. The point is that there may be disagreements. But not by much. Both the gangs, and the current political caste in LA have an interest in continued dilution of the voter pool. Especially as the established minority population (in this case Latino) becomes more and more disillusioned with the decline of their communities. The Democrats in LA may be blinded by race, and unconstrained in screaming at Trump and the Republicans, but the people actually adjacent to the violence of this recent unprecedented wave of illegal immigration are not.

And this is what I call Memetic coherence. When memetic coherence exists, it’s not important for everyone to be a conscious actor. They can help. But the broad interests in how society is structured is really not in play. That dramatically eliminates conflict, at least in the short run. It can be a powerful thing, rapidly evolving societies up or down. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is a great example of disparate forces coming together to eliminate Jim Crow and create an integrated society. But it can also happen when devolutionary forces band together to provide cover and distract from the real psychosocial mechanisms at hand. The elite psychopaths like Bass, as well as other white folks (this is NOT race-delimited) are going to work to drive society back to that tribal level where their behavior is not anomalous. And they’re not going to have a hard time forming alliances with complicated organizations like the Sinaloan gangs, or Latin Kings. Those people mastered that playbook in Mexico. They bring logistical game to the table. No learning curve required.

And LA politicians who are simply avaricious are available for sale.

What none of these people are counting on is that these types of Tribal/Authoritarian societies are poorly organized. And up against any group with real military training, they’ll run away. Which is exactly what is happening this morning as I write this. It’s historic. Very few tribal societies can stand strong against an actual, organized government — Cortes’ 500, with a little help from friendly neighbors, dropped the 1M member Aztec empire. It wasn’t just guns, germs and steel. All those Brave Warriors on the ostensible Left, riding motorcycles and waving Mexican flags, have vamoosed.

One thing that people also don’t realize, when leadership is psychopathic, is while there are certain things psychopaths do well, they are also chronically dissociated. That inability to focus in on real events is super-important. Organization beats chaos almost every time. But they are still going to cast their spells of illusion broadly. And the MSM is going to be there to help and amplify — they crave collapse so badly, mostly because it’s exciting. But also even today in L.A., they’re up on the 405, with their fellow white elites, and don’t have to experience anything other than the game they hear over their mass media channel of choice. Just as long as they don’t take the wrong exit.

Stay tuned. This was written the morning of June 8, 2025. It’s going to be an interesting day.

P.S. One fair question might be “why aren’t these Tribal/Authoritarians fighting with each other?” The answer is “no real overlapping economic interests.” Gangs fight over turf. In this case, Bass, Antifa, and the other DSA partisans have no physical things they’ll be denied by aligning with the Mexican gangs. Groups may have conflicts due to ideology. But when your ideology is chaos, and no one is stealing your very real cheese, it’s just getting as many idiot actors out into the street as possible.

And that’s what we’re seeing. Bass and Newsom only started backing off when the feds started doubling down on removing more of California’s sovereignty. Cuz that’s where the real money is.

PPS — just to reiterate — there is no conflict in the two camps regarding their Deep feeder streams of money. Bass and the CA gov’t gets money from the feds, which is now being threatened to be cut off. Activists get money from the feds due to NGO cut-outs (CIA/USAID/State). The Sinaloan gangs get money directly from the immigrants they’re smuggling. SoCal politicians get money from the cartels, and from the NGOs, but the actions are coherent, so everyone is happy.

It’s the Perfect Racket. Everyone gets cut in. And the only victims are legal immigrant communities, as well as the rule of law.

What Does IQ Mean, Anyway?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Evening at SeaTac – Days of Miracles and Wonder

One of the most vexatious arguments, to me at least, is this whole idea that “smart people should run the world.” As a certified Smart Person, I can tell you that the last thing you want is for smart people to COMPLETELY run the world. I do think smart people come in handy — we can do particular things very well, and some things that no one else can do that’s not a smart person. But having not just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I’ve known plenty of people that wouldn’t score so highly on something like an IQ test that have saved my bacon.

What’s worse, from an epistemological perspective, we have a very poor idea of what “smart” even means. Smart can often mean self-delusional, and that kind of BS leads to all sorts of sadness and death. I really do like this video by Gurwinder (the full credits are on the Youtube clip.) Gurwinder’s a pretty smart guy himself, and on the way to becoming wise.

The short version is that smart, or rather High IQ people can be very good at self-delusion, in that their brains can create false, self-justifying scenarios that they themselves can believe. And then because they often have more intellectual/memetic tools at their disposal, they can be very good at amplifying these beliefs. In status-driven hierarchies, they can rise to the top.

But then, if you actually study some of the concepts on this blog, you see how this can become very self-limiting. Why? That old concept of Grounding Validity. It’s not enough to have things that are complicated and sophisticated. Sooner or later, you’ve gotta ground your ideas (or at least try) in some kind of reality. Touch grass, as it were. Or else you’ll envision planets like Dune, and have spaceflight-sending psychopaths. Which is fine for entertainment. But hardly any way to build a rocket company. My favorite example of this kind of nonsense is Black Panther’s Wakanda. Here we have an advanced, technological society that’s basically hidden, that settles leadership through hand-to-hand combat. Give me a break. Conway’s Law just says “no”.

Back to IQ. My mother, socially dysfunctional as she was, drug me down to some testing center when I was 15, and put me through the various tests. My IQ came back — 164. She was already at her personal limits attempting to figure out how to deal with her home situation, and she had no real idea what to do with me. I obviously wasn’t autistic (though I have been called meta-autistic — one of my favorite compliments!) and had already passed through the typical calculus gauntlet at 13. So the following year, they packed me off to Case Western Reserve to engineering school. There were other bona-fide, award-winning mathematical geniuses at the school, but they were actually autistic, and I didn’t fall in with them. Instead, I practiced drinking a lot of beer quickly (I was a perennial beer chug contender) and worked on getting out of school, which I was going to have to compensate my parents for, as quickly as possible.

There’s a whole lot of academic “blah blah”, as well as a stint in the steel mill, in between there and here. Recently, I re-tested my IQ with one of those informal tests. It made my head hurt, but did remind me what goes on in an IQ test. My retested IQ at 60? About 115. Certainly, my friends and acquaintances will support the notion I’ve gotten much stupider. But maybe not that much.

What IQ DOES test is some version of pattern-matching ability. It is intrinsically algorithmic, which means that kids raised up in a stricter legalistic environment are far more likely to get a higher score than kids raised more loosey-goosy. People in the Survival v-Meme don’t stand a chance, and kids raised in neo-Tribal societies are gonna struggle as well. It’s no surprise that Asian-American kids do the best, at least to me. White kids come in second, on average, though if you understand that demographics are some form of Gaussian-distributed, once people are in a stable version of modern society, there’s going to be convergence. I don’t even want to get close to the question of “IQ as a genetic inheritance,” other than to say that if you’ve got smart parents, you’re gonna get a leg up on whatever processor architecture compared to the rest of the population. Both my own sons are wicked smart, though I say with no humility that at least some of this comes from their mother. And yes — they had some IQ advantage coming genetically from us. But a lot of their smarts come from them be raised in environments where grounded problem-solving was the norm. See below for that environment. Needless to say, you gotta think for yourself when you’re in a tight spot.

Conor at 12, dropping in. He wanted it — bad.

What IQ means cannot be decontextualized outside canonical knowledge structures. And young people’s affinity for future learning also cannot be separated from the dominant culture they come from, as well the developmental stage most young people are in at any given time. IQ testing comes along right when kids, in advanced, legalistic cultures, are passing through the gate of evolved algorithmic thinking. And so it’s no surprise that kids that likely have genetic affinity, along with reinforcing culture, and developmental tracking are going to do better on IQ and other tests, like the SAT. Of course.

And if there’s any understanding of how that plays out, it’s that the kids, relative to others in their age cohort, are going to be more SOPHISTICATED thinkers than others in their cohort. But now societal trade-offs come into play. You’re also going to be pre-biasing the educational system, especially for professions that have complicated hierarchical social structures, like medicine, or even programming, for kids that at this point in time are optimal. Certain types of neurodivergent kids are going to win this competition every time.

But down the road, they may NOT be the kinds of people who you really want that have the ability to cross-fertilize with others. Who are more evolved and empathetic thinkers. Who may indeed be the kinds of people who can integrate disruptive paradigms into innovative strategies that move society forward. Let’s review quickly Evolution vs. Sophistication with this graphic:

What this means is that you are selecting young people for tracking into institutions (like universities) where the be-all and end-all actually IS status. And you’re not leaving the door open for those that might be superior not so much in ANALYSIS – but actual SYNTHESIS. Because successful designers require agency, and the ability to make choices, which inherently is a very different set of neurogenic pathways. And THOSE people have to be able to listen to others, and synthesize their viewpoints into a larger, aggregate understanding. There are decisions being made when one solely considers IQ that inherently can close off those future paths to career success.

Long-term, from a societal perspective, this ain’t so hot. Without some understanding of how disruptive innovation works, which often involves folks taking a Hail Mary moonshot, in a different field, you’re only going to end up with incremental innovation inside a particular type of legalistic/algorithmic knowledge structure. That is, of course, what is happening inside academia. I got tenure with (I think) ten papers. Now, all our young faculty better have about 20, or they don’t stand a chance. So the system is, from an incremental Darwinian perspective, selecting for rule-following neurodivergence and IQ. But this will not produce the people who will necessarily invent more profound ways of teaching the current crop of young people, which is going to require more understanding of others, in a different cultural milieu, and a different set of tools that they may have facility with, that the teachers do not (e.g. ‘digital natives’.) Which is especially problematic in engineering, with the huge turnover in relevant knowledge happening constantly.

Further, the people you want inventing ways of measuring these higher cognitive skills — academics! — also end up being v-Meme limited in how they even assess heuristic decision making ability, because these abilities are poorly evolved in their own context! One ends up with obvious complexity ceilings among the teachers. And that is problematic.

How? Over the years, we’ve had various “critical thinking” projects at my university. These are well-meaning. But it doesn’t take long (usually after the pioneers of said programs have moved away) to only reward and call things “critical thinking” that agree with the professors’ viewpoints. In the Woke World of the modern academy, this has been disastrous in stifling debate, as well as producing ideologues. And because the subject matter is often about societal interpretation, it attracts more than its fair share of psychopaths, interested in only power and control.

The path to answers I’ve followed, at least from an engineering perspective, is to open my classroom up. Lots of contact with the outside world of engineers, which means LOTS of validity grounding, for both the students AND myself. I’ve been very successful with this — there ARE answers.

But this does not get at the heart of people wanting testing protocols for K-12. And therein lies the rub. And because education is, inherently, at the lower levels, a status-sorting game, the interest in actually creating more enlightened young people is just oh so boring. I’m not the first to say that the system is functioning exactly as it’s been created to function.

The problem is that the asteroid of complexity in many fields, as well as how to run a multi-ethnic society, is approaching. We’ve done a pretty shitty job of creating a society where people can find meaning, as well as developing pathways for others to find it, as well as make sure the trains run on time and the grocery stores are full of food. The problem with NOT doing this is that you end up lots of elites working to find ways to tear it down, because that’s in their non-self-aware elitist interests during periods of Elite Overproduction.

Educators might consider what might happen to our shared future when it finally hits.

Summary

There’s a lot in this post. Summarizing:

  1. We test for legalistic/algorithmic abilities and sort kids based on these at THE critical juncture in their lives — at 18 — with things like IQ tests and SAT tests.
  2. Some cultures have a profound leg up because their kids are raised in orderly societies.
  3. We don’t test at all for agency and empathy, nor do we particularly focus on raising young people to be independent. Yet these two things are critical for evolving our society as life conditions change.
  4. Academia has little to no interest in persistently systemically confronting this failure.
  5. We have no accepted epistemology for even looking at this problem in knowledge and decision making ability.
  6. Without some enlightened sense of awareness, we’ll eventually converge on societal stasis and promotion of neurodivergence, which will not play out well in the long run.