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2025 Nov 07 See all posts Galaxy brain resistance

One important property for a style of thinking and argumentation to have is what I call galaxy brain resistance: how difficult is it to abuse that style of thinking to argue for pretty much whatever you want - something that you already decided elsewhere for other reasons? The spirit here is similar to falsifiability in science: if your arguments can justify anything, then your arguments imply nothing.

You want to get to step 2 and then stop.

It's easiest to motivate the need to think about galaxy brain resistance by looking at what happens in its absence. You've probably heard many cases of people saying things like this:

We are building a new decentralized ____ marketplace that will revolutionize how ____ customers interact with their providers, and will allow creators to turn their audiences into digital nation states. $____ is a governance token that lets you play a direct role in this rapidly growing market. If we capture even 1% of the ___ market share, this will be a $___ billion market, and the governance token will be worth billions.

In politics, you can get much worse. Like, say:

[ethnic minority] is responsible for a lot of persistent social disruption and drains our resources. If we were to just completely remove them (and I do mean completely remove, so they don't come back), it would be a grim one-time act, but in the long term, if doing it makes our economy grow even half a percentage point faster, then in 500 years, our country will be twelve times richer than it otherwise would have been. That is a huge number of much happier and more fulfilled lives. It would be a grave injustice to condemn our descendants to vastly poorer lives simply out of cowardly fear of paying this one-time cost today.

One way to deal with arguments like the above is to deal with them as mathematical objects in a philosophy class, try to identify the specific premises or steps that you disagree