It's scary because I was never as smart as he used to be. I could be even more off base with even less to back it up, and equally unable to see that.
The whole thing reminds me of a book written by one of the researchers who was first reviewing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
An expert on his field, he eventually writes a book about how everything was actually connected to magic mushrooms. But the key is - it's all using abstract references and coded language.
So much like how online "pedophile investigators" suddenly saw flying in Chicago deep dish pizza as code for child trafficking because triangles are coded symbolism - it becomes a self fulfilling abstraction.
Redefine first principles off a presumed conclusion with enough abstraction and you can magically arrive at that conclusion from those first principles in ways no one can understand unless they embrace your abstractions! Crazy, right?
- Contact with reality (feedback). Predict, try, did it work?
- Having a good reasoning framework. For some it's 1. Religious text, 2. what others they respect think, 3. reasoning for understanding. This is not the worst but not the best. Perhaps a better one would be 1. Science/rationality, 2. religious/philosophical/spiritual texts, 3. first principles thinking
- Humility, you don't know anything unless you have great reasoning and empirical evidence to back up what you're saying. Even then, when faced with complexity (i.e. unless you are dealing with the most atomic/simple concept), you're still almost certainly wrong.