The main reason why I decided to start a blog was frame erosion.

Its not a concept you would find anywhere, because I made it up. Its something along the lines of, you have a problem that really bothers you, you come up with a triumphant realization (either by yourself or by reading it somewhere), you incorporate it into your thinking, and then a bit later (several months to a year) you come across someone who is completely devoid of that perspective, and you find yourself utterly unable to explain it to them.

The reason why its particularly annoying when it happens, is that you remember the feeling like you could have written entire essays on the subject, would readily debate it with anyone who would have come across you, and now you just feel utterly drained and annoyed. You remember that before you understood the thing, you were asking similar questions and making similar objections to the ones that people are asking you right now, and you can tell that in some sense they have the same mindset to that of past you. But past you does not exist anymore, and tracing the path that lead it to the current you feels at best like archaeology, and at worst like factorizing primes.

I have decided to dub this phenomenon "frame erosion", in vein of the concepts of frame problem in AI and frame control in social dynamics. Basically, when you investigate a certain important topic, you build up a certain "frame" - facts that are important and relevant to it, connections between disparate fields, mental models that are not common knowledge anywhere but allow you to make sense anywhere, that sort of stuff. Then, once you figure out what has been bothering you and verify that your conclusion seems to be correct and useful, you keep the core idea but slowly let the supporting scaffolding of perspectives and justifications rot. (This happens even more easily if the conclusion is something that is already widely believed in your environment, so your belief does not get challenged much, and there is no reason to keep the frame).

For an annoyingly meta example of the phenomena, I am writing this post from some notes that are already about a month old. This means that the concept of "frame erosion" is no longer super fresh to me, but since I still remember most of how I came up with it, so its only slightly annoying to write. I find myself having to double-guess and check myself sometimes - where did I get the "frame" terminology from? What exactly did I feel that made it so important to me?

On that topic, the real problem with frame erosion is not even the loss of information itself, because if it will end up being important to you in the future you will gladly figure it out again. The real problem is with communicating with others. If you have an idea that you are having trouble to explain, but you are pretty sure you are right and they are just not getting it, you don't really have the same drive to figure out again what you really know. There is this joke about the mathematician who accidentally set himself on fire two days in a row but refused to put himself out the second day because it was "already a solved problem". Frame erosion follows a similar kind of logic. It difficult to put a lot of effort into clarifying your intuitions, just so that you can find out what you already know.

Now, that doesn't mean that frame erosion is all that bad. Often spending the cost researching something again can lead to new conclusions, or correct old mistakes. Revisiting old ideas can be good, since they can depend on old cached beliefs that one may no longer have. In general there is probably a direct trade-off between "writing the stuff down in bouts of inspiration" and "maybe just writing down the general concept and then coming back to it later".

But there is however one particular thing on this track of reasoning that I am afraid of. What if there are so many little ideas, some of which could change the world, others which have already changed the world, that are just out there and nobody wrote them down, and the people who understand them have eroded frames so they can't explain them anymore, and everything is just running on pure momentum and is gatekept on implicit knowledge that will maybe die with the people who built it? David Chapman claims that something along those lines lead to the decline of post-modernism.

I am worried that as I go on learning stuff about the world, I might accumulate interesting and unusual insights about how the world works, but that will alienate me from people who don't share those insights and by then I will no longer remember how to convince them or give good arguments to support it. I think this often happens to communities of people - they become isolated by their shared beliefs which they work out together, but then no record of that working out happens. And then maybe newcomers show up and they only pretend to get it and the actual insight gets lost in translation, but that's partially a different story altogether. Part of the reason why I think it is a good idea to have a blog is to have some kind of record of this working out happening.

This sketches out the general parameters of the kind of content I want to post here. I am not really interested in being extremely rigorous in my writing (although naturally I intend to be self-critical, and if I find some idea to be "more crazy then usual" I will probably point it out explicitly), but more so to just "get ideas out of the door", where the door is my head, while I still have intact the kind of structures that led me to them. One could call it stoner talk, or insight porn. But if it really is porn, I want it to be of the nice classy kind, of the sort which one can hang on a wall and say its artistic or whatever.

I still intend to be as convincing as possible, even if I'm probably not going to be giving explicit probabilities for anything any time soon.