Thinking operates on a spectrum of granularity: smaller versus larger chunks of inherited thought. Nobody thinks from first principles. The intellectual universe is too gnarled for that.

Smaller chunks produce fewer hard limits. But just as certain physical problems require specialised instruments with complex supply chains (performing vast numbers of FLOPs quickly, say), certain intellectual problems are analogous. Without the right mental tools, the problem simply goes unsolved, and the tools themselves cannot be reconstructed from scratch. The epsilon-delta definition of a limit is a case in point: not difficult to use, but extraordinarily difficult to originate, as history demonstrates.

Working with smaller chunks of thought nonetheless affords greater range and fertility than working with larger ones, since the combinatorial space of possible constructions is vastly wider. One can assemble far more from a hundred individual Lego bricks than from four pre-glued walls. But this is not purely combinatorics. Thinking in smaller units reflects genuine competence and generativity, and smaller units carry fewer internal hazards: fewer traps, dead-ends, and black holes. A hundred discrete observations are safer intellectual currency than a single ideology.

Engage seriously with trying to change the world and you will find that power operates nothing like conspiracy theories suggest: not for want of malice, but for want of competence.

This creates a two-stage selection pressure. Directly: those who try to act soon abandon conspiratorial thinking, culling believers from the active population and leaving only the fatalistic. Indirectly: for a conspiracy theory to persist as a meme, it must induce passivity in its hosts, since any host who acts will eventually defect.

Conspiracy theories are therefore memetic parasites. They consume the vitality of their hosts in order to perpetuate themselves.

When Napoleon designated Lombardy the Cisalpine Republic rather than the Transalpine Republic, he was electing not to proclaim a new Rome, not yet. I find myself wondering whether he weighed both names.

Meetings and marketplaces perform the same basic function: aggregating buyers and sellers of information or vegetables to reduce search costs. The difference is one of parallelism. In a marketplace, transactions occur simultaneously; I need not finish buying milk before you can sell an apple. In a meeting, transactions are serialised. Shared communication channels are rivalrous in a way that shared physical space is not. Scaling a marketplace increases liquidity. Scaling a meeting creates congestion.

But the purpose of a meeting is not information exchange, not increasing volume or liquidity. It is the production of common knowledge. A fully non-rivalrous meeting, everyone dispersed into breakout rooms, would enable far more transactions but generate no common knowledge at all. The inefficiency is load-bearing.

The more memetically fit a religion or scripture, the less likely it is to be true.