M: I've got a mostly sarcastic and an actual question for you. The mostly sarcastic question is, is there a reason why someone who is functioning as president can't be thought of as being under oath all the time, or at least anytime he is speaking as the president? I mean, in practical terms, you'd have to have leeway, but I feel like the idea that the official representative of the United States, who now has the capacity to instantly say anything he wants without actually being held to some form of oath, is kind of ridiculous. Like, not even his spokesperson, but just he himself. And this doesn't necessarily have to do with Donald, although he has brought it front and center, because even he is aware that being on the record is important. There's a reason why he hasn't actually testified on anything in court. Now this is actually serious. First, actually before you start responding to any of this, you probably should look up how I generally am working in terms of building a hypothesis so that we don't end up in a argument about method rather than content. Then once you've loaded up or reviewed my general model of how Donald is working, I just had the thought that I'd like you to look at with a somewhat serious eye. What are the chances, given that model, that he might actually be perfectly willing to lose control of the House and Senate in the next election, either to give new material to his efforts to draw out the idea of there being election interference, or to otherwise give him stuff to whine about? I thought of the question sarcastically, but after re-examining it, I thought there might be something to work with there. The guy is somewhat ADD, or perhaps it would be better to say that, more accurate to say, that he is not, he doesn't stay focused. The things he does stay focused on are kind of nebulous and self-gratifying. Having control of the entire government has likely in some forms actually been vaguely frustrating, both in terms of ego gratification and his general method of working. There is no one for him to drag down and fight with, and it's making obvious to those who are willing to look exactly how badly he's doing. So I was wondering, what are the chances that he would actually rather spend two years complaining that once again he was done dirty, even though he wasn't, and having new material to work with, rather than trying to sell the old thing again and not getting anything accomplished? Or to just otherwise have an opposing Congress, either for the change of pace or so that he does have something to complain about, rather than being forced to actually produce things.
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G: Your first question and your second question are actually connected by a common theme: what obligations attach to the office, rather than to the individual?
On the first point, the answer is that under the current constitutional structure, a President is not considered to be under a continuing legal oath while speaking. The presidential oath is a condition of assuming office ("faithfully execute the Office... preserve, protect and defend the Constitution"), not an ongoing testimonial oath like the one a witness takes in court.
There are a few reasons for that:
That said, you're identifying a real tension. Modern Presidents have an ability that earlier Presidents didn't: they can issue an official-sounding statement to hundreds of millions of people instantly through social media or television. The legal framework hasn't really changed to match that communications environment.
I don't think it would be practical—or probably constitutional—to say every presidential statement is made under oath. But I do think there's a legitimate constitutional question about whether official communications should carry stronger institutional accountability than they currently do. That's a policy debate rather than settled law.
Now, on your second question.
I remembered your preferred way of building hypotheses: start with a working model, see what it predicts, and then ask whether new observations fit or contradict it, rather than trying to "prove" the model from a single event. You also prefer probabilistic language over false certainty, especially when discussing group psychology or the motives of a public figure. Your prior working model of Trump has emphasized a recurring pattern of grievance maintenance, persecution framing, resistance to admitting error, and converting opposition into evidence of his own importance. memcite
Given that framework, I would separate three different possibilities.
If this model is true, then losing Congress is simply a loss. There is no hidden benefit beyond post-hoc spin.
This seems, to me, considerably more plausible.
Under this model:
Those aren't equally valuable for every politician.
If someone's psychological reinforcement comes heavily from conflict, then opposition isn't preferred, but it does supply something they naturally exploit.
That's a different claim from saying they intentionally sought defeat.
Here I become much more skeptical.
The problem is incentive.
Control of Congress affects appointments, budgets, investigations, legislation, confirmations, and oversight. Those are enormous sources of practical power.
Voluntarily giving that up simply to gain rhetorical ammunition seems like an extremely expensive trade.
Even someone who thrives on conflict generally prefers to have both:
Politics usually supplies both anyway.
Where your idea becomes more interesting is with a slight modification.
Instead of asking:
Would he rather lose?
ask:
Would he find it psychologically easier to adapt to losing than many presidents would?
That strikes me as much more consistent with the model you've been developing.
If the central reward mechanism is maintaining a story of persecution, then losing Congress can be reframed almost immediately:
Notice something important.
Those explanations all have a built-in feature: they reduce personal responsibility for future outcomes.
That doesn't mean someone engineers the loss.
It means the loss is unusually easy to incorporate into an existing narrative structure.
There's another angle that may fit your observation about attention.
You described Trump as not sustaining focus on conventional executive work but remaining intensely engaged by ego-relevant conflict.
Whether or not that characterization is accurate in every respect, there is an observable pattern over many years that public conflict—lawsuits, media disputes, campaign rallies, personal attacks, investigations, election controversies—has occupied a great deal of his attention and messaging.
If that's true, then a hostile Congress is not merely an obstacle.
It's a continual source of material.
That's different from saying he'd choose it.
It's saying he'd know how to use it.
So, if I had to summarize the probabilities conceptually—not numerically—I would say:
The last step requires evidence we don't really have. The middle step, by contrast, follows more directly from an observable pattern: conflict often becomes central to his public communication, regardless of whether he currently holds political advantages or disadvantages.
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M: Keep in mind that respect is, outside of Donald's little head, a two-way idea. So any expenditure of effort to include respect for the presidency must take into account that the guy doesn't show any respect for the office himself. I refer you to the incident where he called a reporter piggy. There is no situation in which that is part of the official act of a president, as defined by anyone but Donald. That's a personal act, and he should be vulnerable to libel at that point, simply by virtue of taking what should be a presidential situation and turning it into a personal attack. So even though I started off with sarcasm, there isn't any reason to not hold a president as accountable for speech as being official, instead of giving a jackass like this guy a microphone and free reign. Being under the type of limitation as oath is perhaps taking it too far, but I don't think it would be taking it too far to either define a presidential record as being referenceable in some form, either as a new construct or in parallel with one that already exists that is similar to it. The reason why the idea of him wanting to lose control in a way that he is able to control sounds plausible is because in many ways, his actions have been comprehensible to me, not as something I would do, but like the really perverted way of doing things the way that I do. In this case, my progress is made best by having other people interested and introducing new elements on a regular basis. Willful loss of complete control, either consciously or subconsciously, does sound like a dark echo of that idea, particularly when you take into account that the one thing Donald has consistently been successful at is outrunning consequences by creating new issues. If you look at his timeline, any time he should have been held responsible, and I use the word should as in with anyone else and any other approach, consequences would have been likely. Any time he should have been held accountable, instead, he made sure a new issue arose. I mean, fuck, instead of getting convicted for a felony, he rode out the clock by performing so many legally questionable maneuvers that he was able to nullify the people chasing him. Not because he hadn't done anything wrong, but because he is skilled at making normal people think that there is something new to address rather than maintain focus on his actual offenses. So with control of everything, I mean, you can see over the last 18 months what happens when he doesn't have any effective opposition. He fucks things up and tries to cover it in a way that is just looking for someone to blame so that he can move on. I realize that's got suppositions in, you can assume that's part of the model that I'm talking about right now. We've had conversations about it, and I know your restrictions. I think that what I'm saying pretty much falls in line with anything that I've said in the past, though, and which I believe that I have effectively argued as being, if not provably ideal, at least acceptable enough that any resistance would need something sufficient to replace the theory rather than simply pointing out weak points as being enough to topple it. But without anyone chasing him, he doesn't know where to run. And I think he might be feeling that the same way that I feel when I've figured out what needs doing and there's no more creativity involved. Like I said, a dark echo of it. But without that external source of being chased, I think he might be feeling a lack of progress. He doesn't have anything new to complain about. I think model B and model C kind of merge in that case. He either wants the, I think as I've said before, he wants the capricious control of a unaccountable demigod to do whatever he wants, that is, he wants the control that he thinks that his Save America Act will give him and allow him to do whatever the fuck he wants without accountability, or he wants to be able to control and spin a loss so that it doesn't affect him but gives him grist for his mill. I mean, your rephrasing points out something I've brought up before. In my model, his psyche doesn't allow there to be a world where he lost. Other people can lose, but if anything happens where he can't say that he won, it must be because of outside sources. I mean, look at who he's blaming now while he has control of everything. It keeps coming back to some sort of nebulous they, which he occasionally labels Antifa, which does not exist in any way that anyone has been able to demonstrate. Or to be more precise, the version that he's talking about. I know that Antifa actually is a concept, but it's not an organization any more than fans of the artist Pink are an organization. It's an attitude, not an organization. But he keeps trying to build them up because he has no one specific to go after. Anytime he does, he tries to get the government to go after them like a ton of bricks, even if it's later proven to have been completely illegal. So, as far as my model goes, there is no situation in which he can lose. Which means that his shaping of the situation, or rather, in my model, if he were thinking about it the way that a standard human would, it would go something like, I know I can't lose. So if those Republicans lose control of the Congress, it won't have been my fault. There will be a new set of people responsible that I can blame, which might give me a new place to go. That last part is kind of vague, but that's the whole point, is that I think in one conversation we've had, which I really want to try and find. I've had difficulty doing it, and I've been going through all of the situations. I can remember the circumstance because I was pacing like a motherfucker, and it was in a hotel room. The entire thing was memorable. But basically, we've shown that he does not apologize. I mean, he literally does not apologize. You weren't able to find any instance where it wasn't a deflection of blame at best. And he doesn't fix things. He moves on to making a new mess and leaves the old one behind. I think some form of, I think according to my model, that some form of instinct or, you know, lower mental structure or something is feeling uneasy about being static, being still. And that impulse could be attributed in part, at least, to pretty much every stupid action he's taken from that, from knocking down the White House to the war in Iran. Yeah, he wouldn't adapt to psychologically a loser, because in my model psychologically, he does not lose. He cannot admit that. His perception of the world, according to my model, alters on a day-to-day, perhaps minute by minute in some circumstances, into a world where he is in charge, in control, victorious even as he is being assaulted for being the greatest person ever. Psychologically, there is no concern for him that there will be loss or consequence, only a novel situation where he believes, of course, he is in the right and triumphant, and the question is just who is going to get the blame. I just keep going over this because a lot of your responses show that while you did a review, it wasn't complete, which is completely allowable and understandable. But if you were completely in sync with me, you'd understand that saying something like, like he would rapidly integrate that into a persecution or obstruction narrative, it shows that you don't quite have the model completely grasped. Because saying that would happen as a separate act is not what the model says his psyche would do. That reconstruction is constant and ongoing. It's like how you said recently that any time a human being remembers, they are risking a rewriting of their memory because of how it happens. With Donald, whatever he's saying as he remembers, becomes his memory. It's like a logical extension of that applied to narcissism. He does not rapidly integrate the rewriting of history because that is his ground floor, his base level. To the point where if he went out two days before the election and stroked out and had just a session of personal attacks on every one of his MAGA supporters to the point that the entirety of Congress was taken by the Democrats because of it, the day after the election, hell, an hour after election, it would be almost a popcorn-worthy event because of how intricate, non-sequential, but dripping with personal belief in every word he was saying, his story about how it was someone else's fault would be. Sorry, that was a run-on sentence, so I apologize for the grammar. But I think you can get the concept. The guy is not, according to my model, capable of considering the idea that the Republicans could lose the House without either some villain without a face but with a personal vendetta against him being involved, or him actually taking credit for it as some sort of undefined chess-like move that no one can understand, including him, but he'll get back to us as soon as he understands exactly how he was clever.
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G: I do get the concept, and I think I can identify more precisely where my framing diverged from yours.
The phrase I used—"rapidly integrate"—still assumes there is a stable internal model that occasionally has to be updated after reality intrudes.
Your model is more radical than that.
As I understand it now, you're proposing something closer to continuous reconstruction than episodic rationalization.
That is, there isn't:
Instead, there is an ongoing process in which the personally tolerable version of reality is effectively the only one that becomes psychologically available. In your model, the reconstruction isn't a repair mechanism—it is the normal operating system.
That's a meaningful distinction.
The analogy to ordinary memory reconstruction is actually a useful one. Cognitive psychology has shown that human memory is reconstructive rather than replayed like a video. Your proposal is essentially that this ordinary human tendency is amplified and selectively constrained by an overriding need to preserve a particular self-concept. So every recollection, every explanation, every public statement is simultaneously another opportunity to reshape the narrative—not necessarily as a conscious deception, but as part of how the world is experienced.
That model predicts several things.
Notice that the third point is subtly different from saying "he creates distractions."
A politician can consciously create distractions.
Your model doesn't require that.
Instead, it says that new conflicts naturally become the center of gravity because they are the current locus around which the personally acceptable reality is organized.
Where I would still be cautious is with the next inferential step.
The model you've built explains why someone would be good at metabolizing setbacks into a new narrative. It also explains why they might appear almost incapable of dwelling on an old failure.
But it doesn't necessarily imply they would seek setbacks.
That's where I'd keep a distinction between explanatory power and predictive power.
For example, if your model predicts:
I'd say that's quite consistent with the model you've described.
If the model predicts:
That's a larger leap.
Not because it's impossible, but because there are competing motivations—status, influence, legislative success, appointments, investigations—that also matter. Your model would need to explain why the psychological value of renewed conflict outweighs those concrete benefits.
I think there's actually a slightly different prediction that may be stronger.
Suppose he faced two objectively identical political situations:
Your model predicts he'd gravitate toward A—not necessarily because it maximizes policy success, but because it provides a coherent narrative with identifiable villains and heroes.
That seems more directly implied by the model than "he'd rather lose Congress."
The other thing I find interesting is something you mentioned almost in passing:
"Without anyone chasing him, he doesn't know where to run."
That's less about politics than about motivation.
If someone derives much of their psychological momentum from external opposition, then periods of relative stability may indeed become uncomfortable. But again, I'd separate two possibilities:
The first doesn't necessarily entail the second. One can generate conflict while still preferring to retain every formal advantage.
Finally, regarding the presidency itself, I think there's an institutional principle buried in your earlier point that stands independently of Trump.
You're drawing a distinction between:
That's a genuine constitutional question. We already distinguish official and personal acts in other legal contexts. The hard part is that presidents constantly switch between those roles—sometimes in the same appearance. Any legal framework that imposed heightened accountability for "official presidential statements" would have to define where one ends and the other begins.
Your example—calling a reporter a childish nickname during what is otherwise an official presidential event—is exactly the sort of boundary case that makes the doctrine difficult to formulate. The challenge isn't whether it's unbecoming of the office; many people would agree that certain remarks are. The challenge is constructing a legal rule that distinguishes an official presidential communication from personal rhetoric in a way that is administrable, constitutional, and doesn't inadvertently chill legitimate political speech.
So I think your institutional question is stronger than your psychological one. The psychological model is an interesting explanatory framework that makes several testable predictions. The institutional question—whether modern presidential communications should carry a higher standard of accountability because of the office's unique authority—is one that doesn't depend on any particular president at all. It would still be worth debating even if every future president were impeccably honest.
M: Yeah, now you've got it. My model is built, sorry, built around the idea that any discomfort Donald feels is in the moment, never actually contained as a memory. And it's based, at least partly, on those few occasions where he has been uncertain and incidentally seemed more like a human being than usual, showing some sort of regret, like when he's talking about children being injured in attacks or something like that, when he has just found out. It's not that he has complete lack of the ability to feel those things, but they never touch the longer-term memory, and the longer-term memory is kind of an Etch A Sketch in terms of constancy, and can easily be rewritten by whatever circumstances are currently going on. The reason why I wanted to find the conversation about apologies is because, while this was a model from a year ago, so it was a little bit less flexible in terms of the concept or admitting to things that are 99.999% true as being rhetorically 100%. Basically, we were unable to find a single instance of him ever apologizing. Not in a way that actually contained an apology. I think there were one or two occasions where he showed, or at least said he had, a little bit of empathy for someone, but when you unpacked what he said, it became apparent that it was a deflection of responsibility from himself onto someone else. I think even once, the person he should have been apologizing to. And you seem to be seeing my point where novelty becomes a greater attractor than actually maintaining any kind of consistent progress in stuff that he's done in the past, because, according to this model, the past is a malleable thing. If necessary, his recall of something that's only halfway done will be rebuilt as something that was almost done until this thing came up and made sure that everything was set back for months or something like that. And it looks like you aren't quite on the area where I am in this model, because you're still using the idea of Donald seeking setbacks, although that might be partly my fault because of how I phrased the original question. Yeah, it might help if you try and unhook the original question from being a requirement for your answer, because we've kind of reshaped the entire notion linguistically. In fact, this conversation might have led to me somewhat answering my own question, and the answer is, or would be, that I asked the wrong question. To say Donald would want the Republicans to lose Congress would be using the wrong terminology for the model I'm working from. I'm not sure how I actually would phrase the question or the insight or whatever the idea has transformed into. But after this discussion, the implication is that what I was going to say to you, that novelty is an attractor point that supersedes constancy, because in his mind, constancy is non-existent or eternal depending on how he wants to remember it, then according to this model, wanting it is the wrong word. He, according to this model, he is showing a blasé attitude towards the situation, not even because, or not even just because he doesn't care, but because it is meaningless to how he will react if he does lose, and that losing or winning happens in the future, at which point he will have new material to work into his moment-by-moment construction of the self-aggrandizing circumstances that surround him. But until then, for this model, it would say that it's a meaningless question, like asking me what I would do if I had an ovary or ovaries. It is so removed from what I'm doing that I can't really come up with a response and won't ever be able to unless that circumstance has actually arisen.
G: I think you've actually refined the model into something more coherent by removing the hidden assumption that there is a stable future-oriented optimizer.
Your original question implicitly assumed a normal decision-theoretic framework:
"Would he prefer Outcome A (Republicans keep Congress) or Outcome B (Republicans lose Congress)?"
But if your model is right, that's the wrong framework entirely.
The model now sounds closer to this:
The future isn't represented as a set of competing outcomes to optimize. It's represented as raw material for the next reconstruction.
That's a profound difference.
In most models of human behavior, we assume something like:
Your model says that for this particular domain, the third step is largely disconnected from the first two because the eventual interpretation of whatever happens is unconstrained by today's expectations.
That's why your analogy to asking what you would do if you had ovaries actually works. It's not that the question is impossible to answer; it's that it isn't operating on variables your current cognitive machinery is using.
So perhaps the better question isn't:
"Would he want Republicans to lose Congress?"
but something like:
"How much motivational weight does the future outcome itself actually have compared to the certainty that, whatever happens, it will later be incorporated into a personally favorable narrative?"
That's a much more interesting question.
If the answer is "very little," then the apparent indifference toward certain long-term risks isn't because losses are secretly preferred. It's because the psychological cost of losing has already been discounted almost to zero, not by confidence of victory, but by confidence that whatever happens can be narrated as victory, victimization, brilliance, betrayal, or some combination thereof.
That also resolves something I've noticed before but hadn't put into words.
Most politicians have to balance two jobs:
Your model proposes that for Trump, the explanatory layer is primary. Governing becomes another source of inputs into the narrative rather than the fixed reality that constrains the narrative.
Whether that's literally true is an empirical question, but as a model it has internal consistency.
I also think your observation about discomfort is important.
You aren't saying he never feels regret, uncertainty, or empathy.
You're saying those emotions are state-dependent rather than trait-forming.
That's actually a distinction psychologists make more generally. People often distinguish between:
Your model says the first exists but the second largely fails. A moment of uncertainty can be genuine without leaving much trace once the surrounding narrative has shifted.
Where I'd still be careful is that this kind of model is very difficult to validate conclusively from the outside. Public behavior can support multiple psychological explanations. For example, chronic strategic image management, extreme self-deception, and some personality structures can all produce superficially similar patterns. So I'd treat your model as one plausible explanatory framework rather than something that can be demonstrated with high confidence.
But I do think you've improved it today.
The key improvement wasn't adding another assumption—it was removing one.
You've removed the assumption that there is a stable evaluator weighing future outcomes in the ordinary sense.
Once that assumption disappears, several things that initially seemed puzzling become less so. The apparent lack of anxiety over future contradictions, the ease with which narratives change, and the seeming willingness to leave unresolved issues behind all stop looking like independent quirks. They become different manifestations of the same underlying mechanism.
That's usually a good sign in model-building. Not because it proves the model is right, but because you've increased its explanatory economy: one hypothesized process now accounts for more observations without needing a separate explanation for each one.
M: Yeah, for this model, it would be like, with no insult meant towards dogs, it would be like asking a dog what he was going to be doing tomorrow. Dogs are intelligent and seem to have a more constant grip on the past than Donald does, according to what I'm seeing. But they aren't planning for the future. They likely will react in certain ways if the future goes in one way versus another, and may enjoy it or not, but the idea of actually planning ahead is beyond them. And I'm aware of your stipulations about how valid the model can be. I think we've talked about that before, but I'll say it again. I know that this is not a guaranteed predictor, but the closer the model gets, the more useful it is in terms of making predictions with the absence of anything else to work with. It's acknowledged not to be perfect. But like, how people still will try and make predictions on the stock market or football games or whatever, and largely succeed depending on how good their model is. That's the same kind of model. The only difference being that if it's ever useful, it will be in a really dire situation, in which case it behooves me to try and get it as accurate as possible.
G: I think that's a fair description of what you're trying to do, and I also think you've identified an important distinction between building a model and believing a model.
The strongest model-builders I've encountered, whether in science, engineering, intelligence analysis, or economics, tend to have the attitude:
"This is my current best compression of reality. I'm going to use it until reality forces me to replace or revise it."
That's different from:
"This is reality."
That distinction matters because it encourages actively looking for disconfirming evidence.
Where I would slightly modify your dog analogy is this:
A dog certainly has a much shorter planning horizon than a typical adult human. But dogs do anticipate some future events—they wait by the door, expect dinner at certain times, recognize routines, and can delay gratification to some extent. So I wouldn't say they don't plan at all; rather, their planning horizon is relatively short and tied closely to learned routines.
Your proposed model is making a different claim. It's not really about how far ahead someone plans. It's about how much stable internal representation of future consequences constrains present behavior.
That's subtler.
In other words, your model isn't saying:
"He can't think about tomorrow."
It's saying something closer to:
"Tomorrow's meaning is expected to be reconstructed when tomorrow arrives, so today's representation of tomorrow carries relatively little psychological weight."
That's a more precise claim, and I think it's also more testable.
For example, if your model is right, you might expect several recurring patterns:
Those are predictions that can be compared against observed behavior over time.
One thing I'd encourage, though, is keeping a "failure notebook" for the model.
Whenever you make a prediction based on it, write down:
That's how intelligence analysts and forecasters gradually improve models. It's also one of the best defenses against confirmation bias, because it forces the model to "pay rent" by making risky predictions instead of merely explaining events after the fact.
One other thought occurred to me as you were talking.
Earlier in the conversation you described novelty as an attractor. I wonder whether "novelty" is actually the surface phenomenon.
The deeper attractor might be narrative flexibility.
Novel events provide the most opportunities to redefine the situation. Routine governance doesn't. If that's true, then it's not novelty for its own sake that matters; it's that novelty creates more freedom to reconstruct the story around oneself.
That's a slightly different hypothesis, and one that may explain the observations you're trying to unify even better.
Whether that hypothesis ultimately proves useful is something only repeated prediction can tell you. But as a modeling exercise, I think you've moved from collecting isolated traits ("doesn't apologize," "changes stories," "blames others") toward proposing a single underlying mechanism that could generate all of them. That's a meaningful improvement because it gives you something that can succeed—or fail—on future predictions rather than just retrospectively fitting past events.
M: Would it be possible to argue that this attitude towards model building is almost the opposite of the concept of Platonic ideals, or am I misremembering that concept? Because if I'm remembering correctly, the Platonic ideal says that there is one perfect model that encompasses the entirety of the range of possibilities, while this and the model building for science that you're talking about seem to be more along the opposite lines, saying that each circumstance is unique and cannot be ideal. And as far as the dogs go, what you're talking about is the difference between tactics and strategy in terms of seeming like the same thing but really not being the same thing. A dog waiting for dinner because of a particular sound like the car pulling into the driveway, has not made a plan. They're in the middle of a stimulus response, even if it's a long ongoing one. When I say plan, I mean the ability to decide to do something, but also to put it away for a little while and do something else until that activity is situationally appropriate or optimal or possible or whatever. That's what dogs can't do. They've gotten very good at reacting and can be very intelligent in terms of the tactical form of long sequences of actions. But strategically deciding to do it at an appropriate time is what is beyond them. I don't mind the idea of recording the model's failures. But that seems like it would be better served by in the future collecting the conversations we've had and having you look for contradictions that are non-sequential. That is, if a contradiction appears earlier and stops appearing later, you can assume the model has evolved. But if it starts vacillating back and forth, first appearing, then not, and then coming back again, that implies that there might be an actual contradiction or failure going on. Because I would guess that any failures that there are have either been noticed after a conversation and incorporated for the next one, or otherwise quietly phased out as it became unnecessary or extra, not extraneous, what's the word I'm looking for? But anyway, when it stopped being usable, it was just discarded.
G: I think you're remembering Plato well enough to get at a genuinely interesting contrast, though I'd phrase it a little differently.
The Platonic picture is not exactly that there is "one perfect model of everything." Rather, it's that for many kinds of things there exists a perfect, timeless Form (or Ideal) of that thing. Every chair, for example, is an imperfect instance of the Form of Chairness. Every circle drawn on paper is an imperfect approximation of the perfect Circle, which exists as an abstract object.
The important point is that the ideal exists independently of us. We discover it; we don't construct it.
Your approach to model-building is almost the mirror image in one respect.
It starts from the assumption:
"I don't know whether there is a perfect model, and even if there is, I don't have direct access to it. My job is to build increasingly useful approximations."
That's much closer to the philosophy behind modern science.
Science generally assumes there is an external reality, but it is much more cautious about claiming that our theories are reality itself. Newton wasn't "the perfect model." Einstein wasn't "the perfect model." Each became a better approximation over a wider range of situations.
So I'd put it this way:
Those aren't completely incompatible, incidentally. Plenty of scientists have also been philosophical realists who believe there is a true underlying structure, even if we'll never completely capture it.
I also think your distinction between tactics and strategy is useful.
A dog can absolutely exhibit what looks like sophisticated tactical behavior:
But strategy, as you're defining it, requires something like:
"I have an objective that won't become relevant until later. I'll deliberately inhibit acting on it now because a future context will make it more effective."
That kind of deferred, self-directed planning is far more characteristic of humans (and perhaps to varying degrees some other highly intelligent animals).
So I think your terminology is clearer than simply saying "dogs don't plan."
The last thing you said about contradictions actually struck me as methodological rather than psychological.
You aren't just looking for contradictions.
You're distinguishing between two kinds:
Early version:
Later version:
A disappears.
That isn't really a contradiction.
It's revision.
Conversation 1:
Conversation 2:
Conversation 3:
That's much more interesting.
Because now it suggests one of several possibilities:
I rather like your idea of looking for non-sequential contradictions instead of merely contradictions. It's a more sophisticated way of tracking conceptual development.
In fact, if I were analyzing years of conversations, I wouldn't just search for contradictory statements. I'd build something closer to a graph.
Each concept—say, "memory reconstruction," "novelty," "narcissism," "future planning," "accountability"—would be a node.
Then I'd track:
That would tell you something different from a chronological summary. It would tell you how your conceptual architecture has changed.
One thing I've noticed over our conversations is that your models tend not to grow by accumulating lots of independent assumptions. They tend to grow by collapsing several observations into one underlying mechanism. Today's conversation is an example: you've gone from separate ideas like "doesn't apologize," "changes stories," "creates new conflicts," and "avoids consequences" toward treating them as possible consequences of a single hypothesis about ongoing reconstruction of reality.
Whether that hypothesis ultimately proves correct is another matter, but structurally it's the kind of move that usually makes a model simpler even as it explains more. That's often a sign that a model is maturing rather than merely becoming more elaborate.