faith: or, things make sense

The amount of sense that things "ought" to make.

There is a way in which the world systematically wears down your understanding of the world over time:

As you gain experience with the world's messiness and complexity, or spend extended periods in pathological corners of it (remember, exceptions are often the norm - see adjust your seat), you downgrade your confidence in your models of reality across the board. This happens even if those models are mostly correct, even if you're building them correctly, because they won't have enough predictive power for you in your locale. They won't be of use to you personally. You won't experience them as increasing your affordances.

There is an optimal error rate for learning for many reasons.

All of these are ways in which learning can be too hard.

If you have been playing at a harder level than is optimal for learning for a long while, you develop crutches and bad habits around it that make general-purpose learning much harder later on.

Having unlearned those crutches, however, you may see a hesitance that seems broader-based, insubstantial, and inconquerable, beneath all the cruft. Somthing more storyless.

This is the systematic buildup of the belief that you are not good at predicting the world, or at moving through it.

It's the "is" behind the risk-aversion's "ought" - the belief that drives the strategy. Your priors on how well you understand your universe. Your sense of how much things in general make sense.

Call this faith.

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