# On hiding the source of knowledge

I notice that when I write for a public audience, I usually present ideas in a modernist, skeptical, academic style; whereas, the way I come up with ideas is usually in part by engaging in epistemic modalities that such a style has difficulty conceptualizing or considers illegitimate, including:

-   Advanced introspection and self-therapy (including focusing and meditation)
-   Mathematical and/or analogical intuition applied everywhere with only spot checks (rather than rigorous proof) used for confirmation
-   Identity hacking, including virtue ethics, shadow-eating, and applied performativity theory
-   Altered states of mind, including psychotic and near-psychotic experiences
-   Advanced cynicism and conflict theory, including generalization from personal experience
-   Political radicalism and cultural criticism
-   Eastern mystical philosophy (esp. Taoism, Buddhism, Tantra)
-   Literal belief in self-fulfilling prophecies, illegible spiritual phenomena, etc, sometimes with decision-theoretic and/or naturalistic interpretations

This risks hiding where the knowledge actually came from. Someone could easily be mistaken into thinking they can do what I do, intellectually, just by being a skeptical academic.

I recall a conversation I had where someone (call them A) commented that some other person (call them B) had developed some ideas, then *afterwards* found academic sources agreeing with these ideas (or at least, seeming compatible), and cited these as sources in the blog post write-ups of these ideas. Person A believed that this was importantly bad in that it hides where the actual ideas came from, and assigned credit for them to a system that did not actually produce the ideas.

On the other hand, citing academics that agree with you is helpful to someone who is relying on academic peer-review as part of their epistemology. And, similarly, offering a rigorous proof is helpful for convincing someone of a mathematical principle they aren't already intuitively convinced of (in addition to constituting an extra check of this principle).

We can distinguish, then, the source of an idea from the presented epistemic justification of it. And the justificatory chain (to a skeptic) doesn't have to depend on the source. So, there is a temptation to simply present the justificatory chain, and hide the source. (Especially if the source is somehow embarrassing or delegitimized)

But, this creates a distortion, if people assume the justificatory chains are representative of the source. Information consumers may find themselves in an environment where claims are thrown around with various justifications, but where they would have quite a lot of difficulty coming up with and checking similar claims.

And, a lot of the time, the source *is* important in the justification, because the source was the original reason for privileging the hypothesis. Many things can be partially rationally justified without such partial justification being sufficient for credence, without also knowing something about the source. (The problems of skepticism in philosophy in part relate to this: "but you have the intuition too, don't you?" only works if the other person has the same intuition (and admits to it), and arguing without appeals to intuition is quite difficult)

In addition, even if the idea is justified, *the intuition itself* is an artifact of value; knowing abstractly that "X" does not imply the actual ability to, in real situations, quickly derive the implications of "X". And so, sharing the source of the original intuition is helpful to consumers, if it can be shared. Very general sources are even more valuable, since they allow for generation of new intuitions on the fly.

Unfortunately, many such sources can't easily be shared. Some difficulties with doing so are essential and some are accidental. The essential difficulties have to do with the fact that teaching is hard; you can't assume the student already has the mental prerequisites to learn whatever you are trying to teach, as there is significant variation between different minds. The accidental difficulties have to do with social stigma, stylistic limitations, embarrassment, politics, privacy of others, etc.

Some methods for attempting to share such intuitions may result in text that seems personal and/or poetic, and be out of place in a skeptical academic context. This is in large part because such text isn't trying to justify itself by the skeptical academic standards, and is nevertheless attempting to communicate something.

Noticing this phenomenon has led me to more appreciate forewards and prefaces of books. These sections often discuss more of the messiness of idea-development than the body of the book does. There may be a nice stylistic way of doing something similar for blog posts; perhaps, an extended bibliography that includes free-form text.

I don't have a solution to this problem at the moment. However, I present this phenomenon as a problem, in the spirit of discussing problems before proposing solutions. I hope it is possible to reduce the accidental difficulties in sharing sources of knowledge, and actually-try on the essential difficulties, in a way that greatly increases the rate of interpersonal model-transfer.