everything makes sense
- There's a sort of fundamental validation of everyone's thinking process, that one can access, such that there's an orientation towards any interpretation anyone is having, as "that makes sense". I may not know why someone's response to something makes sense, but it necessarily makes sense because minds are sense-making entities.
- I find that when I remind myself of this, I can embody a stance that is tremendously spacious and able to hold everyone's experience without any more effort than it takes to remind myself of this.
- From there...
- Say I'm in a relationship conflict scene, and someone says something like "I'm afraid you are (or are about to be) doing <this awful thing>" then even if I'm confident that's not what I'm doing, and even if I don't know why they're afraid, I can still embody a stance that says "that makes sense that you're afraid". It might be that their fear is about a past version of me or it might be a flashback to some totally different time of their life. The details can be sorted out later, but step zero is just orienting from a place of "of course you feel afraid".
- Of course reality is as it is—how could it be otherwise?
- related topics
- < coherence therapy / coherence empathy >
- This applies not just to others but also to every single thought you're having.
- Each thought that arises, consciously and unconsciously, is (some part of) your mind's best attempt to make sense of what's happening for you right now, and even if some other part of you knows (or thinks) that that thought is mistaken, invalidating your own thinking process doesn't actually help you learn!
- Whether this is
- something utterly benign like some part of me thinking "oh, it's monday, time to call—wait, no, it's still sunday, nvm"
- or profoundly significant like some part of me thinking that my friend or lover is my enemy
- ...that thought is arising to try to make sense of things, and what I want to do is welcome its sincere attempt, and learn from it what there is to learn.
- That may not be much in the "monday" case, but in relation to anything emotionally charged you can be sure there's some sort of protective intelligence acting, that might be creating relational tangles by how
- Mistakes make sense
- < Michael Smith - PCK >
- how is someone trying to tackle this math problem?
- no such thing as mistakes
- A bunch of tweets on the topic
- this whole thread
- this response to PJ Eby
- That's not to say all interpretations are "appropriate" to the external situation.
- For example a war vet who hears fireworks might have a PTSD flashback to being shot at.
- The response is inappropriate, but it makes sense given the veteran's life experience.
- It wouldn't make sense for a random 8 year old middle-class girl who has never seen or heard a gun to experience being shot at when fireworks go off, and we observe that she does not in fact experience this thing that would not make sense. In fact, if she did, then it would make sense (even if we don't know why).
- Note that some interpersonal triggers activate in moments that in some sense are inappropriate but the behavioral response within the dream mashups world change the scene such that it makes the interpretation appropriate.
- This phenomenon can make it really hard to figure out what's going on and find other workable interpretations!
- What about crazy people? That is, states of mind that involve a breakdown of sense-making capacity.
- Examples might include
- Diminishment: delirium, Alzheimer's
- Chaos: psychosis, schizophrenia
- However, most of what we call "crazy" is still fundamentally a kind of sense being made, and emphasizing the lack of order is missing the point, which is that everything makes sense.
- So we can still ask "well, what sense is this person with Alzheimer's making of the world, as they wander away from their home?" They must be making some sort of sense, such that they are wandering outside rather than doing any of an infinite number of other things they could be doing.
- Likewise, "what sense is this psychotic person making such that they're yelling at nobody?" The sense that they're making determines that they're yelling rather than punching the air, as well as what they're yelling, and so on.
- Meanwhile, say that you're talking with a friend of yours, who you ordinarily think is quite sane, and they say something that surprises and upsets you, and you think "wtf? they've gone crazy!"
- two things:
- Put your own oxygen mask on first. Validate and honor that you're having the thought that they've gone crazy. That thought is part of you trying to make sense of things.
- Next, consider: there is some sense to what they're saying. You may have no idea what it is, but they're trying to make sense of things.
- What about lying people?
- Except for psychopaths, most people are in some sense being quite honest most of the time, although due to Game A power dynamics they're usually sufficiently compartmentalized that it's hard to tell what's going on.
- In the case of sociopaths or people who are consciously deceiving you, one must note that they're definitely making some sort of sense of things, they just may not be accurately be representing their true perceptions and interpretations to you.
- Recalling that everything makes sense doesn't mean you know what sense it makes, there's not much to say about lying people.
- Oh! Except that there's also a sense that it makes that they're lying.
- (this doesn't mean they're not a threat or whatever)
- Let's consider a borderline-lying case here, not psychopaths etc.
- Say you ask your partner "what's wrong?" and they say "I'm fine" and obviously they are not fine.
- Well, here's a great opportunity to again
- put your own oxygen mask on first and validate your own perception that something's not fine, even though you don't know what and it might be that you're confidently assuming it has something to do with you when it actually is about someone else or is just a stomachache.
- (Though again, if you bother the person enough, you might be able to make it be about you, proving yourself right even though you were originally confused. Taking things personally sometimes does make them be about you.)
- then consider that no matter how much it upsets you or no matter how much you feel like it would be helpful for them to talk about it, it makes sense to them not to talk about it. And it makes sense to them to try to pretend that there's nothing going on.
- This is fucky, which is why you need to validate your own experience first.
- With psychopaths, the sense it makes that they're lying might simply be "they want to trick you into doing something that doesn't benefit you but benefits them"
- (this maybe related to simulacra levels, although I'm not sure how important or central that is)
- And also that if something feels off to you and it feels lie-shaped, then there's something that makes sense about your distrust, and self-trust comes from respecting distrust
- Sources:
- September 30th, 2020 group convo, about 25-30mins in
- September 29th, 2020 walk with B, last 10-15mins
- Related:
- Examples of people not getting this:
- "Why do VC Investors Tend to Bet on Young Founders?" "VCs are simply wrong" - this doesn't quite explain why they do it though. sure, mistaken belief, but "simply wrong" doesn't explain why someone has that mistaken belief and not another. there might also be an access thing, or wanting influence on those founders, etc. meanwhile since only 0.1-0.3% succeed, VCs obviously are not just going based on the stats - they think they can pick better
39 linked references
August 12th, 2025
- 1. consider a situation where you feel misunderstood, where there's been some conflict, you feel aggrieved, some situation played out in some way that resulted in blame, maybe some sense of
- 2. now feel into the sense that it made for you to do what you did. be with your own sense of what the situation looked like to you and/or what you were trying to do - whatever it is that the other person doesn't understand... YOU understand it. be with that felt sense. whatever they think, you did something that made sense at the time, at least locally.
- 2b. [if I'm running this live 1:1, I check (explicitly or implicitly) that they've got some of the felt sense of the self-validation / unspinning / deconfusion / etc vibe.]
- 3 (open when you're ready enough in terms of 2b)
- 3. now consider that I could run this exercise with anybody, and in particular I could run it with the other person in the scenario you're imagining, who doesn't understand you and is frustrated with you! and if I did, they would be experiencing the same sensation of how what THEY did also made sense to them. and how YOU don't understand them, and how it makes sense that THEY don't trust YOU, or whatever.
- 4. now imagine I walk THEM through step 3
November 15th, 2024
- David Deutsch uses "Understanding" to refer to something like everything makes sense, in Book/The Fabric of Reality - according to Michael "Valentine" Smith
- and ofc "seeking PCK"
April 29th, 2023
- explores the image of the homunculus at the desk
Cointelligence R&D Lab Proposal
The aims of the project › To create and grow a group... › a group of people that has profound non-naive trust of th… › —trust which comes: › but out of the capacity to respect the coherence of each …
February 18th, 2022
- C) all behaviors necessarily make sense in whatever terms they're actually performed in, otherwise people would be doing some different apparently-senseless thing.
- thus if it results in some problem, it's because there's some other factor not being incorporated into the decision-making process, which could be due to:
- them not knowing about it at all (eg if you didn't know a disease was contagious via some medium or didn't know you were sick or whatever)
- them having their awareness narrowed so as not to account for it (eg being fixated on playing a video game and missing caring about something else)
- them projecting something about another situation in such a way that they can't respond sanely to the current situation (eg someone has an emotional flashback to kindergarten when talking with their boss)
- them not knowing or remembering that something is a problem for someone else (eg I make pizza for someone that is vegan, celiac & lactose intolerant 🍕)
- them not seeing a way to meet multiple conflicting demands (eg a parent trying to not coerce their kid, but also being under some constraint of their own life that means they have to make a decision at a certain pace)
- conflict that causes some compromised halfway output that satisfies neither higher-level desiderata (eg someone trying to be polite and honest at the same time and ending up achieving neither)
Podcast summaries
- Keywords - cooperation & defection aren't as obvious as they might seem (they depend on frame) IFS collective agency untangle self-authoring social technology is more of a bottleneck than material technology intentionality everyone is always doing whatever makes the most sense to them partswork Coherence Therapy everything makes sense Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings self-trust comes from respecting distrust Learning how to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too safety psychological safety Alfie Kohn punishment is goodharting waiting to happen protectiveness is damage control deliberate "negative reinforcement" is punishment even if you don't call it that intrinsic motivation adulthood An Everyone Culture in general, people don't not-care. they care about many things and don't know how to care for all of them together (PCT) reward is just the temporary relief of punishment scarcity much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly what is culture? how do we make groups with the union of their individual wisdoms rather than the intersection of their individual wisdoms? list of common schemas learned in school School is fake averagerianism post-average
- Keywords: NNTD, Home, everyone will constantly point out ways in which things are incomplete, Learning how to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, community, what might a healthy community look like?, complaints are sacred: how we affirm our values, protectiveness is damage control, defensiveness = protectiveness, Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings, sometimes things need to be said even though they feel like they really really should go without saying, What is Blame?, everything makes sense, there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, apologize in the other person's frame; forgive in your own frame, power dynamics
- 6:56 - 11:17 - If disentanglement isn't about maximizing agency, what is it about? How do we become more deliberate about our time and actions? untangle intentionality everyone is always doing whatever makes the most sense to them partswork Coherence Therapy everything makes sense dream mashups Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings self-trust comes from respecting distrust Learning how to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too
With Joe Lightfoot — Podcast with Joe Lightfoot Transcript › Outline of ideas discussed (I'm 'M', Joe is 'J')
- 40:04 - 56:41 - Forgiveness and blame in relation to re-establishing trust. Examples from personal situations. What is Blame?, everything makes sense, there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, apologize in the other person's frame; forgive in your own frame, building trust out of distrust, blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
October 13th, 2021
- M > "respecting that your mind is a sensemaking system, that it can't do anything other than make sense"
- Elise > "old neural circuits" but they're alive and active today
October 4th, 2021
- > In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
September 4th, 2021
16:00 - starting a kind of writing block › looking at Sequence on NNTD › saw this page: how my thinking has transcended the Upstar… › looking at What's the deal doc (another unpublished piece… › and this obviously can't be published as is, but has a lo…
thinking that rejects other thinking
- The shift out of thinking that rejects other thinking and into being able to learn from everyone comes from internalizing & generalizing coherence empathy—recognizing that everything everyone thinks (and does) somehow actually makes obvious sense from some perspective (which is the perspective from which they thought it or did it). If it doesn't make sense to you, there's something you don't understand.
- Importantly, this applies to your own behavior too—you think things and do things for reasons you are not conscious of, and there's a sense to it even if it seems senseless.
- If you ever find yourself saying about anybody's behavior "that didn't make sense", see if you can find a way for it to make sense to ask "what sense did that make?"
- And if you can't, well, that makes sense.
- In general, someone who looks naive to you knows something you don't.
- You usually know something they don't, of course, as well, which is why they look naive to you.
- But if your relevant knowledge was properly a superset of theirs, it would be straightforward to convey what you know to them, and let's face it—that's rarely the case for anything interesting.
- (I'm not just talking about factual knowledge but embodied or relational knowledge as well, or knowledge of what-it's-like-to or how-it-feels-to or what-happens-when)
- (It's worth noting that while being unable to convey what you know to them is a strong sign that they know something you don't, the mere fact of having had a conversation that appears to result in you conveying something to them does not prove that you actually had such a superset—more common is that the person you're talking to mentally suppresses some of their own knowings that would produce objections that you don't understand and wouldn't be able to respond effectively to. This requires some amount of knowing what they know, but can also occur for many reasons ranging from charisma to social power to frame battle skill.)
June 28th, 2021
- Great thread by Zoe Curzi on everything makes sense
- > Lately I've been trying this thing where I just validate the rationality of every phenomenological thing that occurs.
Basically I just verbalize or vibe at myself, "Well, that probably makes sense." No matter how little I actually understand why what's happening is happening.
June 24th, 2021
- > Don’t judge a situation you’ve never been in.
June 9th, 2021
- great articulation of everything makes sense; relevant to NNTD & symptom coherence+coherence empathy
May 30th, 2021
- something key about trusting your own sensemaker / everything makes sense
- but on the gripping hand, part of what the whole better not to start; if you start better to finish quote is getting at in the first place is the thing where even if things can be untangled in the limit, they may not be able to be in good time since life is trappable!
- so there needs to be something about maybe like... meditation (bottom-up style meditation in particular?)
Sequence on NNTD
topics — I want an auto-generated N/M progress bar here › dream mashups - Everyone is basically living in a dream m…
- one is everything makes sense, to avoid invalidating of stuff as "just dream mashups"
- opening to carnegie HTWF&IP has some extreme examples of this and some other stuff
April 24th, 2021
- (connects with everything makes sense - if something had been wrong, you wouldn't have done it)
January 8th, 2021
Reflection on how my blogpost showtime system is working,… › then I was talking with Sarah McManus and when she heard …
- I did end up doing some writing on the topic, on twitter [thread] and roam: everything makes sense
November 24th, 2020
- Not that I would want to write a version of everything makes sense for LessWrong, but if I did, it might look something like this:
- > The thing that changed and allowed me to actually start updating more efficiently was that I actually started believing that all parts of me are pretty smart.
- > I started believing this because I started actually listening to myself and realised that these parts of me weren’t saying the ‘obviously wrong’ things I thought they were saying.
- > I began to stop just listening to experts and going ‘what they are saying makes sense’ and started having conversations where I just entirely let the part of me that disagreed say all the reasons it disagreed and ‘fight’ the expert. I allowed that part of me to have contact with the world and this meant that part of me could learn. And it worked.
symptom coherence
- I'd rather just say everything makes sense