Fake Frameworks

Here's a dangerous skill: using models you know are wrong. Not grudgingly, not as a stepping stone until the right model arrives, but deliberately and productively — because a wrong model that highlights real patterns is often more useful than no model at all, or than a technically correct model too abstract to generate predictions.¹

Valentine's "In Praise of Fake Frameworks" calls this out as a core rationalist practice that gets insufficient respect. The rationalist instinct is to only believe true things — to police your ontology for correctness at all times. But this instinct, taken to its extreme, means you can only use frameworks that have been empirically validated, which dramatically limits the tools available for thinking about a complex world. Most of the best thinking tools in everyday life — "introverts and extroverts," "left-brain and right-brain," "fight-or-flight" — are oversimplifications that capture something real while being technically wrong in important ways.

The Sandbox Trick

The key move is to use a framework while flagging it as fake. You run it in a mental sandbox: "This is all made up, and I'm going to reason with it anyway." This does two things simultaneously. First, it gives you access to the pattern-matching power of the framework — you can actually generate predictions, notice details, and see structure that you'd miss without any framework at all. Second, the "this is fake" tag prevents you from over-investing in the framework's specific claims, keeping you alert to where it breaks down.¹

Take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. As a scientific instrument, it's weak — low test-retest reliability, the four dimensions don't cleanly replicate in factor analysis, and the typology encourages binary thinking about continuous traits. The Big Five personality model is empirically much better. But many people who've spent time with Myers-Briggs report that it taught them something real about the diversity of minds — that some people genuinely experience the world through sensing rather than intuiting, that introversion isn't shyness but a genuine difference in energy management. Valentine describes learning from the Enneagram — a personality system with even less empirical support than Myers-Briggs — and it helped him see his father's sternness as affection. The framework was wrong, but the seeing was real.

Ontologies as Toolkits

The deeper point is about what Valentine calls "ontological flexibility." An ontology is a set of basic things you treat as real when building a mental model. In a road map, roads are basic. In physics, quarks are basic. In the Enneagram, nine personality archetypes are basic. Whichever ontology you're wearing, its basic elements feel real — that's what wearing an ontology is like.

The skill of fake frameworks is the ability to put on and take off ontologies without losing your grip on reality. Roads feel real when you're navigating a city. But you can also zoom in and see molecules, or zoom out and see urban planning patterns. Neither view is "the real one." They're all maps, and the question is which map is useful right now.

This is actually what reductionism promises — that given any set of working ontologies, there exists some super-ontology at least as rich as all of them. But that's a philosophical claim about what exists, not a practical claim about what you have access to. You don't have the super-ontology. You have a handful of partial, flawed frameworks, and the challenge is to use them without confusing any one for the territory.

When Fake Frameworks Fail

The danger is real. If you take the Enneagram as literal truth rather than a useful fiction, you'll force people into categories that don't fit them and ignore evidence that contradicts the typology. Astrology is a fake framework too, and there's a reason most people who use it epistemically aren't improving their understanding of human behaviour — they're selectively noticing confirmations and ignoring disconfirmations.

The difference between productive and destructive use of fake frameworks comes down to a single test: can you put the framework down? If you can't switch to a different ontology while looking at the same situation — if the Enneagram types feel too real to set aside — then the framework owns you instead of the other way around. The sandbox has leaked.

This connects to a broader theme about the relationship between maps and territories. The strongest version of the map-territory distinction says you should always be ready to redraw your map when it doesn't match the territory. Fake frameworks extend this: you should be ready to use multiple inconsistent maps simultaneously, picking up whichever one highlights the features you care about right now, and putting it back down when it stops being useful.

Valentine learned to "extend ki" in aikido using the concept of ki — a vitalist concept that doesn't fit within physics. It took him over a decade to understand what he was doing in physicalist terms. The fake framework gave him access to a real skill that he couldn't have reached through the correct framework alone, because the correct framework didn't have the right handles for the thing he was trying to learn.¹

That's the strongest argument for fake frameworks: sometimes the truth, by itself, isn't usable.

Mythic Mode

Valentine takes this further in a follow-up: what if you could use fake frameworks not just to understand personality types but to navigate your own life?² His "mythic mode" treats culture as a distributed intelligence and yourself as a character in its story. The key move is entering a story-like lens — seeing coordination failures as Moloch, seeing yourself on a hero's journey — and using the narrative structure to find paths that rational analysis alone can't see.

This is playing with epistemic fire, and Valentine knows it. Mythic mode highlights seemingly meaningful coincidences, some of which are genuine pattern-matching and some of which are confirmation bias. The skill is sandboxing: entering the mode deliberately, using it to generate insights and motivations that sterile analysis can't reach, and then leaving it to evaluate what happened with your normal epistemic toolkit. It's the same sandbox trick as with personality frameworks, but turned up to eleven — you're not just wearing an ontology, you're inhabiting a narrative.

Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" is Valentine's paradigm case. Nothing in the essay was conceptually new to people who already understood coordination problems. But by transposing the fight against existential risk into the key of myth — literally naming the demon — Alexander made it emotionally real in a way that game theory papers never could. Facts inform culture, but story guides it. The rationalist community didn't need new information about Moloch. It needed a name and a narrative frame that made the problem feel like something worth fighting.²

Ritual Epistemology

Sarah Perry's essay on ritual epistemology pushes the fake-frameworks idea into territory most rationalists would find uncomfortable: maybe "irrational" social systems aren't failures of rationality but alternative epistemic technologies that work through practice rather than argument.³

Perry's key examples are legal and religious ritual. American law isn't primarily a truth-finding system — it's a dispute-resolution system designed to produce outcomes that people accept as final and fair. The elaborate rituals (black robes, gavels, rules of evidence, courtroom architecture following Christopher Alexander's pattern of increasing privacy) aren't decorative. They're functional — they create the sense of gravity and finality that makes people accept the outcome, which is the actual purpose of the system. A "purely rational" justice system that dispensed with ceremony in favor of accuracy would likely fail at the thing law actually needs to do.³

The Pentecostal churches Perry describes work out their solution to the Problem of Evil through behavior and ritual rather than argument — good things are God, bad things are demons, and the subjective experience of possession provides the plausibility structure. Practice precedes belief, not the other way around. This is "ritual epistemology": working out truth and meaning through practice and experience rather than papers and conferences.

The post-rationalist insight isn't that ceremony is always better than analysis. It's that the rationalist impulse to strip away all "irrational" ceremony needs to reckon with the possibility that the ceremony is load-bearing — that the Amish, who use very little modern medicine but live just as long, might be operating a different and equally effective ritual order, not living in a vacuum of rationality. Shredding a functioning ritual system, even a costly one, is risky. You can only replace it with another system, never with nothing.³