Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see In Praise of the Sage. For the previous lecture this one picks up from, see The Scientific Ritual.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains are supposed to do: create patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.

So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

¶Picking up from the last lecture

Now, in my last lecture, I spent some time criticising the scientific ritual, as I called it—talking about how science is a belief system like any other, and in that way leads to similar kinds of failure modes. The most visible face of this is the replication crisis, where major findings across psychology, medicine, and biology really just can’t be replicated. And as a consequence, the conclusion we have to make is that they probably aren’t actually true.

And the broader point of that lecture, and the article behind it, is that science is only one kind of belief system about how we can know things—epistemology—and the failings of science come about because we trust too much in that belief system about how knowledge should happen.

I had some responses to that lecture, and the question that seemed to raise for people was: if science is this flawed way of knowing, what other kinds of ways of knowing are there? What other kinds of belief systems about knowing are there, and are they any good?

And I left a dangling thread about the difference between your GP—your doctor—and a PhD, a doctor of philosophy. That, I think, is an interesting paradigm case to illustrate this.

See, medical doctors are experts. They’re trained, they’ve spent years honing their craft, and their intuitions are the thing that we go to doctors for. That experience.

In contrast, I’m a PhD. I went to Cambridge to learn everything I could about brains and behaviour. And now I teach at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, because people come to me to learn. It’s not so much my intuitions thereafter, but my transferable knowledge—what do I know about brains and behaviour and how that translates into leadership and management.

So you wouldn’t come to me to diagnose a persistent headache—you’d go to a doctor. But if you wanted to learn about how the research around neurodivergence was developing, perhaps coming to me over your GP would be more sensible. Experience in diagnosis (your doctor) against expertise in where those diagnoses come from (the researcher).

And since I mentioned Sandhurst, I should probably say—just quickly—that this is obviously not the perspective of Sandhurst. It’s just my little podcast, especially now I’ve invoked neurodivergence. But the point is that experience and expertise are both ways of knowing.

And I want to talk a little bit about how ambivalent our attitude to experience is, and how it leads us to make these weird kinds of decisions when it comes to who we should trust for advice.

So let’s get into it.

¶The two ways of knowing we accept

I think in the Anglosphere world there’s a bit of a consensus that real knowledge comes from one of two places.

The first is the empirical way of knowing. The scientific method is the best example: experiments, collecting data, running statistics, drawing conclusions from a lot of observations, publishing that information, trying to replicate it. I think we really like that way of knowing, and we think that real truth lives here in this space.

There’s another way of knowing that I think we’re less enthusiastic about but, again, we do prioritise—which is a more reflective way of knowing. A contemplative way of knowing. You sit and you think and you reason your way to a conclusion. Philosophy, essentially, in its most respectable mode.

Now, I spent a whole lecture arguing about all the flaws in the empirical way of knowing, and I have not just a couple of articles on my website but in fact an entire research programme here at Sandhurst on the flaws of human reason. But for the most part I think that we not only do, but probably should, accept these as well-founded ways that legitimate knowledge gets created.

But I think there is a third mode of knowing that sits underneath them. And we don’t think very carefully about it. In some cases we accept it, in some cases we reject it, and the reason for doing so isn’t always sensible.

¶The third mode, smuggled in

To go back to our example of the doctors: I suspect we’d actually interpret our GP as the same thing as the scientific method. The same thing as the empirical way of knowing. Because GPs are a sort of stand-in for medical literature, right? You go to them because they spend all this time at school learning things, and when you’re sitting there, they’re imparting all that knowledge to you.

But I don’t think that’s exactly right, and I don’t think it’s exactly right in an important way. Medicine is research-informed, but doctors, when they’re sitting opposite you, are regularly behind the curve of modern advances in medicine. There’s no way they could keep up across all the disciplines they’re supposed to in order to do their jobs.

Their value comes in their training combined with their experience. And I think that it’s actually their experience that we want. But we’re using the idea of their training, and the idea of medical research, to legitimise the fact that we’re coming for the experience—because we’re uncomfortable with the fact that we are.

It helps us accept the result of the doctor’s intuition, but we won’t accept her hunches as a legitimate form of knowing on their own. It’s allowed as a stand-in for research. It’s not allowed as a thing itself.

And I’ll try and prove it to you. Nobody really wants a doctor in training or a first-year doctor to help them with serious or chronic stuff. They’ve gone through all their training, they have all the knowledge, but they don’t have the experience you’d want.

And similarly, you wouldn’t have to go very far online to find people who are sceptical of the way they’re being handled by doctors—looking on Reddit for second opinions, or complaining that it took years to get a diagnosis. Just think of the pandemic scepticism: the experience of the medical community in the transmission of pathogens led to certain actions—quarantines, rushes on vaccines, this sort of thing. But there was this idea that the evidence wasn’t there yet, so many, many people remained quite sceptical for a long time.

So we value the doctor’s experience, but as soon as it’s not wearing the right kind of lab coat, we start to mistrust it. We start to think that maybe it’s not valuable anymore.

And when the form turns up without a coat to hide under—the guru, the sage, the herbalist, the astrologer, the medium, the village wise woman—we’re no longer ready to accept the expertise in the same way. In fact, often we denigrate it outright. Folk wisdom is for grandmothers and the credulous.

¶Dawkins and the cultural water

Now, in the last lecture I gave you a quote from Richard Dawkins. It’s a militant version, but I think it does cut at the core of how we think about these things:

Not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the real explanations we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence.

That’s the militant version. The idea that experience, revelation, faith in the intuitions of a figure of authority is the antithesis of the evidence-based empirical way of knowing.

The soft version is the default cultural water we swim in. The argument that starts with “science says” or “the experts say”—always in response to what we perceive as a problem of credulity.

And there’s a backlash to scientism that I think, again, illustrates this strange way of thinking about knowledge really nicely. Because the backlash is people saying don’t trust the experts, think for yourself. So we say perhaps the empiricism isn’t quite so fantastic—for all the failure modes I spoke about in the last lecture and at the top of this one. Instead we should resort to reflection. That contemplative and reasoned process of putting together knowledge.

But in all these cases expertise isn’t something we fall back on. It’s not something we seek out. It’s something we want to dress up.

¶The fear has a basis

And the fear has a basis. I’ll talk about this a little later on in more detail, but most psychics are crooks, and most horoscopes are fluff. The Forer effect—that effect where you give somebody a generic personality description and they’ll swear it’s spookily accurate—is a real and well-documented way that charlatans have been fleecing people forever. Wellness influencers in linen trousers who’ll fix your gut microbiome for a couple of hundred bucks. You’re right to be sceptical of expertise. It’s an earned scepticism.

But what I want to draw out here, and maybe resolve, is the impulse to throw out the entire mode of knowing on the grounds that some of its worst practitioners are bad—that expertise has failure modes.

Because there is a mode of knowing under there, and we rely on it constantly. And by dressing it up as though it’s other ways of knowing, we end up making really weird decisions.

So let’s talk about that a little bit.

¶Aristotle: there are at least two

I have a kind of research and teaching programme here at Sandhurst that is around ethics, and ethical decision-making in particular. I’ve been reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics in order to brush up on ethics because it’s not my original background.

He puts this third mode of knowing quite nicely. He says that people of experience know that a thing is so; men of theory know why. And this is the difference between the doctor and the PhD: the doctor knows that something’s wrong, the researcher knows why. Both are forms of knowledge. They’re just different.

You wouldn’t ask your GP about a brand-new drug, probably—what are the chances that the GP knows about the brand-new drug? You’d ask the researcher who knows about drug development. But similarly, you wouldn’t ask that researcher to diagnose a lump on your neck. You’d be wanting to go to the GP. They’re both forms of knowing, and they’re both different.

And to quote Aristotle, just to put it into context:

We become builders by building and harp-players by playing the harp. We become just by doing just acts, brave by doing brave acts.

What he’s saying is that certain kinds of knowledge live in the doing of those things. You can’t acquire certain kinds of knowledge from a textbook. Think about our trainee doctors from earlier, or a fireman who’s never fought a fire, or a pilot who’s never flown. Obviously we need these people to have done the thing to trust them.

¶Dewey: the three nest

A little bit more recently than 2,500 years ago, you have John Dewey, the American pragmatist—not the Dewey Decimal System person—who in the first half of the 1900s, where honestly all the best psychology was done, talks about these three modes of knowing explicitly. He talks about the empirical mode of knowing (the scientific method), he talks about the reflective mode (this sort of philosophical thinking and reasoning), and then he wants to talk about a third—an embodied, traditional way of knowing. A way of knowing that’s soaked in the culture of how to do the thing. Aristotle’s mode of knowing by doing.

Dewey himself was nervous of this third mode of knowing, because it looks like dogma if you squint at it wrong. Like Dawkins’ authority-revelation-faith concern. He didn’t want to drag the worst of traditional ways of knowing back with him. But he was worried about us abandoning it. Because the first two modes—the empirical mode and the philosophical mode—don’t work without this third, embodied, intuitive way of knowing.

He takes the scientific method first. He says that the scientific method is full of intuitions: the choices the experimenter makes, the imaginative leap from one model to another, the taste for which question is even worth asking in the first place. To quote him:

For all experiment involves regulated activity, it is directed by ideas, by thought … theories and hypotheses in scientific experimentation … have a free, imaginative quality that no direct sensation or observation can have.

So for Dewey, the scientific method develops out of this third mode of knowing. That’s what sits at the bottom.

Reflection feeds into things too. Reasoning about a problem, thinking philosophically. Perhaps if we can’t trust the data, we can reason about it—ask questions as to the provenance and the generalisability of the results. But, again, you can’t reason from nowhere. You have to reason from a posture, from habits of mind, from a sensibility you got from training in a tradition.

So again, reason comes out of this third way of knowing. They’re not separate ways of knowing. That expertise, that experience, the guru—is the thing that sits underneath the other two.

¶AI as the proof

I’ve talked a lot about the problems with the empirical mode. Again, I’ll leave a link to the other lecture in my show notes. It’s worth spending a bit of time talking about the errors of reason, too.

Like I said, this is my current research programme at Sandhurst, because ethical reasoning makes this particularly obvious. There’s this phenomenon called moral dumbfounding, where you give people a vignette and ask them to reason about it—and their reasoning is terrible. Completely deranged by their intuitions.

But I think another research interest of mine is actually a more interesting place to think about this from: the problem of AI hallucinations.

AI hallucinations are something a lot of people spend a lot of time worrying about, because in theory these are programs that know everything. Algorithms that have this whole corpus of human knowledge. So they have no business making stuff up. And we get upset about it.

But what’s interesting about AI hallucination is that it’s actually not really that different from the problem of human reason. The reason it’s qualitatively different is because AI doesn’t have intuitions to reason from. It has no posture about the world. It has no sensibility. It has no embodied training.

All it has is pattern matching from this incredible body of knowledge, and the latent patterns of communication that live within it. And then, perhaps more recently, it has something about human taste—what answers are preferred by humans than others, with reinforcement learning. But it doesn’t have grounded, embodied intuitions.

And this is the reason for one of the other problems of AI: sycophancy. It so quickly wants to take your side. Or if it’s not taking your side and it’s coming from somewhere else, it’s not a true intuition—it’s a sort of weak intuition, or some weakly-held position that it has derived from the conversational space you put it in. It’s not a true intuition.

As a consequence, it’s no surprise that when it’s reasoning about these things, it’s not reasoning from anywhere in particular—it’s reasoning weakly from a couple of different places. And under these conditions, humans make incredible errors of reason. So it’s no surprise that AI does.

Science and reason—both of these things sit on a body of grounded intuitions, embodied training, some sort of traditional sensibility about a domain of knowledge.

¶Why we deny the third mode

Now, John Dewey had a perspective on how we came to distrust this third mode of knowing, and it comes out of the origin of the scientific method itself.

He talks about how empiricism was developed as an instrument of criticism against this more traditional mode of knowing’s worst impulses—Dawkins’ dogma, authority, revelation. Dewey says of revelation that these things were structures of power that led to all sorts of abuses. As Dewey puts it, empiricism was “for dissolving institutions then dominant, ecclesiastical and political.”

And I think we’d agree with Dewey that it’s right to push back on the abuses that come from these places. Faith in expertise and authority is reliably abused—not just by the experts themselves, the gurus, but also by the people who adopt those beliefs and misunderstand them, or use them for their own gain. I think it’s fairly intuitive—if I can use that word now—that we should want to push back on the potential for that mode of knowing to be abused.

And evidence itself feels dogma-free. The Enlightenment empirical philosophy saw it as an ideal, this way of opening up a road towards the infinite perfectibility of humanity, unbounded by our worst impulses.

So the very tradition of the scientific method lauds itself while denigrating this third mode of knowing. But the result is that we’ve abandoned the very mode which makes it possible at all.

And the upshot is that we use this third mode constantly, but we pretend that we don’t. Which means we can’t tell a good sage, a positive guru, a trustworthy expert from a bad one—because we don’t really have a framework for it.

¶Sages we already trust

I want to illustrate this a little bit more before I come to some ways I think we can do this better. It’s worth pointing out some sages, some gurus, that we already accept.

We’ve already talked about the doctor. That thirty-year pattern of training and experience means that when she sits there and she says “that doesn’t sound quite right, can I send you to do this other invasive procedure?”—you’ll just trust her and say “yeah, of course.”

Another example: anybody who has friends who are tradies will know this one. You have your mate come over, or you go into a building with a mate who’s a carpenter or a cabinet-maker, or you just have one come to your house to do a survey before you buy it. And they walk in the room and their shoulders tense up and they go “this is fucked. I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s terrible.” And you ask them why and they’ll shrug. They won’t be able to tell you straight away. Very quickly they’ll start to point out the problems—that corner’s a little funny, or the way the lights are placed is weird. But the reasons come after them saying that there’s a problem. And if you’ve got any sense, you’d trust them about it. You wouldn’t buy the house.

Or you think of the recent wave of subscription journalism. You go on Substack and you subscribe to a writer that you really like. You’ve been paying her for a couple of years; you don’t agree with her on everything. You probably couldn’t articulate exactly why you trust her takes more than the Guardian’s or the Financial Times’. But you do. And when she writes something surprising, you take it very seriously.

Again, we are trusting in some kind of experience here. And often we’re trusting them because of the costume. The lab coat that dresses the doctor; the hi-vis that dresses the builder; the credential block that dresses the online writer. But if you stripped out that costume and put any of them in linen trousers on TikTok or whatever, then we’d be sceptical of all three—because they’re using a mode of knowing that makes us uncomfortable.

¶What we actually don’t know about medicine

I want to use one more example that I think really sharpens the point, but it also lets me transition more easily into talking about what we need to do instead.

I have a couple of articles about how quixotic, how overzealous our attitude towards doctors and medicine and drugs in particular is. I’ll link those in the show notes. But a couple of brief points.

We still don’t know how a lot of painkillers work. Paracetamol, acetaminophen—household-name stuff that’s in everybody’s medicine cabinet. We actually do not understand what the mechanism of action is. And in drugs, this isn’t unusual. Penicillin. We don’t quite understand general anaesthetic. We don’t quite understand lithium, one of the most prescribed mood stabilisers on the market. The mechanisms of action for all of these things are still obscure to us. We know a little bit more about some over others, and the full account keeps getting rewritten, but our understanding isn’t finished.

Part of this is because of the way new drugs are discovered. It’s called phenotypic screening, and essentially you throw thousands of random chemicals at cells to see which ones do something useful (if you’ll allow me to take some poetic licence on the process). And sometimes, decades later, we do figure out what the chemical was doing. But that doesn’t start the process of putting it through clinical trials and getting it out to people.

The structure of modern pharmacy is something a little bit more uncomfortable for a huge chunk of what’s on the chemist’s shelf. Most of you listening will not have known that. Most of you would have assumed, probably, that we know how paracetamol fixes your headache—that penicillin, one of the most transformational drugs of the modern era, is a well-understood chemical process. But you didn’t know, and you never thought to ask, probably because experienced people tell you it works, you trust them, you take it. And the fact that nobody really knows why it works doesn’t factor into that process of decision-making.

What’s interesting is if we compare that process with the process of going to a homeopath. Homeopathy is almost the inverse of medicine: they take an active ingredient and then they dilute it so much that it ends up not really being something you could call the active ingredient anymore—in the same way that you wouldn’t call the ocean a fish, because there’s way more ocean than fish. That’s sort of the basic process of homeopathy.

I think most people are sceptical of homeopathy, and if you ask them why they’ll say it’s because how could that possibly work? We don’t know how homeopathy could actually lead to better outcomes. And it bears this sort of troubling symmetry with modern medicine.

There is something about modern medicine that’s different, and that is that it’s more empirically informed than homeopathy is. The processes by which drugs get on the shelf are more rigorous. So I’m not saying by any means that homeopathy and paracetamol are equivalent in their results. I’m just trying to point out that what people do is not really based on what we might like to think it’s based on. What we’re doing is just surrendering to experts in a kind of knowledge production that we can’t articulate.

The whole thing is not a story about the evidence for the average person. The whole thing is much more a story about what gurus we allow and disallow.

On reflection, I’m not entirely satisfied with the homeopathy example, but I’m not going to go back and edit it. What I’ll do, though, is link to two articles that talk in much more detail about our strange relationship to the placebo effect and our strange relationship to drugs—they’re a bit more nuanced.

But the point here is that these things are not stories about evidence. We’re not making these decisions based on the evidentiary process. This is much more a story about what kinds of gurus we allow and don’t allow to occupy that position.

So hopefully I’ve illustrated enough. Let’s move on and talk about what we can do instead.

¶The doctor and the guru, same form

The core issue here, to me, is that the wellness influencer in linen trousers running the seed-oil takedown on your TikTok feed is running on roughly the same authority structure as your GP.

Both of these people are presenting themselves as having this sort of compressed experience they couldn’t fully articulate, and asking you to trust on the strength of it. The form is identical. The way we consume it is identical.

The difference between these examples is a cultural decision that medical research and the medical model more reliably produces better results. But that’s not the place from which we, as the individual, make those decisions.

¶When the veneer cracks

You can see this in this particular example when something more difficult goes on medically. Anybody who’s lived with a chronic illness can tell you that the trust in the doctor only goes so far. The doctors misdiagnose them, or dismiss them. They might tell you that it’s all in your head.

For the person who’s going through this months- or years-long process of trying to figure out what’s wrong with them, the veneer that guides our acceptance of the medical model starts to crack and chip away. And once it starts to crack and chip away, these people then start looking elsewhere for the same thing—a new guru who might result in a better outcome.

If you’re not careful, you follow this cultural pattern of denigrating this third form of knowing. And if that’s true of you—refusing to admit that’s the way you make your decisions—then you might find yourself having no equipment to tell good from bad when the time comes to go shopping for a new one. Instead, you end up trusting whoever’s loudest, or prettiest, or who made you feel the best about the thing you already wanted to do.

¶Picking your sage by principle

The selection of the GP is something like an aesthetic preference. A taste preference. And when our tastes change—like when the medical model fails us—then we pick a new solution again, based on the aesthetics.

Picking our gurus based on how they look and feel is, for the most part, usually fine. It often tracks the costume. I said the doctor wears a lab coat, but the lab coat represents something real: the medical model. And for all its flaws, it does reliably improve outcomes on average over a lot of other ways of solving the same kind of problem. It’s the reason we have this quixotic orientation towards doctors and medicine.

But that way of making the decision is the same enterprise that leads us to trust the doctor until we don’t anymore, and to jump in some other direction on some aesthetic instinct. And this is how grifters win. They fill the aesthetic space that people turn to when they’re shopping around for the next guru.

So what we really want to optimise for is the experience and the culture and the tradition that sit underneath the figure. The thing that gives the intuition of our gurus its weight. If it’s not the medical model, what is the thing that gives them the authority to speak? The training that built that intuition—that’s the thing you’re going to end up trusting.

The question isn’t whether you trust sages or gurus, because you do. You can’t function without them. The question is whether you’ve chosen yours, or whether you’ve had them assigned to you by whatever algorithm populates your media feed. There’s an article on this, and in fact one of my first lectures, on mundane cults—it’s the same family of question. A lot of our decisions just require a bit of attention. What groups we’re a part of, and what gurus we pick.

¶The leap

I closed off the last lecture with a line from one of my favourite books, Life of Pi. The bit about how all of us—the religious and the secular—go as far as the legs of reason will carry us, and then we have to make a leap. The atheist leaps onto science; the believer leaps towards God. But either way, it’s a leap.

I guess I’m trying to add something to that, which is that the guru is the person whose hand you have to take when you have to make that leap. You always have one. Everybody does. The world’s too big and your life’s too short to figure everything out for yourself.

The question is just whether the hand you took is a hand you’d be proud of.

I’ll leave it there.