Modern people laugh at the ancient story of the man who carved a mark into his boat to find his lost sword, forgetting that people are still doing the exact same thing every single day.
The man in the ancient story did it because he lacked better tools for understanding the world. Modern people do it because there’s too much information and everything moves too fast, so they consciously choose not to pay the cost of thinking things through again.
The difference is that the ancient man was ignorant. Modern people choose to remain ignorant.
The problem with carving a mark on a moving boat isn’t stupidity. It’s trying to use a static reference point to locate something in a constantly changing reality.
Path dependence is another manifestation of the same problem, just from a different angle. In the original story, you’re following someone else’s old mark to find the sword: someone else took this path and succeeded, so I’ll take it too. The older brother made money in a particular field, so the younger brother is pushed into studying the same thing. With path dependence, you’re trapped by marks you’ve carved yourself, unwilling to let go because you’ve already invested hundreds of thousands into something.
At their core, both are about using information from the past to make decisions in the present while ignoring time as a variable.
What gets replicated is always the surface of a successful outcome, never the conditions that produced it.
You can find plenty of classic examples just by looking at China’s major game studios: Genshin Impact clones, Chinese-style extraction shooters, asymmetrical competitive games, and so on. I’ll leave the details aside for now.
Path dependence isn’t limited to the gaming industry. It’s practically everywhere. Game studios copy Chinese-style extraction shooters, restaurants copy Haidilao, and so on.
The more transparent information becomes, the more visible success stories are, and the worse survivorship bias gets. You can see the revenue figures of a particular game, but you can’t see all the similar games that failed around the same time. The stronger the temptation to imitate, the harder it becomes to identify the actual conditions behind success.
When things fail, how do people explain it? Poor execution? Bad management?
Almost nobody asks whether the boat has moved.
Because admitting that the boat has moved means admitting that the original decision to carve the mark was wrong. That’s a price too many people aren’t willing to pay.
The cost of leaving a familiar path has never been purely financial.
Imagine someone who has spent thirty years working in a particular industry. Asking them to consider the possibility that they’ve been heading in the wrong direction isn’t just questioning their judgment. It’s questioning the meaning of their entire existence.
Thirty years is no longer just experience. It’s their entire sense of identity.
That’s why their response isn’t necessarily an attempt to reason with you. It’s an act of self-preservation.
Someone who has poured four or five hundred thousand into a project and refuses to walk away isn’t simply reluctant to lose that money. They’re reluctant to abandon the grand claims they made at the beginning, the promises they made to others, the story they’ve told themselves about their own lives, and, finally, the gambler’s instinct that keeps them doubling down just to prove they were right.
At the end of the day, people are fighting against themselves.
People are afraid to admit that something they did was wrong, because that means admitting that the version of themselves who made that decision was wrong, too.
A decision can be changed. But your identity is what you believe yourself to be. Questioning that identity means questioning the person responsible for every decision you’ve ever made.
If that person was wrong, who can you trust to make the next decision?
So most people choose to protect the last thing they have left: their self-respect.
The human brain has a mechanism for constructing a coherent story that makes everything fit.
This mechanism isn’t inherently good or bad. It can’t simply be judged in those terms. Throughout human history, it has saved countless lives. It gives people something to hold on to when they’re at their most vulnerable, and helps them find a new foothold when their entire worldview collapses.
Someone goes through a breakup, cries for a while, and eventually says, “They weren’t worth it anyway.”
At that moment, the tears aren’t really about the other person anymore. The statement is protecting a different narrative: “I’m a rational person.”
They’re trying to convince themselves that they weren’t as vulnerable as they actually were. The very fact that they need to tell themselves they’re not upset is why they need that sentence to hold them together.
But this mechanism can also be exploited.
A personal narrative is how you deceive yourself. A grand narrative is how someone else deceives you. The mechanism is exactly the same; only the scale is different.
Cults target people whose personal narratives have just collapsed, people who have recently experienced upheaval or lost their sense of meaning. They offer a new narrative that’s coherent, complete, and full of belonging, filling the void left behind.
You can’t simply dismiss the people who join as stupid. They encountered something that filled the void at precisely the moment they were most vulnerable. That’s how the underlying human mechanism works.
The most sophisticated narratives go one step further: they define questioning the narrative itself as a sin.
If you don’t believe, it’s because your faith isn’t strong enough. If you have doubts, it’s because outside enemies are corrupting you.
Web3 does this, too. So does the self-help industry built around success.
Anything that claims to be the one and only truth is essentially doing the same thing: trading certainty for your right to think for yourself.
The fundamental difference between science and these systems is that scientists offer the best explanations available within the current framework, not absolute truths about the universe. They’re always prepared to replace those explanations with better ones.
That’s precisely why science can make progress.
Something that’s genuinely objective doesn’t need to proclaim itself the truth. Nobody needs to become a believer for 1 + 1 to equal 2.
Here’s something I once said:
The most painful moment isn’t “I don’t know.” It’s “I’ve always believed I knew, and now you’re telling me I don’t.”
“I don’t know” is an empty space. You can fill it with something new.
“I’ve always believed I knew” is already full. It’s filled with pride, past judgments, and a fragile narrative about who you are.
To accept something new, you first have to empty out the old. That process is the real cost.
Every pursuit of truth comes at the price of admitting that, at some point, you were a fucking idiot.
Put the truth in front of someone, and accepting it means letting their personal narrative fall apart. They have to learn to stand again without the old beliefs that once held them up.
Most people will instinctively protect themselves instead, refusing to accept what you’re telling them.
There’s another thing people often get backwards: the relationship between letting go and figuring things out.
It’s not that you figure everything out and then let go. More often, you have to let go before you can figure things out.
Reasoning can’t get through because the door is locked by emotion.
People who manage to reach a point of genuine acceptance have often allowed their personal narrative to fall apart at some point. Then they discover that they’re still here after everything has collapsed, and that maybe it’s not such a big deal after all.
Think about school. Most of us went through it as children.
When I was in elementary school, being one minute late in the morning felt like the end of the world. Later, I realized that being late wasn’t actually going to change much.
My narrative had cracked. I let go, and then I understood.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
If you follow this line of thought far enough, you eventually run into a dead end.
“I’ve seen through everything” is a narrative.
“I know that my belief that I’ve seen through everything is itself a narrative” is also a narrative.
You can use narratives to explain away just about anything. There’s no hard limit, no numerical value to optimize. It’s just a mechanism that keeps generating explanations.
So genuine transcendence doesn’t really exist. All you can do is adopt a certain stance: recognize the narrative at work, acknowledge that you’re caught up in it, too, and leave a small opening for doubt.
Only by refusing to cling to answers can you keep moving closer to the truth.
The brain’s self-protection mechanisms and narrative-generating machinery are part of its underlying code. You can’t simply rewrite them. Human society has evolved far too quickly for the brain to keep up.
But the user layer can still be modified. Algorithms can be optimized. Patches can be applied.
Once you know the narrative-generation mechanism is running, you can add a monitoring process on top of it.
Once you know your self-protection mechanisms will kick in, you can make yourself wait one extra second when they do.
Once you know path dependence can trap you, you can run a quick check before making a decision:
What conditions made this success story possible? Are those conditions still present? Do my circumstances actually match the circumstances that existed when it worked for someone else?
If you can’t rewrite the underlying system, add patches on top of it.
A tool is just a tool. An ordinary person might use a wrench to loosen a bolt, while a master mechanic can use one as part of a complete vehicle overhaul. Then there are people who expect the wrench to fly around and fix everything by itself.
That’s not using a tool. That’s indulging in another narrative.
Only by acknowledging the limitations of the underlying system can you build patches that actually work.
There will always be a gap between knowing and doing. That’s unavoidable.
But if you can at least get these things straight in your head, you can shorten the amount of time you spend trapped in a mistake.
And honestly, that’s good enough.
