How Smart People Talk Themselves Into Utter Bollocks
The Frame Rate Fallacy
I once watched my neighbour Steve spend twenty minutes explaining to his wife why their cat was definitely reincarnated from a Roman centurion. His ‘evidence’ was that the cat sits upright sometimes, and Romans were disciplined. Also, the cat’s name is Caesar, which Steve insisted was “too much of a coincidence to ignore.” His wife nodded along with the resigned expression of someone who’d stopped fighting years ago, whilst Caesar licked his own arse with the dignity of a military commander.
The thing that struck me wasn’t that Steve believed it. It’s that he’d constructed an entire logical framework to support the belief, complete with supporting evidence and internal consistency. The framework was immaculate. The premise was insane.
When Pseudoscience Wears a Lab Coat
Which brings me to this recent bit of intellectual bollocks about “agency frame rates” and consciousness that sounds vaguely scientific, uses proper terminology in almost the right way, and explains everyday experiences through a framework that feels revelatory until you actually think about it for more than thirty seconds.
The basic claim is this. Your consciousness operates at different frame rates throughout the day, like a video camera. When you’re “switched on,” you’re sampling reality faster, which makes everything feel safer and easier to control. When you’re drunk or tired, your frame rate drops, and suddenly holding a laptop by the corner feels risky because you can’t trust what your hand’s doing between conscious “frames.”
It’s bollocks. Sophisticated, well-articulated bollocks, but bollocks nonetheless.
I know this because I’ve spent years watching tech companies dress up ordinary observations in scientific language to make them sound profound. I’ve sat in meetings where someone would take a simple truth like “people make mistakes when they’re tired” and transform it into “reduced cognitive sampling rates create temporal agency gaps in decision architecture.” Same observation, but now it sounds like you need a PhD to understand why you shouldn’t operate heavy machinery after three pints.
The Problem With Borrowed Authority
Someone’s taken the legitimate concept of frame rates from video technology, mashed it up with half-understood neuroscience about consciousness, and created a metaphor that sounds explanatory but explains nothing.
The tell is in the details. “We can’t oversample ourselves” sounds technical, but it’s meaningless. Consciousness doesn’t work like a camera with a fixed sampling rate. Your brain isn’t taking discrete snapshots of reality and stitching them together. That’s not how neural processing works, even remotely.
But it feels true. We all recognise that experience of being “switched on” versus feeling sluggish. The framework provides a satisfying explanation for something we’ve all felt. The problem is that satisfaction isn’t the same as accuracy.
I watched this exact pattern play out many times. We’d have some legitimately smart engineer who’d discovered a concept in one domain and immediately try to apply it everywhere else. Suddenly everything was about “optimising the pipeline” or “reducing friction coefficients” or “establishing feedback loops.” The metaphors were perfect. The applications were absurd.
The worst part is that it’s incredibly hard to argue against because teh framework is self-reinforcing. If you point out that consciousness doesn’t work like video frame rates, the response is always “well, you’re just not understanding the model properly.” Which is the same defence Steve used when I suggested his cat was probably just a cat.
How to Spot Dressed-Up Rubbish
First, watch for borrowed authority. If someone’s taking terminology from one field and applying it to another without acknowledging they’re using a metaphor, that’s a red flag. “Frame rate” is a real thing in video technology. “Agency frame rate” is poetry masquerading as measurement. The moment you see technical language from Field A being applied to Field B without any actual mechanism explained, you’re probably looking at someone who’s fallen in love with their own metaphor.
Second, test the framework against absurdity. The “agency frame rate” idea claims autistic people experience reality at a higher frame rate, which is why their social interactions seem forced. This is the Steve’s-cat-is-Roman moment. You’re taking a complex neurological condition with actual documented mechanisms and explaining it through a made-up video camera metaphor. If your framework requires you to reduce human neurodiversity to “they’re just running at a different FPS,” you’ve left science and entered creative writing.
Third, look for unfalsifiable claims. “We can only sample ourselves at our conscious frame rate, we can’t oversample ourselves” is the kind of statement that sounds profound but can’t be tested or disproven. It’s designed to shut down questioning by making the framework immune to evidence. Real scientific concepts can be wrong. Pseudoscience is constructed to be perpetually correct by making itself impossible to challenge.
Finally, ask yourself what the framework actually predicts that you couldn’t predict with simpler explanations. Drunk people drive badly because alcohol impairs motor control, reaction time, and judgment. That’s documented, measurable, and doesn’t require inventing a consciousness frame rate. If your elaborate model doesn’t explain anything better than existing, simpler models, it’s probably just intellectual decoration.
The Comfort of Patterns
The thing that makes this particularly insidious is that these frameworks feel genuinely useful. They provide a way to organise your experience, to feel like you understand something complex. Steve genuinely did feel like he understood his cat better through the Roman centurion lens. The person writing about agency frame rates probably does feel like they’ve unlocked something important about consciousness.
But that feeling of understanding isn’t the same as actual understanding. It’s pattern-matching turning up at a fancy dress as insight. And in a world where we’re increasingly surrounded by actual systems that do run on frame rates and sampling, where real neuroscience is making genuine discoveries about consciousness, the gap between what sounds scientific and what is scientific has never been more important to navigate.
When you start believing your metaphors are literally true, you stop looking for actual answers. You’ve got your framework, it explains everything, and any evidence that contradicts it just means you haven’t properly understood the framework yet. It’s intellectual cement: once it sets, nothing new gets in.
I still see Steve occasionally. Caesar died last year. Steve’s convinced he’s been reincarnated as their new kitten, Wellington. The ‘evidence’ is that Wellington also sits upright sometimes, and military leaders often get promoted. His wife still has that same resigned expression.
The framework remains immaculate. The premise remains insane. And somewhere, someone’s probably writing a paper about how Wellington’s “agency frame rate” makes him a natural leader.