Be careful when people present hidden structure as if it were discovered structure. A model’s internal arrangement may be useful, but the utility of a model does not come from the authority of a model.

My mistake was believing that “latent” implied access to a more fundamental order, as if enough raw experience would let the model recover hidden forms. That there was an unmediated layer, you just needed to know where, or who to ask.

But there is no reason to believe that. What the model finds is not some eternal structure, but a useful arrangement shaped by data, architecture, and the objectives set by a team of people using specific tools. Men of science, men of faith, both can drift into treating their frameworks as proof of a mind-independent order rather than as tools shaped by particular histories.

Arriving at this realization is not a let down. Quite the contrary. Freedom is realizing there is no hidden store of perfect knowledge waiting for someone to discover. Meaning is made through movement, arrangement and rearrangement.