xxx Million Man Ouija Board
Who ya gonna call? There are no experts in the mechanisms of free expression and how it undergirds freedom more generally. Yet.
Mark Changizi
4 March 2021
4 March 2021
About the Great Mass Safety Delusion of 2020, I have had so many utterly frustrated people asking me, “How do we reverse this?” Indeed. A solution to the problem of the human susceptibility to mass delusions is one of our goals here at FreeX. Mass delusions underlie the greatest failures of civilization: revolutions, dictatorships, totalitarianism, genocides, and the rich varieties of democide.
Curing ourselves of mass delusions is part of what we call the Societal Holy Grail: Securing the mechanisms of free expression and the fruits of freedom to which it leads, while ensuring those mechanisms function smoothly and avoid the mass delusions that are civilization's greatest threat.
Finding the Societal Holy Grail is as difficult as it is important.
(a) COMPLEX. The problem concerns complex networks of highly intelligent, reputation-seeking individuals, with organizations, governments, militaries, and media thrown into the mix. Not pretty.
(b) MULTIDISCIPLINARY. It requires a considerable grasp of an extremely wide variety of areas, including evolved human psychology, socio-emotional signaling, evolved reputation accounting mechanisms, cultural evolution, graph theory, computation, economics, and much more.
(c) HOLISTIC. A historian won’t solve this. A physicist won’t solve this. An epidemiologist definitely won’t solve this. Specialization will be a handicap. Big picture problems need big picture thinkers.
(d) HARD. We know it’s hard because there are so many examples where either the mass delusion never did get undone, or came undone only through “rivers of blood” (a reference to Charles MacKay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841).
The Great Mass Safety Delusion of 2020 has given new urgency to the search for the Societal Holy Grail. Prior to 2020, most in the West had the feeling we had risen above that. The great wars are behind us. Communism is behind us. The big contemporary nation-level examples of mass delusions and/or dictatorships are far-away and/or non-Western. Classical liberalism — found in variable but ample amounts in most countries today — is the antidote to totalitarianism and mass delusions.
Or so it was believed.
I am certainly of the mind that classical liberalism is a necessary part of it. But we see clearly now that classical liberalism is not sufficient. The need for the Societal Holy Grail appears to be just as relevant today in our modern, “advanced” state as ever. Maybe more than ever.
Why?
For potentially the first time in human history, a mass delusion came to encompass a large majority of the entire world (of seven billion). Europe and the U.S., for example, are filled with folks whose escaped nations “run” by mass delusions. Those were the good old days where there was somewhere non-delusional to escape to. For the Great Mass Safety Illusion of 2020, there is almost nowhere to escape to.
Again, research on the Societal Holy Grail is more important than ever.
Back to the Holy Grail question I mentioned I am commonly asked. “How do we reverse this?” The truth is, we don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Sad, but there it is.
I believe, however, that we at FreeX -- Dr. Tim Barber and I -- have the beginnings of a promising framework moving forward in the direction of finding the Societal Holy Grail.
(i) Socio-emotional signaling
To understand these mass movements and mass delusions first requires a theory about the mechanisms undergirding how reputations rise and fall based on the resolution of disagreements. Surprisingly, our system of emotional expressions is the mechanism undergirding reputation transfers (i.e., “payments” of social currency). We have been working on this aspect of the problem for the last decade, and that work will appear in our upcoming book, UNMASKED: Why We Express Emotions (tentative title).
(ii) Decentralized social currency
But the next step needed is understanding the mechanisms underlying how these transfers of reputation “wealth” get preserved in a social network. This is the world of “narratives” and decentralized mechanisms for converging to the truth. We believe we have the beginnings of a framework for this, one that will lead to an eventual rigorous theory with broad explanatory power, including prescriptive advice on how to reverse mass delusions, and how to inhibit them in the first place.
... and doing so consistent with classical liberalism, civil liberties, and so on. THAT’S the challenge! If one’s theory prescribed draconian authoritarian measures to avoid mass delusions, that would be fighting rivers of blood with rivers of blood. I hint in the direction of our framework for (ii) in this subtweet.
~~
So, we at FreeX don’t yet have an answer to the Societal Holy Grail. But we’ve been working on ideas crucial for solving it for some time (including varieties of other research directions that generally help). And we have the beginnings of a promising needed next stage. There are no experts in this. As the new research continues, I’ll try to convey here (and on Twitter and YouTube) our evolving views of it from various angles. We need research on it so that there’s something to even be an expert on!
PREVIOUS: Inception
Curing ourselves of mass delusions is part of what we call the Societal Holy Grail: Securing the mechanisms of free expression and the fruits of freedom to which it leads, while ensuring those mechanisms function smoothly and avoid the mass delusions that are civilization's greatest threat.
Finding the Societal Holy Grail is as difficult as it is important.
(a) COMPLEX. The problem concerns complex networks of highly intelligent, reputation-seeking individuals, with organizations, governments, militaries, and media thrown into the mix. Not pretty.
(b) MULTIDISCIPLINARY. It requires a considerable grasp of an extremely wide variety of areas, including evolved human psychology, socio-emotional signaling, evolved reputation accounting mechanisms, cultural evolution, graph theory, computation, economics, and much more.
(c) HOLISTIC. A historian won’t solve this. A physicist won’t solve this. An epidemiologist definitely won’t solve this. Specialization will be a handicap. Big picture problems need big picture thinkers.
(d) HARD. We know it’s hard because there are so many examples where either the mass delusion never did get undone, or came undone only through “rivers of blood” (a reference to Charles MacKay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841).
The Great Mass Safety Delusion of 2020 has given new urgency to the search for the Societal Holy Grail. Prior to 2020, most in the West had the feeling we had risen above that. The great wars are behind us. Communism is behind us. The big contemporary nation-level examples of mass delusions and/or dictatorships are far-away and/or non-Western. Classical liberalism — found in variable but ample amounts in most countries today — is the antidote to totalitarianism and mass delusions.
Or so it was believed.
I am certainly of the mind that classical liberalism is a necessary part of it. But we see clearly now that classical liberalism is not sufficient. The need for the Societal Holy Grail appears to be just as relevant today in our modern, “advanced” state as ever. Maybe more than ever.
Why?
For potentially the first time in human history, a mass delusion came to encompass a large majority of the entire world (of seven billion). Europe and the U.S., for example, are filled with folks whose escaped nations “run” by mass delusions. Those were the good old days where there was somewhere non-delusional to escape to. For the Great Mass Safety Illusion of 2020, there is almost nowhere to escape to.
Again, research on the Societal Holy Grail is more important than ever.
Back to the Holy Grail question I mentioned I am commonly asked. “How do we reverse this?” The truth is, we don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Sad, but there it is.
I believe, however, that we at FreeX -- Dr. Tim Barber and I -- have the beginnings of a promising framework moving forward in the direction of finding the Societal Holy Grail.
(i) Socio-emotional signaling
To understand these mass movements and mass delusions first requires a theory about the mechanisms undergirding how reputations rise and fall based on the resolution of disagreements. Surprisingly, our system of emotional expressions is the mechanism undergirding reputation transfers (i.e., “payments” of social currency). We have been working on this aspect of the problem for the last decade, and that work will appear in our upcoming book, UNMASKED: Why We Express Emotions (tentative title).
(ii) Decentralized social currency
But the next step needed is understanding the mechanisms underlying how these transfers of reputation “wealth” get preserved in a social network. This is the world of “narratives” and decentralized mechanisms for converging to the truth. We believe we have the beginnings of a framework for this, one that will lead to an eventual rigorous theory with broad explanatory power, including prescriptive advice on how to reverse mass delusions, and how to inhibit them in the first place.
... and doing so consistent with classical liberalism, civil liberties, and so on. THAT’S the challenge! If one’s theory prescribed draconian authoritarian measures to avoid mass delusions, that would be fighting rivers of blood with rivers of blood. I hint in the direction of our framework for (ii) in this subtweet.
~~
So, we at FreeX don’t yet have an answer to the Societal Holy Grail. But we’ve been working on ideas crucial for solving it for some time (including varieties of other research directions that generally help). And we have the beginnings of a promising needed next stage. There are no experts in this. As the new research continues, I’ll try to convey here (and on Twitter and YouTube) our evolving views of it from various angles. We need research on it so that there’s something to even be an expert on!
PREVIOUS: Inception