Mistakes were Made

Never do drugs while trying to steal a country

In my last post, I talked about how I tried to use memetics to create a positive and uplifting religion for people to follow while simultaneously conducting a replication test of my memetics science. Needless to say, things didn’t turn out quite as well as expected. In this post, I’d like to analyze what went wrong, and how things could have perhaps gone better.

The first thing that could have gone better is that I could have paid more attention to security. 4Chan’s tripcodes are not exactly the world’s best security apparatus, so it should not have been a surprise when my tripcode was stolen and somebody else took control of my account. At the time I was not too worried about it since the online identity I was using had not achieved the notoriety that it would eventually garner. It wasn’t until much later when my stolen pseudonym emerged on 8chan advocating much more extremist behavior that I evaluated the situation in hindsight and thought to myself, hey, there could be a real problem here.

The second thing that I would have changed in hindsight is that if I had known how things would shake out, I would have come clean about the whole thing earlier. But you need to understand that on 4chan, identity is a flexible concept. Anonymity is built into the ethos of the platform itself. Whomever had taken over my online identity obviously had a similar ideology to mine: in fact, in some ways they were doing a better job of creating a religion than I had been. My main purpose in doing this had been to gather useful scientific data for my memetics replication test, and whomever had seized control of my tripcode and used it to take control of my online persona wasn’t really interfering with that goal, so why worry about it? I was still getting the important scientific data that I needed, so who cared that one of my many anonymous online pseudonyms had been stolen?

The third thing that I probably would have done differently is that I wouldn’t have tried to artificially enhance my intelligence using psychedelic mushrooms to rewire my own brain (at least, not at the same time that I was trying to start a religion). While I still believe that accelerating evolution is a worthwhile goal and I have always taken an interest in intelligence enhancement, I didn’t realize how drastically my perceptions would shift, or how subtle and insidious this perceptual shift would be. Imagine a color seeping into your life slowly, just a little bit more each day. If it happened all at once, it would be very noticeable. You’d be alarmed by the sudden shift in your perceptions. But if the color increased just a little bit more each day - if the filter you saw the world through became just the tiniest bit more tinted every time you woke up - you wouldn’t even notice anything was happening to you until you were already seeing everything through a greatly altered perspective. That’s what my perceptual shift was like. By the time I realized that my viewpoint was shifting, I already was the new viewpoint.

The fourth thing that I would have changed is that I might have tried to notify somebody about the upcoming Covid pandemic that I foresaw with my superforecasting techniques. Granted, nobody would have believed me. Imagine yourself, back at the height of the economic boom in 2019, telling people “In less than one year, a massive pandemic will sweep the world - a pandemic so large that entire cities will shut down. Everyone will be wearing masks! Movie theater chains will go bankrupt! Wild animals will wander through empty city streets! THE WORLD WILL CHANGE FOREVER!!!” You would very quickly be sedated and taken to a mental institution, which is not the best place to be during a pandemic. That’s part of the reason why instead of telling people, I chose to instead stay quiet and invest in Covid-resistant stocks like Amazon, making a lot of money on the stock market. Then I sold my Amazon stock and scooped up Covid-vulnerable stocks like NYMT during the peak of the pandemic, making a lot of money off that decision as well. I suppose in hindsight - if I had not been tripping balls off my transhumanist experiment - I would probably have tried to find a way to warn people about Covid in a more rational, thoughtful way which they might accept. (Or.. I might not have. Part of my psychedelic journey involved the realization that deep down, I resent society for its constant discrimination against aspies like me.)

Then again, it raises some interesting questions about the competency of the media that during the initial stages of Covid - when a warning would have been most beneficial - they were even more actively engaged in Covid denialism than Trump. If I had sounded a warning in those early months, do you think it’s likely anybody would have listened to me? Or would the “experts” just have mocked me as a crazed conspiracy theorist, like they were doing to everybody else at that time? The rationalist community certainly knew about Covid in advance, but nobody paid any attention to them, because people believe what they want to believe, and nobody wants to believe bad news is coming. So if a bunch of well-read and highly educated intellectuals who were justifiably concerned about a pandemic were completely ignored, why would anybody have paid attention to my warnings?

—————People didn’t see this as a problem until the media told them it was—————

Perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that pays more attention to celebrities, politicians, and Instagram influencers than to the smartest people in the room, especially when this behavior results in mass death and widespread economic hardship. Perhaps instead of living in an effectively managed society, we are actually living in a dysfunctional dystopia that is in deep need of correction. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We can discuss that idea more in another post.