Science is War

Battling the Scientific "Deep State"

If you developed a new science, what would you do with it? Science isn’t easy to monetize like so many other fields are. Pop stars like Taylor Swift get applause and accolades when they refuse to let their product get stolen by greedy corporations, but we scientists are expected to be altruistic and share our product with the world out of the goodness of our own hearts. This has never made much sense to me. Money is power, and the more money you have, the more power you can access to impose your vision upon the world. Most people would agree that it’s usually the most intelligent members of society who are best qualified to run it, which is why it’s so strange that rappers are encouraged to seek money and power whereas scientists are not. When we reward a behavior, we get more of that behavior, so it seems extremely confusing that we often reward people highly for behaviors like singing songs or high-speed trading while the people who create new techniques that advance society forwards seldom get rewarded at all. When I realized the vast potential of the new science that I had created (memetics, the science of manipulating large groups of people) I decided that this trend needed to change. Scientists were no longer going to scrounge for scraps while less intelligent people got fame, money, and adoration. If I was right about the potential of memetics, then I literally had the opportunity to reshape society for the better, and I decided that in the new world order that I wanted to create, scientists were going to be the new rock stars.

Of course, in any paradigm shift, there are winners and losers. As I discussed in my previous post, the elites at the top of any social status hierarchy seldom respond well to efforts to replace them, and scientists are no different. In fact, our society currently has a whole industry dedicated to shaming and discrediting scientists who disagree with the status quo. I refer, of course, to Cancel Culture.

It may seem surprising that people would judge the quality of science by how politically correct it is instead of how accurately it describes reality, but this kind of thing has actually been going on for millennia. Socrates was forced to drink hemlock because he spoke about uncomfortable truths that the Athenian leadership were unwilling to grapple with. Galileo was pressured into recanting his theory of heliocentrism because it conflicted with the dominant scientific paradigm of his era. Scott Siskind was accused of racism because he refused to denounce an unpopular President vigorously enough. So if anybody is actually surprised that science is more of a heavily politicized battlefield rather than the pristine academic debate that it is often portrayed as, perhaps they simply have not been paying much attention to the world around them lately.

In my previous post, I explained the perverse incentives of science - how scientists who are supposedly invested in advancing humanity’s knowledge get caught up in games of prestige and status. These status games often prevent the “experts” (ie, those at the top of the social status hierarchy in their field) from recognizing when they are wrong or acknowledging when a newcomer to their field has a better scientific framework than they do. Because of this, the people who should be most invested in advancing their field often end up fighting to suppress any scientific progress that would disqualify their own discoveries. Since a lot of scientific elites in the sociology and economics communities would have their prestige completely stripped away by the superior techniques of memetics and superforecasting, I knew from the very beginning that they would not acknowledge the validity of my sciences. They would attempt to discredit and embarrass me, using the same techniques that they have already used successfully on so many other people whose paradigm threatened their own grasp on power. Accusations of racism and sexual harassment would undoubtedly be raised in combination with claims about poor methodology or a lack of credentials. My personal life would be investigated with a fine-toothed comb to find even the slightest scrap of immorality or wrongdoing.

I had no intention of letting the narcissistic elites at the top of the scientific hierarchy destroy or discredit me the same way they did to so many other innocent people, so I knew that I needed a plan to take them out first. Before I went public with my findings, I would need to have overwhelming evidence that my sciences could get results that theirs could not. Additionally, since I knew that they would attack my credibility with lies and misinformation, I saw nothing wrong with undermining their credibility first, since that would make it easier to ensure that my ideas were given a fair hearing in the court of public opinion, rather than being shouted down by self-proclaimed “experts.” One significant advantage I had is that until I went public, my enemies would have no idea that I even existed. I could damage their credibility anonymously by spreading conspiracy theories online and pointing out the flaws in their methodology, gradually eroding public trust in their credibility. My enemies might have an incredible advantage in terms of wealth, status, and power, but that wouldn’t help them at all if they didn’t even know who they were fighting against. I was going to take them out silently from the shadows, like a ghost.

Because superforecasting and memetics are different (though related) sciences, the plan I came up with was a two-track approach, with one track to prove the validity of superforecasting and another track to prove the validity of memetics. Superforecasting would be relatively easy to prove: all I would need to do was demonstrate that I could make a significant amount of money simply by playing the stock market. I figured that if I could get 200% returns (in other words, tripling the money I invested) from my investment portfolio in less than three years, that would be more than enough evidence to demonstrate that superforecasting was indeed a real science. After contemplating this plan some more, I realized that one objection that my opponents might raise would be that my success in the stock market was purely the result of coincidence, which I then had explained by making up the idea of superforecasting. (In other words, retrofitting my theory to the data, rather than coming up with the theory first and then demonstrating that the data supported it.) I needed some sort of proof to demonstrate that I had come up with the idea of superforecasting before making all my money on the stock market. The easiest way to prove that I had not retrofitted my theory to the data would be to self-publish a book about superforecasting on Amazon before executing the rest of my plan, so that is what I did. (I will go into this in more detail in one of my future posts.)

However, when it came to memetics, I was at a bit of a loss. The primary use of memetics is to manipulate political outcomes, but how could I demonstrate that I had done so successfully while maintaining the secrecy that I would need to continue undermining my scientific enemies credibility from the safety of anonymity? I would need a very unusual confluence of events: a politician that was a long-shot candidate whom the expert consensus guaranteed would lose. And it would help greatly if he had a seething hatred for the opinions of those self-proclaimed “experts”, because that would further my efforts to undermine their credibility before they tried to cancel or deplatform me. I knew that the moment I went public with my findings, the knives would come out, and an intense battle for the future of science would begin, so I needed a politician who hated the elites every bit as much as I did. But where could I find a political candidate with such unique qualifications?

Then, like a miracle, Donald Trump announced that he was throwing his hat into the presidential race, and I knew that it was Game On.