Stock Markets and the Collective Subconscious

Never bet against a hive mind

In my previous posts, I’ve talked a lot about superforecasting. Superforecasting is a complicated concept but if I was forced to define it in a single sentence, I would say “superforecasting is the science of noticing broader macro trends and extrapolating how these broader trends would unfold on the micro level.” Normally, I don’t make my definitions any more complex than that because I’m trying to appeal to a broad audience. However, if you’re enough of a nerd to have become a paid subscriber to my blog, then clearly you’d like to take a deeper dive into my scientific theories, so for this post I’d like to talk a bit about the collective subconscious - or as some would call it, the hive mind - and how that relates to superforecasting. The idea behind the collective subconscious is that everybody is a thinking being with their own narrow goals, much as every living cell in your body could be considered a discrete individual creature with a specific narrow task. Of course, your individual cells don’t see the bigger picture. Your lung cells know that they need to breathe oxygen in and out, but they don’t know why. Your blood cells know that they need to carry that oxygen throughout your body, but they don’t know why they do it either. Your heart knows that it needs to pump that oxygen, but if you were to interrogate it, it wouldn’t have the faintest clue either. Yet you and I, as larger collective entities, can see the bigger picture. We understand that the purpose of each of these activities is intertwined to allow the functioning of a consciousness much more vast than any single individual cell would be. In much the same way, the separate individuals in our society form pieces of a greater collective consciousness. It might seem hard to believe that any collective consciousness formed by millions of random individual interactions might have a coherent intelligence and be able to act with purpose, since after all that collective is composed of numerous individuals, each of whom is acting according to their own narrow goals. But anybody familiar with the field of AI knows that consciousness is a process that is naturally emergent from enough rules-based interactions between low-level agents. In other words, the “I” that you consider to be your personality does not actually exist. In reality, your entire personality is nothing more than a ton of very primitive yet interconnected interactions between your memories and emotions. If you gave me a sophisticated enough neurochemistry set, a team of unethical scientists, and a little time to experiment, I could probably scrub your entire personality clean as a whistle. (Note: I am legally obligated to state that I am not a doctor nor am I licensed to perform any sort of human testing, so please do not reach out to me asking for a personality wipe.) If AI is formed from the interaction between lots of low-level subroutines in its programming, and your own intelligence (and personality) is formed from the interactions between lots of low-level interactions between your body’s cells, why is it so hard to believe that large groups of people can exhibit a collective consciousness that is similarly greater than the sum of its parts?

A lot of highly spiritual hippies talk about this kind of stuff, usually after doing obscene quantities of psychedelics. “We are all one, man,” they tell you earnestly, staring intensely at your left ear. “Like, think about it, man. You and me and all the rest of the universe… we are all just one single entity joined in love” they slur at you, while slowly tipping over sideways. I’m not a particularly spiritual guy, so I’m totally uninterested in examining the philosophical or ethical ramifications of collective consciousness. Instead, I want to talk about the practical applications. The reason it is important to believe in the collective consciousness is because a lot of interactions between large groups of people can be predicted better if we think of society as an emergent AI that is motivated to preserve itself while fulfilling certain core directives, and this is very important to the fields of superforecasting (and also memetics, but that is a topic for a future post).