January 29, 2024 — This is a post about delusions. In society and in myself.

1. has a low probability (~<1%) of being true
2. is perceived by the agent to have a high probability of being true (~>50%)
3. is slow for the agent to update its perceived probability
4. is acted on by the agent

I had been following the early stories about Covid with some concern, but after the first big data dump was published on February 17th, 2020, it seemed clear to me that Covid would not be a huge danger. Most importantly, the first data dump indicated strongly Covid was not a significant danger to children. Every additional large data dump from then on only reinforced the more mild view of Covid. Covid was not deadly for nearly everyone (awful flu like experience aside), except those who were also at risk of dying from the flu. Thus, it shocked me as society locked down increasingly harshly over the next two years. The precautionary principle is a fine argument that would have justified a strong response measured in weeks, but the duration of the response put this in the delusional category.

Let's see how some of the things that unfolded meet the criteria of delusion as defined above.

Years after this dataset came out, at least in Hawai'i, my 3 year old daughter was still being required to wear a mask outdoors due to the perceived threat of Covid to kids. This was a societal delusion. The theory was that Covid was a high, avoidable danger to kids (given the data, this was <1% true). Society (or at least, "leadership"), perceived this probability to be ~50x-100x higher than it actually was. Society took years to update their perceived probability. And society took actions (requiring masks, even outdoors; closing beaches, parks, and playgrounds; "vaccination" requirements; severe limits on social gatherings) based on this delusion.

Another delusion was that recovering from Covid somehow did not provide protection as well as the "vaccine" would. Given all we know about the immune system, this was a very low probability hypothesis, treated like a high probability theory, updated extremely slowly, and acted upon.

There were a lot of other related delusions going on at that time. Eventually however, society did update their perceived probabilities and the Covid delusions faded.

Sidenote: I chose two delusions that were both held by a number of people. However, I'll admit there were other groups with other delusions, like one group with the delusion the vaccines caused mass death.

Anyway, society went delusional. Society acted like it was living in the movie Contagion, even though the math did not back that up.

I developed two delusions of my own.

My first delusion was that the copyright system was a root cause of society's delusions. I had long ago formed circuits in my brain that were against copyright law. These circuits believed copyright led to a less healthy information circulatory network. Now I was seeing the information network that our copyright system molded spouting delusions. Meanwhile, people were shouting "trust the science" while Sci-Hub, the preeminent site for sharing scientific research, was frozen by legal attacks from the copyright lobby. I really wish I could say that I was not delusional about this idea, but now I think that I likely greatly overestimated the impact of copyright in our world (positive or negative) and that whether we have copyright or not is probably not very impactful. So, I had a low probability theory (copyright significantly harms society) that I viewed with high probability for a long time. I also acted upon this theory, resigned from my job and formed a new corporation. So this meets all my criteria for a delusion.

My second delusion was that I had exceptional capability to solve this problem for society. I believed that I had world class talent and resources to spread a different kind of virus: a movement to abolish copyright law and replace our information circulatory network with something healthier. The theory that I was super talented (low probability), which I acted upon with great confidence, was a delusion.

That's why I really struggled in this case. I worked with the Covid data day in and day out and could not find a mathematical justification for society's actions on Covid. This time the bug was not actually in my thinking but was upstream in society.

At times this enraged me and I wasn't sure how to deal with it. It felt like an exceptional time to me, and I felt maybe I needed to stand up and do something exceptional.

Years later I see how society's delusions eventually subsided. I now realize that society will always have pockets of delusions--and that's okay! One should not get so worked up about it. Society will eventually update its probabilities, even if stubbornly slow.

But what causes these excitatory states? Could it be fear?

It does seem that in society, fear enabled the delusional behavior. Maybe in a state of fear, confident agents are king. Societal fear during Covid was fed by the media.

Perhaps, in individuals like myself, a fear state can arise at any time simply by an uncontrollable unconscious thought of the inevitably of death, and then a high energy state kicks off, and confident neural agents are able to take control.

People have told me when I'm in a hypomanic state I can't be reasoned with or talked to. I think this is a harmful attitude to have. Even when I am focused on one particularly delusional idea, I still experience many brain pilot switches in a day. I may be very angry and confrontational one moment, but even in those days I have a large number of moments when other agents are piloting and listening to feedback.