🪄 Delusions of Splendeur 🔮
"Defender" believes everything, from everyone
This post explains the character “Defender” that I’ve been playing for the past ~2 years, primarily on twitter. This should be a B for all my readers1.
Defender believes everything, from everyone.
He’s meant to be the most gullible mind you will ever encounter. He will take whatever you say at face value, believe it, and act on it. His mind is like Wikipedia — anyone can change it, and as long as there is no opposition nor attempt to change it back, it will stay that way.
Despite this, his worldview remains coherent. How? Because the 2nd rule is: there cannot be two conflicting truths. Defender cannot reject any truth that any human earnestly believes, but he also cannot allow conflicting beliefs to co-exist.
Let’s see an example of how this process unfolds. Below is what happened when Defender encountered the flat earth society, 15 years ago.
Flat Earth Society Forum: “the earth is flat!”
Defender believes it and runs around high school spreading the good word
High school friend: “That’s stupid, there wouldn’t be timezones on a flat earth”
Defender goes back to the flat earthers to tell them about the missing piece of information that he now has that has changed his mind
Flat Earth Society Forum: “no, that’s fine! the sun is a spotlight, it rotates like this, see? that’s where we get timezones”
Defender runs back to his high school to let them know the theory withstands their criticism
This process repeats back and forth, until the high school runs out of arguments.
Defender realizes the true source of the belief in round earth is faith, not fact.
What ultimately settles Defender’s mind back is having to reconcile how satellites work in a flat earth model, plus the difficult odds of maintaining the massive conspiracy. This pulls out others who were convinced of flat earth but weren’t swayed by the external attacks & ridicule.
Sabine’s 2020 “Flat Earth - Wrong but not Stupid” is the only treatment I’ve seen that accurately describes the minds in that community.
As long as there is “empty space” in Defender’s mind, anyone can write to it. The reason “the earth is flat!” changed his mind was because he never saw any evidence against it. The earth could just as well be any shape! How would he know? Everyone around him believed in round earth, but how do THEY know?
If they knew something he didn’t, then he should be able to get that information himself. He is gullible, overwhelmingly trusting, but not stupid.
Defender spends a lot of his time with crackpots on twitter. People who say, “I am the smartest man alive” or “I have a cure for cancer, but no one is listening to me” or “I am being hunted by political assassins, please send help”2
What if they’re right? Does there exist a mechanism for their message to reach its place if they are right? If they’re wrong, why do they believe what they believe? Could they convince Defender? And then from there, either convince more people, or people change Defender’s mind back (and in doing so, change the original guy’s mind)
This is my job now. The way it pays is the same way investors get paid - if you find untapped value in society, you can capitalize on it.
But that was not the original goal. And most of the people that I talk to, that I spend my attention on, are “crackpot”, there’s no way for me to capitalize on them. When I do find someone valuable, I try to help them as quickly as possible, and do enough of those cases that it pays for me to keep doing the other ones.
I love to get inside people’s minds, even if they are delusional. Especially so. I just think it must be lonely in there. I think if you are delusional, you don’t know if you are delusional. All you have to trust is your mind. If I was delusional, I would hope someone would sit with me and show me what parts of my world are real, and what parts are not real, instead of just telling me that my mind is broken and leaving me lost, and alone.
…
I used to find it frustrating that people would get so angry at those who have conflicting beliefs. Like, why are you yelling at them, instead of explaining the correct answer? Why do you assume they are malicious instead of like…dumb, or misinformed? What if they change their mind on exposure to the information you have? If you think their beliefs are evil, and a threat, shouldn’t you try ?
But I get it now. It’s because this work is dangerous. It’s because exposure to conflicting ideas might change YOUR mind, in the wrong direction. And it doesn’t matter if you get to the truth “eventually” if in the meantime you fall into a rabbithole, get radicalized, and hurt yourself, or others.
I couldn’t do this work without anchors. The word “normie” used to feel like an insult, but now I recognize it as a critical function of any information network:
A normie is the category of mind that ONLY changes its mind when a critical mass of other minds like them change first
The only guaranteed way to test for the outcome of beliefs is to “run them” on real human minds. In the same way that lawyers understand that the only real way to know what a law does is to litigate it (like “running a piece of code”, you know if a law actually works or not when it runs in a real court with real stakes). It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much you think a new belief is safe. You won’t know until you allow it to infect your mind, and then see what happens.
But by then, it may be too late.
Thanks for reading! This essay is meant to act as an entry point to the “open mind lab” that I run34. There’s a “recent A” that I got that I wanted to sneak in here. I can’t explain all the necessary prereqs, but I’d like to at least write it down for myself, and for those who might get it.
You’ve never seen an infohazard because if you did, you wouldn’t be around to tell your story
You’ve never seen anyone else experience an infohazard, because when a dangerous infohazard makes contact with a mind, it detonates a debris field of fnords. To the undiscerning observer this looks no different than random noise / crackpots
The safest way to “handle” a potential infohazard is to expose another mind to it. You can query & map the object through another mind without getting infected. You can also just observe the subject’s health over time
It is necessary to study this by constantly moving into the unknown, because there is no way to protect yourself from the unknown if you cannot see it or recognize it
“B” here refers to the A/B/U rating system. See here for the widely accessible description of the system, and here for the more technical description.
These 3 examples are fictionalized versions of real minds that I have tracked & tested. Happy to share the stories/cases. Future reference their codenames are: ogi, water guy, nigerian guy.
Tweet mockingly describing how doing open mind experiments is punished, but doing them in secret is totally legal & fine
In which defender reveals he's been socrates
“This should be a B for all my readers.”
i clearly haven’t been reading your page for long enough because it felt like i got at least one A from this. the research and work going on in this community is so interesting, i love it.