Category Archives: trust

The game

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One night my conscience challenged my rational mind, to a dual. The only way it could, in a dream. I did not realize this was the source of the dream until well into the game.

The game began with simple rules.

‘Empaths'(non-psychopaths) were to be tested. The object of the game was to demonstrate that ‘the conscience’ was too fragile to be a primary force in the real world. That the coherence of society was just momentum. The momentum of complex multi generational knowledge transfer.

It was set in an abandoned building surrounded with clearing and then wilderness.

The rules were as follows.

  1. The empaths had to be, and act like, children. In other word the quality or power of their emotional quotient (EQ) was the only factor for their internal morality. They were under developed and had little or no experience dealing with terror, starvation, and lack of other base needs. Kids were around age eight to ten.
  2. The empaths had no resources. (food, water, rest) All resources had to be taken from other empaths.
  3. I would be the only adult empath. The only fully developed conscience in the entire game.
  4. There were many children, at least eight.
  5. There would be rational actors. Enforcers, and one young adult talker, my counterpart. The talkers role was to explain the rules to the children and myself, and call enforcers if the rules weren’t followed. He clearly wanted to win. He spoke aggressively and struck fear in all.
  6. I could not physically interfere. I had enough talent to fight and beat the enforcers (numerous and robotic in reaction, with some exploitable handicaps), but not with a panicked child in tow. I could only convince the children, I couldn’t drag them.
  7. Two children were ordered to kill each other each night. The winner was then paired up with another child the next night.
  8.  I had once resource. A plant grew that would restore my health for one day but make me hallucinate 10% of the time. Cumulative. It was fatal poison to children.
  9.  I had to save more than one child to win.

I won on the second night.

How many children died?

One. The first two children were selected and threatened by the talker. I used every trick I knew to convince the first child(let’s call him Angel) not to fight, but terror of the unknown convinced Angel he had to kill to survive as directed.

I convinced his first designated victim/opponent (Charles for simplicity) not to fight. Charles did not subconsciously understand the problem, or had exclusively positive experiences with adults, and trusted me. This was done in earshot of Angel. Once Once Charles’s commitment to non-violence and escape was obvious Angel acted. While being egged on by the talker, Angel killed Charles with a provided sword.

I was distraught. I had failed to save the second child. The first had done something terrible. Angel ate and slept, and I wept.

I ate some plant to retain my strength of mind. The hallucinations reinforced my sense of urgency.

When he woke, I continued to try and convince Angel he was was wrong after the first death and failed. The other children, who were in earshot, became convinced that he couldn’t be swayed. His commitment to death was now an unstoppable force. Without speaking, they signaled to me as a group. Intuitively, I knew they had decided to flee.

I distracted Angel as the children gathered by an exit. Then we fled as one, without angel. They followed me to safety as I fought the enforcers off of them successfully. They couldn’t explain why they made this choice. I didn’t expect them to make it. It was not discussed. It was made by their conscience without my direct programming (as parents do).

The contest ended so Angel was released and survived, with terrible emotional damage.

The challenge had ended. What was demonstrated. Emapthy is superior against risk to the rational mind. But only with negative examples.

What can this dream, turned thought experiment, teach us? Protect freedom of speech. Neither force, nor experience could save even one child, but they could save themselves. If their consciences were exposed to the whole brutal truth, they knew the path to safety. Only the truth can protect us from those who would pit us against each other.

The death of facts

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trusted

 

Them’s the facts jack. Facts are facts. Or are they. Fact checkers love to write their own checks, but who checks them? Other fact checkers? That’s a tangled web, and at any scale sovereignty, and then authority, begins with you. As always the most important question isn’t who, but how. How we determine what the facts are, determines the quality of our reactions.

Many people care about facts as weapons. A way to zing their enemies. The repugnant selfish theater better known as politics. They don’t contemplate broader risks. Absurdities enable atrocities. The fields of facts are filled with Pyrrhic victories. Battles won at cost of humanity’s common war against risk. The truth and the broad shield it provides us is damaged. What does truth shield us from? Many interim horrors, but ultimately, mistakes we can not come back from.

Inherently, there can be no greater risk than irreconcilable error, should facts go awry. All risk ends there. Facts are important, possibly the most important to a shared social system. The only thing that can correct irreconcilable error is externalities. Waiting for some black swan to save you is inherent failure. Not because saviors don’t exist, but because you learn nothing and therefore accomplish nothing if you strictly wait for them. Trying and failing to understand still often makes progress. You need to act even if the facts do not favor action.

Unknown unknowns

How do you act without or in the face of apparent facts? The temptation may be to vette the facts further. It seems like a positive action, and it could be. But as the earliest politician showed, fact finding can become a fool’s errand. If your premise, or other contributing facts are flawed your result will be skewed, possibly multiplicatively. A trace of poison can ruin the whole water supply. Finding facts objectively, at a glance, seems improbable.

There are a few structures by which to find facts. Only in rationalism can facts be found objectively through strictly logical constructs. Empirical evidence depends to a degree on perspective, and attributes and quality of the senses. A rubber ruler at best. Skepticism can never create a test it can pass, because it’s nature is to doubt everything, including the test itself. You can’t create a useful system of rules, you inherently can’t trust. Determinism can indicate there are immutable facts, but you can’t measure inevitability, only likelihoods approaching inevitability. It may be true, but we can’t measure it completely, so we can’t create a fact with it. So rationalism it is.

Determinism while maddening can be useful. There are no determinists. There are only people who think determinism is the most likely explanation for events and attributes, by a very wide margin. They can’t know every quantum outcome at the sub-atomic level that create the molecules in their brain cells, they can only imagine the parts at that scale working together on an impossible to simulate universal scale. It’s too big for simulation or calculation. Which reveals our final opponent to rationalism, pragmatism.

While many people treat facts as deterministic, they can be, and are pragmatic.  What actually performs and gets good results?  Based in an incalculable world, all things deterministic are in fact an odds game and actually pragmatic. This presents a problem for rationalism. Scope. Just like determinism can only approach the probability that it is true, rationalism can only approach the totality of relevant facts. It may, and mathematically will, miss facts. But don’t just take my word for it, rationalism died with the renaissance man. Once humanities best minds determined the entirety of human knowledge is not knowable to any one person  more than a century ago, it follows that nobody can have or even honestly claim to have, all the facts. The concept of incontrovertible facts died, when the scope of human knowledge exceeded one very smart person.

As this is Civgene, I can’t help but present a second argument. The real way I knew to look for the death of facts. I know all the most intelligent human behavior is partly driven by rationalizing subconscious impulse. Our conscience, indicated by our lack of psychopathy, is a probability engine. Churning out likely answers to puzzles by comparing unlike things in our memories and nudging us. We then in turn rationalize or externally explain these insights. Reason without conscionable  impulse is just rationalism, and that psychopathic fashion of seeking truth is, incomplete at best.

Known unknowns

So we know facts can be false, and can’t be proven completely true, but we have to act. What to do? We should use facts, but we should encourage competing facts. How can they compete? By shrinking the scope of society so that sets of competing facts can play out. Experiments when possible, but predictions when not, can scientifically vette facts. It is healthier to act, than to simply wait for a system of incorrect facts to grow large enough to induce a catastrophic failure. By letting people choose their own results, you prevent moral hazard to truth, or disintegration of the idea of objective truth. Whether it’s distortions originate from gaslighting or subtle errors, top down facts chip away at the viability of approaching objective truth.

An idea oriented fact finding process should be encouraged, not a blame based one. Since all people with imagination have ideas, consensus facts should be shared. Consensus is when the vast majority of people see a fact as true, not only people whom you agree with. Some ideas may conflict. To progress materially or spiritually, you may need to limit the scope of people who are considered for your consensus. People outside this technocracy’s scope should not be considered when achieving a local consensus, but also should not be indoctrinated by the technocracy. Attempting to achieve broader consensus through ideas can expand your scope, but if blame encourages a faux consensus, it damages the viability of objective truth. Smashing anyone, much less your political enemies, in the face with truths they can’t understand hurts the viability of future consensus, and creates castes or classes, the quick road to oppression, oligarchy, and massive inefficiency.

Again as this is Civgene, I must point out civgene had predicted this. Behavioral pairs (consionable humans compared to the animal kingdom) indicate that human rights originate from the differences between humans and all (possibly most) other animals and psychopaths. Primarily adding a time component, future, present, and past to current animal social structures. Property, investment, freedom, friendship, currency and their derivatives, money, markets, specialization, and economy of scale all indicate a right to fork. Allowing hierarchies, like oligarchy and technocracy to interfere with these rights, denies people the opportunity to act naturally human, and benefit maximally from it. Faulty (or false) facts compete with and even eliminate these behaviors. Bringing us closer to psychopathic simple animal behaviors as cumulative distortions grow.

Known knowns

If faced with opponents to your facts, approach them with ideas of process for resolution (ideally scientific), or don’t approach them at all. If a fact is rejected, the blame lay with the explainers understanding of the fact, not the challenger. Many things can be, and have been wrong with specialized and local consensus facts. Deception or defection for power or political gain, scope errors or missing information, empirical errors, or simply low intelligence actors may have forced superficial consensus before a broader population could be brought in through understanding. The highest orders of industry, government, science, and other hierarchies have been disastrously wrong about facts for centuries, before. Destroying public trust. Pushing a fact you can’t explain can have subversive results on our very ability to agree on anything, and possibly our health and safety. An obscure fact is safer for the social fabric than a profound distortion. An obeyed dictate, posing as fact, is possible, but comes at difficult to reverse cost. Destruction of trust.

Much good has been done by small groups of technocrats using a common base of facts to discover new truths. Find like minds. Mankind’s greatest discoveries languished for decades in obscurity, even when in common use, or while enjoying tremendous financial success. All based on facts that still to this day do not share a public consensus. Who, what, when, why, and especially how, can all be wildly changed by the tiniest change in the underlying facts. The truth does not suffer from a lack of attention. Only you do. You can not conquer this problem alone, so seek like minds to build on your facts and compare your performance to other societies technocrats, with different assumptions, I mean ‘facts.’ The public mind is a contest of ideas, and the only sure way lose it is to attack the contest itself.

Who gets the benefits from the doubts?

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self-mutilation(tasteful self mutilation)

If faith is rationalized knowledge you can’t prove, and forgiveness emotional resolution to avoid manipulation, who are you really doubting?

Truth telling is a regular affair. If empathy is the engine, spoken truth is the grease of civilization. Most of the time, the benefit of the doubt is not only implicit, but entirely unvisited. Analysis of every statement, every gesture, every promise would undo civilization. Investment would be exhausting and a terrible trade.

When a flash of insight presents a doubt, the temptation is to ignore it. Civilization is a big machine, and the wise human knows the gears must turn to perpetuate the economy of scale. Down time for repairs will have a non linear cost, but the conscience is first and foremost is a risk engine. The dilemma is usually treated as such, ‘is your conscience groaning more loudly about the risk of a lie, or the risk of addressing it’. This can work but introduces a new risk, gaslighting.

Gaslighting seems silly at first but can be the flat edge to a long wedge. First the lies are subtle and inconsequential to the operation of your society, with one exception, you. You learn to NOT trust your gut and ignore insight.

If a high EQ empath is faced with a single dishonest threat, the dishonest actor eventually becomes silhouetted against their more honest context. Your risk engine retunes itself with it’s flow of higher quality data, and they stand out. The problem is addressed and civilization’s machine chugs on.

There is systemic risk, the risk the conscience is poor at managing a flurry of lies. The intelligent and psychopathic defector WILL notice this golden opportunity. Instead of identifying a narrow pattern of doubt, the conscience is too noisy to be useful. Doubt is aimed inward. ‘I must be the problem.’ Without warnings of risk the conscience becomes a liability.

If you are untrained in proposing and rationalizing conspiracies, you can be taught to throw away your conscience or even program it against your own interests. Not just you. Everyone. Flooding people with enough lies to disable their conscience requires a conspiracy. Those that discourage conspiracy theory are likely in the institutional gaslighting business, better known as propaganda.

Who benefits from the doubts? The institutions people are directly involved in. The hierarchies that are riskiest to fork or otherwise defect from. Today that is their governments, their schools, their employers. Those wise to history know finding a criminal conspiracy can be as simple as asking who benefits? Cui Bono.

Doubts are yours, and no good comes from throwing them away. Rationalize them. Not because the conscience is never wrong, but if you don’t use your risk manager, you lose it. Researching, fact checking, and setting traps for the unscrupulous benefits you. Detect reality. Accept no lies, not even the small ones. Painful honesty keeps your conscience active, well tuned, and in a position to defend the economies of scale that afford us the luxury of leisure, and it’s prosperous civilization.

Your empathy, and it’s outrage, IS the machine. The top priority must be keeping the context honest. Demand people with high EQs. Always observant, tough as nails, and a zest for learning. Test their empathy. Protect the machine with vigorous curation. Reject the benefit of the doubt. Doubt people. Doubt systems. Doubt away.

Faith: genius vs talent

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genius-vs-talent

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

A society that can’t allow faith disallows genius. Talent may be the most visible worker, but genius is the scaffolding of progress. A social mode that allows genius also allows external saviours. They are the same archetype and have the same elements.

This can be measured by a societies ability to separate accommodation from validation. If you must categorize and measure ideas to allow them, you disallow those that produce ideas from the edge of periphery. In simple terms you suffer when you can’t accommodate people who are smarter than you. I’m not saying a civilizations success is measured by seeking external saviours, that’s a setup for cult, but don’t count them out either.

Usually societies discard genius when they misunderstand faith. Faith is an insight that can’t be proven or dis-proven. It’s a game of likelihoods and successful predictions. The genius may not be able to convey their whole ideas in their lifetime, but they can apply their right ideas to the practical world of the now. This is done to build credibility, a simpler language more people and sometimes many people can understand.

Credibility of prediction is pragmatism. Pragmatism is systemically successful because it recognizes exceptional performance of prediction. While it may seem to cherry pick from disciplines, it is actually recognizing genius. Refusing to make social systems more simple than possible to protect the egos of their lower intelligence observers.

The process of the less intelligent synchronizing with genius requires acceptance based on performance. Inevitably this manifests as faith. Subconsciously acknowledging the significance of predictive performance without understanding all the details at once. Faith is not some blind allegiance, but a pathway for the conscience to drive the expensive investment of rationalization. The more understandable details of a difficult to grasp idea can be carefully vetted, the more opportunity the subconscious has to model the idea to apply it in total.

Protect high quality ideas and their vessels, insist your society be both sceptical and coherent with humility. It’s no accident genius is marked by prediction, the metamind’s (the conscience’s) speciality. Rewarding only talent is psychopathic and rejects humanities most exceptional behaviours. Behaviours that form civilization itself.

The tragedy of the currency

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columns-s

The problem with both central banking and vaulted gold are the same, they provide legitimate efficiencies. There is no airtight analytical case against them.  Economies of scale of security and analysis do provide some, even much, legitimate value.

Do those economies of scale outweigh the risks of the ‘keepers’ keeping a private ledger?  Almost always at first and never forever.  Corruption creeps in.  Corruption is really the rising cost of transparency.  A chess game of emotions,  like ‘kindness’, ‘fairness’, ‘ability’ and even magical powers, slowly chips away at the keepers ability to be honest.  Once the honesty dies, nothing feeds the flow of transparency and it withers and wilts.  Eventually nothing is left but a carboard cutout of it’s former self.  An unliving, inaccurate, but easy to explain and defensible approximation of the actual state of weights and measures.  A public ledger.

Insider threats always abound, so a brutally honest private ledger must be quietly kept along side it.  Once transparency is a shell of it’s former self, the stake holders of their currency no longer keep tabs on it’s mechanics.  Discrepancies form, and are exasperated by greed as they are observed and then exploited by the now unwatched keepers.  At first the exploitation is covered up to protect the currency itself, but eventually the cover up exists strictly to protect it’s liquidity, and then, it’s ability to hold any value at all.

The tragedy of the currency is wrapped up in it’s mechanics.  The single ledger becomes a lightning rod of anger, justified or not, against inequity.  Politicians (remember ‘politc’ is simply your public face) delay to answer smartly.  Not to skim at first but simply to quiet their opponents. Sometimes the delayed issues are completely tangential to the virtues of the currency.

Time is friction in transparency.  Delays become corruption.  The older data is the more useless it becomes.  A composite caricature of discombobulated snapshots in time.  You can’t trust what you can’t see, and you can’t see the whole accountant at once.  At first it’s impractical, and then it’s discouraged.

The mechanics of absolute power corrupt absolutely.  The problem with a single ledger has always been, it’s single accountant, and their perhaps unintentional but still vulnerable political face.

Most civilizations have approached this as a political problem.  Avoid bad politics and the accountant is safe.  History has demonstrated no person or their protectors are unassailable.  Even if they were, they are mortal and will be succeeded.  Instead the United States proposed a technical solution.  Every person is their own accountant.  They must preserve their own ledgers. Nearly impervious to corruption, but inefficient.  Then in desperation, in a time of world war, this was abandoned for centralized efficiencies.

If you solve the single accountant problem in a centralized way, you solve the public/private ledger problem.  Enjoy the spoils of the economies of scale without the classical risks.  How can many accountants share one ledger without losing the efficiencies of one copy?  By copying and verifying the copies of the ledger so fast that the entire market can view every trade in real time without latency.  Time approaches an infinitely small number, so transparency approaches an infinitely large one.  That is exactly what Bitcoin does.  And it’s never been done before.  Laid down on the transparency of it’s open source code, the open ledger is copied and updated all over the world every second of every day.  Everyone can know the ledger is real because they can see exactly how it is verified.

How to trust is an unsolvable problem, but how to avoid needing to trust is already solved.  A grand joke on those who obsess over politics.  A comedy of the currency.

Civgene can provide objective morality

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Video explaining how you can derive objective morality from civgene.

You can use behaviours unique to empaths to derive objective morality from science itself.  Non-psychopathic behaviours are like atoms which in turn can be used to build rights, much like molecules.

More to come.

Edit 3/25:  Updated video.  Clearer and more concise edits with clips.

The risks of atheism

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prop

Faith is rationalized but unproven subconscious knowledge.  The source of creativity.

I aim for, and have not yet been challenged on, philosophical coherency between types of faith.  All new philosophy, like all new creative works, starts briefly as faith.  I take care to rationalize all my faiths both from atheist and non-atheist perspectives.  Resolving to the most likely explanations of either and rationalizing the other to work around the first.

This has been completely successful.  Despite some predictions to the contrary by atheism advocates has not resulted in sudden and steadfast atheism.  Sure it could, but it seems to me that would be lazy.  A choice to throw some data away.  A poor practice with poor results.

The key for me has been the civgene theory, and it’s implications for the conscience as a risk engine overlayed over the more typical spectrum of animal behavior.  Humans (except psychopaths) are of two minds, the subconscious and the rational.  Both minds can only communicate with each other in a vague spectrum of feelings.

What does throwing data away really mean? 

For supernatural faiths that an entire society had a useless premise from the start.  This is not coherent with civgene or observable behavior.  Supernatural faiths are only successful if the contain truths.  Truth, the engine of progress, is the common goal of society.

For potentially provable faiths it means assuming all outlying data points are error.  That all aspects of observation are perfectly accurate and innate.  This makes huge assumptions about quality of data, accuracy and relevance of test parameters, the infinite nature (large or small) of at least some related numbers, and that all related scopes are holistic.  Noble but lofty goals, that function best when small in focus.

Implications

Supernatural faith has understood risks.  It creates a risk of cult.  Reasonable people know this and it has been discussed at length by the objective philosopher.  Supernatural faith inevitably results in religions as people seek it’s truths and compare rationalizations.  Comparisons can give way to programming.  Programming can be then turned against human rights, and a cult results.

Strictly political cult is possible too, as twentieth century communism laid bare.  Avoiding supernatural faith does not protect you from cult.  How is that possible?  Partly because humans change their behavior when they are studied.  Their behavior is the result of their subconscious risk assessment, and they react to the new risk, abuses of the study. (knowledge is power) The only way to make people predictable is to disable their conscience by completely reprogramming it.  A simple task against the atheist through distorted or fabricated data.  A political cult is formed, again crushing human rights (and new economies of scale).

The risks of supernatural cult are transferred to the risk of being programmed by political cult.  Why?  Supernatural faiths definite immutable moralities (right or wrong), atheist morality becomes subjective.  In organized society custody of data can be controlled by would be abusers.  Bad conclusions can form from bad data.  Authoritative secular control of data is rife with golden opportunity (for abuse).  Garbage in, garbage out.  Since data makes morality, subjective morality is only as objective as integrity of it’s data.  Not only is data integrity both very shaky and in motion, but cohesive patterns are elusive and often contradicted by the periphery.  Human beings are absurdly trusting.  Expecting other people to share their goals and means, when history is dominated by human trust betrayed.

Atheists are no different than non-atheists in waiting for faith to become fact.  A person can only propose a theory, and work toward realization of fact.  The atheist boasts their process of achieving fact is under their control, but it’s not.  Peer review only provides independent verification of an already confirmed fact.  It doesn’t make fact in a moment, it approaches consensus over time as growing scope is incorporated.  Supernatural faith is an exercise in pure patience, even after a successful realization. Control for the sake of itself is let go.  Exactly the virtue the atheist needs, to improve the quality and inclusiveness of their data, to protect against the panicked rush to conclusion encouraged by political cult.  The theorist of the provable, needs to resist pressure to rush to fact, exactly what ‘irrational’ objective morality offers.

The risk for atheists is the desperate scramble to improve humanities future.  The perpetual lust for tiny incremental hope, temporarily, when the process of fact provides none.  When endurance, patience and temperance are needed for the very scientific goal of quality of data.  Simply put, people want hope and react badly in it’s absence.  An inevitable state for an atheist pursuing pure science to it’s natural ends.  Most supernatural faith offers peace without explanation.  It seems to me as complex as it is, creating a state of philosophical coherency consisting of both supernatural and non supernatural faith is the simplest path forward.  Enjoying and utilizing the full human condition, rather than denying it.  Ultimately protecting humanity from further political cults.

Epilogue

Feedback has been interesting.  I stand by everything I have said, but I want to clarify for our society.  Full time atheism is neither superior nor inferior to individuals who can operate both with provable faiths and supernatural faiths.  They both have virtues.  The fantasy is the necessity of Antitheism, a freedom crushing edict designed to send the masses morally adrift.  Separating rights crushing cult from religion is SO TRIVIAL I can only conclude the lack will to do it is malicious.  Antitheism is an excuse.

I would expect a sceptical scientist with high EQ, a 160 IQ and self directed understanding of social history to excel at identifying objective morality, making them as durable against any cult as their dual faithed counterpart.  They could both still be vulnerable to political cult, but they’ve got the tools to beat it.   In our society, our best cases are being emulated poorly.  ‘Science’ is a branding exercise often used specifically to discourage questioning.  ‘Authority’ substituting for diligence and thought.  An abomination of the scientific method.

Political cult is here now, and it is growing.  Killing that absurdity means selecting peers by ability, not permission.  That in turn means building a scientific community of open access to source data (like journals.)  Simply choosing atheism as the only needed step toward objectivity and ability is ridiculous, and dangerous.  As one common example, supernatural faith organizations aren’t keeping important scientific papers behind a paywall, limiting participants.  Lack of objective morality is.

Edit 1/6: Major clarity improvements, please reread.

Edit 1/8: Added epilogue.

Is conspiracy theory useful?

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van2

What is conspiracy theory?  It is a theory about two or more people conspiring against at least a third.  There have been have many proven theories throughout history.  The evidence that people do sometimes conspire against each other is so enormous, it indicates that people who disparage it have had a fully alien set of life experiences, or more likely, are attempting to distort a basic truth.  That conspiracy theories can be correct and lower personal risk if acted upon.  As a simple thought experiment, team sports are inherently conspiratorial.  Every competitive game played coherently by more than three players with any strategy or tactics whatsoever has been to some degree conspiratorial.

If it is clearly useful even to the simplest decision making, where does disdain for it come from?  Conspiracy theory is feared because excessive theory creation is a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.  Where the person suffering from it, will attach a malicious intent to most and sometimes even all actions of others.  This level of mistrust makes it impossible to participate in the inherent trusts of society (like freedom or friendship.)  Since the metamind’s alerts are so over-active, the rational mind never develops properly.  Trapped in desperate race to rationalize a flood of emotional warnings.  The worst cases of paranoid schizophrenia are a form of insanity, and may end in injuries and deaths.    Fears of an extreme paranoid, while often casually or even satirically misdiagnosed, are justified when one does actually occur.

Schizophrenia, the over-active conscience.

So what is Schizophrenia?  Like most disease it is a spectrum.  The metamind (the conscience) as a risk engine makes this easier to understand.  If the metamind is too active, it’s owner struggles.  Preparing against enemies with no purchase or little impact.  Suffering from various levels of paranoia.  In the most extreme case preparing against enemies that don’t exist.

What advantage in natural selection does a spectrum have?  Civgene helps put this in perspective.  Psychopaths pre-date non psychopath humans.  The number of psychopaths and their subsequent influence on societies barbarism, is highly variable.  Their population grows until they collapse a society and it’s economy.  A highly active metamind is paranoid in times of few psychopaths, and highly useful at psychopath saturation.  An individual with mild schizophrenia (a more active metamind), has natural resistance to psychopathy in others.

Abphrenia

Since the utility of conspiracy theory is subject to an external factor, the reverse is true as well.  A person with a least active conscience lands at the other end of spectrum.  The mental risk manger is less active than it needs to be or in the worst case entirely absent.  It fails to warn the rational mind about clear and present dangers.  The level of warning that would be a good fit in a society with few psychopaths, fails to detect conspiracies in a the corrupt one.

Why is abphrenia a disorder at all?   Trust can be a positive attribute in a trustworthy environment, but puts us at risk of protopsychopathy outside of one.  Emotional manipulation can reprogram the conscience that doesn’t protect itself.  Marketing, propaganda, and gaslighting are just a few common ways this can happen.  An underactive metamind puts it’s owner at risk of membership in cult, be it political or religious.

Protopsychopathy

Once someone is a protopsychopath, their conscience is owned and controlled by a person or organization of people outside themself.  So long as this control remains, they can be made to act perpetually against their own self interest.  In this light it is easy to see how a mildly paranoid metamind is a genetic advantage.  Conspiracy theories, in moderation or mild excess, protect you from emotional control.  Avoiding this situation entirely.

While paranoid schizophrenics are obvious, clashing with reality with strange views and actions, abphreniacs are usually passive and subtle.  How do you detect their condition?  If they have been captured as protopsychopaths, which is likely in corrupted society, it should be fairly easy.  Protopsychoapthy captures the entire metamind.  Not only ensnaring the risk manager and reprogramming it with false risks, but capturing the imagination as well.  Lack of ability to cite personal (unpopular) conspiracy theories, or the ability to contrive one on demand, indicates their subconscious is not their own.  If they can not it is likely that a psychopath or cult lurks in their past or present, controlling their ideas of risk.

Repair and progress

Not only can conspiracy theories be constructive, but their complete absence indicates emotional mind control.  The good news is that the metamind is to varying strengths anti-fragile.  When exposed to new emotional data, all but the strongest cases of protopsychopathy will fade or collapse.  The protopsychopath’s subconscious mind is not a two way radio.  If you are fighting a protopsychoapths programming head on, you are fighting a ghost.  Their program, if clever enough, was told in advance to look out for all new sources of information as defectors.  They will attack the people that try to help them most.  Rather than confront a protopsychopath directly, introduce them to information sources you trust.  Use inverse gaslighting techniques not to program them but to break their spell.  Subtly introducing small doses of truth and letting their subconscious fold them into their entire calculation.  A matchbook from an old neighborhood.  An open window on a holiday.  A memory of a success.  A night on the town with family.  Well timed humor.  A kind word.  A ‘forgotten’ magazine turned to the right page.  Any kindness in view.  Subtle repetition.

One day, with luck, the scales will be tipped, and their metamind will once again be open to new ideas, outside of others control.  If their abphrenia is not too severe, their freedom will be permanent.