Sometimes it makes sense to believe "Hyperreal Falsehoods" - falsehoods that are more true than the truth.

How can a falsehood be more true than the truth? How can it be rational to believe something that's not true?

Consider Bostrom's dictatorless dystopia.

Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill them.

Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.

So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on.

#Rationality fails in these Dictatorless Dystopia equilibria. Minds whose maps reflect the territory get trapped.

Actual (normie) humans might escape the dictatorless dystopia though, via motivated reasoning.

𝘋𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘺𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯? 𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘨𝘦𝘵 40 𝘩𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯!

The motivated-reasoining-normies start breaking the rules of Dictatorless Dystopia. A few get killed. But they are celebrated, and more are recruited to the cause. They start fighting back. Their consensus becomes stronger than that of the enforcers.

Birtherism, QAnon etc are hyperreal falsehoods.

I won't elaborate on which dystopias they are designed to escape, but I think you get the idea.

Hyperreal falsehoods are dangerous because they work for reasons that are hard to understand and whether they work or fail is very hard to predict.

The point is that #rationalists have to understand that deviations from map-territory epistemology aren't random. They're sort of ecological/anti-inductive.

Political irrationality is well-adapted to zero-sum political group warfare, or at least it used to be.

(We live in an environment with options for positive sum interactions though, so the well-adapted irrationality might actually not be well-adapted any more - it might be better to just find people who want to play positive sum games)

You can even imagine that in a dictatorless dystopia, some people might do research into game theory and rationally work out how we could break free, or perhaps come up with some other technical solution.

But such rational freedom fighters would get censored by the system.

In the end it might be people irrationally believing that the weapons didn't kill you but instead sent you to heaven who succeeded in breaking free of it.

You just have to understand that this might be the way things work; the irrational beliefs of others might be functional.