Inferring to adversariality
Sun Tzu said “All warfare is based on deception”. The best war, hence, is the one the enemy doesn’t even know is being fought. Thus, inimical action often hides. (Making it harder to create a Schelling point to coordinate against it). Therefore, it must be inferred to.
There are heuristics that help in making these inferences.
E.g.: ““Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”.
E.g.: “Quo vadis?” which is Latin for “Who benefits?”
Imagination
The faculty that allows you to merge. Be it with its own creations, the dream world, VR, a carl, a thought, a concept, an agent.
Ideology
A game in the form of an IRL VR.
Created by Sociopaths, Clueless, Losers to organize society through broad-scale Coordination.
Works exactly as games do: orients you by giving you a simplified version of reality that tells you without any ambiguity what’s good, what’s bad, who you are, and what your purpose is.
The result of an Evolutionary search process. (Groups that chanced upon ideology as a means of coordination conquered those who didn’t.) in
E.g.: The “money game”, the “work game”, “Normalcy”, etc. (It is because money is a game that you can just print money, it is because jobs are a game that you can just print jobs [“bullshit jobs”], etc.)
E.g.: “You are a ea/rat/capitalist/proletarian, and what is good is to maximize utilons/qalys/shareholder value/proletariat revolutions”
Icons
Something that stands for something else, but isn’t the thing it stands for.
E.g.: The term “Andrew Tate” stands, at this point in time, for two distinct things: the “Andrew Tate” character, or persona, in the public imagination and the man named “Emory Andrew Tate III”.
Icon arbitrage
Exploiting the conflation between an icon and what that thing is an icon for. Frequently because the thing it’s an icon for doesn’t scale, and the icon does.
Influencers, musicians, and politicians - basically anyone who’s “famous” - exploit the parasocial relationships people have to them.
Very much a double-edged sword: Donald John Trump used “Donald Trump” to get elected as President of the United States, but then became the most hated man on Earth. Emory Andrew Tate III used “Andrew Tate” to get rich and then got thrown into Romanian jail. Streamers rely on their icon to form parasocial relationships and get money, but now have AI-generated porn of their icons.
Hyperstition
A special instance of social reality where people come to believe something will happen, act in accordance to that belief, and their acting thus causes it.