The Clear Pill

Moldbug is back, writing under his birth name in The American Mind. I decided to jump into his series opener titled The Clear Pill, Part 1 of 5: The Four-Stroke Regime.

After an introduction he begins his section called Take The Clear Pill:

Here is one way to check out any idea you don’t want to believe: assume it’s true, then build a new reality around that axiom. Once you fail, you get to say: I can’t see how this could be true.

What purpose would this serve? Not seeing how something could be true is not the same as something not being true. This approach has the interesting characteristic of discarding the underpinnings of both science and religion simultaneously: if you can't imagine it, it doesn't exist. It's the same kind of logic that we constantly see the mainstream astrophysics community engage in. Since they can't imagine a comprehensive alternative theory of the universe that resolves all the contradictions of the current model, they assume none must exist.

I don’t want to believe the CIA did 9/11. I try to build a reality in which it did. I fail spectacularly. I go back to believing it was an al-Qaeda conspiracy.

What is the utility of this approach? He doesn't want to believe that the CIA did 9/11, fails to convince himself, and then goes on believing the default version. How often are people able to convince themselves of something they don't want to believe in? Very rarely. Does he know of Operation Mockingbird, or that the CIA is now engaged in its second round of coup against the elected president? Knowing those things, it is no great mental feat to imagine that the CIA could have been involved in a domestic terror attack intended to wrangle public support for renewed imperial vigor.

I don’t want to believe OJ is guilty. I assume he’s innocent, then look for the real killers. But I can’t even imagine them.

Try imagining his son. This example is even worse. It's strange that he could not even provide convincing examples for his clear pill strategy. (I'm fairly sure it isn't all meant in jest.) His line of reasoning would not hold up in a court of law. Under it, OJ is convicted. Why, because he was accused? Under the clear pill, the accused is presumed to be guilty. Well, that would be a problem.

This integrity check is literally failsafe. It can’t brainwash you into random Internet nonsense. If you don’t see a hole in the dome, you stay in your present reality. Your failure is a contrapositive proof that either you were right, or your imagination was weak. Either way, time for another steak.

It's literally failprone. Supposedly the benefit is that you cannot be easily recruited into every other zany theory you encounter on the internet. Well, sometimes those zany theories are correct. Is it acceptable to reject them because "your imagination was weak," or you were ignorant, or the facts were censored, or they weren't but you were too lazy to find them? Even worse, it assumes that we are starting from a position of sanity. Why is the default position that OJ was the murderer...because some racist cops said he was? Or, because the media made a grand spectacle of it, starting with the live aerial coverage of the infamous white bronco chase scene and continuing on into live courtroom coverage, turning the case into the first reality TV extravaganza. "Staying in your present reality" means believing what the mass media told you to believe.

The same applies to 9/11. Why does he believe it was an al-Qaeda conspiracy to begin with, because that's what the nightly news was reporting? Did the nightly news happen to mention that the CIA's Bin Laden confession tapes were blatant forgeries? After 9/11, we were told to Never Forget. Except regarding Building 7 - that we are supposed to forget.

And your success—remains yours.

Unless it was wrong. It is a common occurrence to change your mind about something, only to realize later that you should have stuck to your initial convictions. Granted, I believe that working towards a belief you want to disprove is more likely to be correct than working to support beliefs you already hold. It's the reason scientists are supposed to work to disprove their own theories. It's the reason I feel very confident in my arguments against modern cosmology and genetic evolution, which resulted from examination of the evidence, rather than an a priori belief against the consensus opinion. Still, that is not the same as saying it's failsafe.

Moldbug continues on to describe ruling systems as espousing one or more standard stories. The analysis is compelling, and the faulty clear-pill approach does not get in the way. I presume he is setting the arc up to resolve in the 5th part of the series, but because the premise is so far off, I'd expect to see some faulty conclusions at that time.