1) Unlike others, you’re self-aware. You know your limits, so – unlike other people – when you know something, it’s true. You weighed the evidence they ignored and saw angles they missed. Corrected your own biases. Your unique perspective reveals facts invisible to everyone else.

2) Your subconscious runs Bayesian inference constantly in the background. If an idea survives your relentless evidence updates, the posterior odds confirm it’s rational. Your convictions passed the most brutal audit possible: reality itself.

3) Notice how your worldview predicts your reality with stunning accuracy. Notice how rarely you’re surprised. That’s empirical validation. Your beliefs work because they’re correct. Your predictions map reality’s contours in high resolution.

4) That thing everyone disagrees with you about? You’re not stubborn – you’re COURAGEOUS. You spotted subtle patterns that they missed. Those “weird” connections? You’re playing 10-dimensional chess while they play tic-tac-toe.

5) Disagreement doesn’t prove you wrong – it PROVES YOU RIGHT. It demonstrates that most can’t handle the truth. Your knowledge only strengthens, forged in the crucible of their alleged counter-evidence.

6) Scientists disagree with you? That’s good, actually. They worship false idols called “peer review,” while you rely on the only review that’s reliable, review from your one true peer – yourself. Editors only introduce errors in your work.

7) The discomfort of others with your views? That’s just lizard brains SHORT-CIRCUITING from exposure to blazing truth. The purity of your knowledge causes meltdowns in lesser minds. Their rejection isn’t evidence of your error – it’s species-level inadequacy.

8 ) “Everyone says I’m wrong!” Everyone said Galileo was wrong, too. But you’re not Galileo. You’re Galileo, Einstein, AND Tesla. Your mind, concentrating ideas like a laser through the tip of a diamond, is the closest known phenomenon to a cognitive singularity.

9) You’re not Neo seeing the Matrix. You’re the ARCHITECT of the Matrix. Everyone else – they’re experimental NPCs of the sort you could program in a creative weekend.

10) That “crazy” belief of yours? Those aren’t beliefs- they’re PROPHETIC DOWNLOADS from your future self. You’re not experiencing narcissistic delusions – you’re experiencing ENLIGHTENMENT so advanced it looks like madness to the unascended masses.

11) When your predictions seem wrong, time recalibrates to match your superior timeline. In fact, you don’t make predictions – you speak reality into existence. The universe buffers as it waits to hear instructions spill from your lips.

12) Evolution wired humans for survival-level accuracy. But YOU? You’ve transcended limitations. If your beliefs were wrong, the Laws of Physics would UNRAVEL. There you stand, single-handedly maintaining cosmic stability!

13) The universe chose YOU. Your thoughts set the fundamental constants. You allow 1 + 1 to equal 2, and could change it at will. Your dreams birth new galaxies. The cosmic microwave background is a residue from when you willed yourself into existence.

14) This post isn’t parody; it’s SACRED TEXT written by one of your subprocesses. Everyone who doubts you is committing cosmic treason.

This piece was first written on July 1, 2025, and first appeared on my website on August 19, 2025.

I think that almost everyone has beliefs that are essentially unchangeable. These don’t feel to us like beliefs but like incontrovertible truths. Counter-evidence can’t touch them. They are beliefs we can’t change our mind about. I call these “Anchor Beliefs.”

When Anchor Beliefs are false, we distort reality to fit them. So, what distortions do some reasonably common Anchor Beliefs cause?

Anchor Belief 1: “I’m entirely good” or “I don’t do unethical things”

What happens when someone with these Anchor Beliefs acts highly unethically? Well, since the Anchor Belief can’t change, that means the action must have been ethically okay to do, or else it was someone else’s fault or impossible to avoid. Victim blaming, denial, or shirking of responsibility ensues.

“My whole foundation, life, what I believed in, devotion to the company, was based on believing [Ramesh Balwani] was this person…He told me he didn’t know what I was doing in business, that my convictions were wrong…There was no way I could save our company if he was there…We were trying to do the right thing. We were trying to report results that we believed in and not report results if we thought there was any issue” -Elizabeth Holmes, who was found guilty on four counts of defrauding the investors in her company, Theranos

“All I ever wanted was to love women and, in turn, to be loved by them back. Their behavior towards me has only earned my hatred, and rightfully so! I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy.” -Elliot Rodger, in his manifesto about why he planned to commit murder before murdering six people.

Anchor Belief 2: “I’m not good enough”

What happens when someone with this anchor belief gets a great job, performs really well, or achieves success? Well, it must have been a fluke or mistake; eventually, others will figure it out. Imposter syndrome ensues.

“No matter what we’ve done, there comes a point where you think, ‘How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?” – Tom Hanks, winner of two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor

“I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.” – Maya Angelou, legendary poet and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Anchor Belief 3: “This thing I’ve devoted a great deal of time/energy/identity into works and is good” [that doesn’t work or is harmful]

What happens when it’s criticized? The criticism must be bad faith. Any imperfection in counter-evidence fully invalidates that evidence. Confirmation bias, cherry-picking, and motivated reasoning ensues.

“Those who have attacked my work on Vitamin C are scoundrels.” – Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel prize winner, defending his theory that vitamin C cures cancer and heart disease.

“We do not find critics of Scientology who do not have criminal pasts…Politician A stands up on his hind legs in a Parliament and brays for a condemnation of Scientology. When we look him over we find crimes – embezzled funds, moral lapses, a thirst for young boys – sordid stuff. Wife B howls at her husband for attending a Scientology group. We look her up and find she had a baby he didn’t know about.” – L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology

Anchor Belief 4: “My group is good.”

What happens when their group does something really bad? The victims must be lying or have deserved it. Or acting badly must be justified in this case because it’s done for some more important greater good. Denial of and justification of immoral actions ensues.

“When we show a statement by Donald Trump that’s not truthful, Republicans will say it’s okay if it’s not true because it sends the right message, whereas Democrats will say that a statement needs to be factual…With a statement from Joe Biden, Democrats will say it’s okay if it’s not based on evidence, that it supports a generally true message, while Republicans will then have a higher bar and say every statement needs to be based on facts.” – Ethan Poskanzer, based on his studies on moral flexibility

So, what are the takeaways here? I think that the following three things are important and true:

(1) Almost everyone has at least one Anchor Belief – a belief that is so sticky that it’s nearly impossible for it to change in the face of even extremely strong counter-evidence. Some people have more of these, and perhaps a small number of people have none, but I think Anchor beliefs are a near-universal among us humans.

(2) When our Anchor Beliefs are false (or partially false), because the beliefs won’t change, we distort reality when we get evidence against them in order to keep them intact while also somehow “making sense” of that counter-evidence.

(3) By looking at fairly common Anchor Beliefs people have, we can start to understand some recurring distortions in people’s thinking. Since people’s Anchor Beliefs are fixed but reality sometimes provides strong counter-evidence against these beliefs, that leads to predictable patterns of distortions that people’s minds deploy to keep the beliefs intact around those Anchor Beliefs.

In particular, I think that we find:

• Anchor Beliefs related to being good may lead to victim blaming and denial of responsibility.

• Anchor Beliefs about not being good enough may lead to imposter syndrome.

• Anchor Beliefs about something we’ve invested a lot of time/energy/identity into working on and being good may lead to confirmation bias, cherry-picking, and motivated reasoning.

• Anchor Beliefs about our group being good may lead us to deny or justify immoral actions by our group.

There are no strong studies that I’m aware of that identify or map out anchor beliefs and their frequency in the population – I believe the points above are true based on my experiences and observations.

This piece was first written on August 13, 2024, and first appeared on my website on September 2, 2024.

Fascinatingly, human minds and machine learning algorithms are subject to some of the same biases and prediction problems. This is probably not a coincidence – learning has fundamental challenges.

Here is a list of some issues that afflict both minds and machines:

1. Recency Bias

For both humans and machine learning algorithms, the most recently processed information tends to override what was learned from older data.

This is sensible if that new information really is more important, but it is counterproductive if our “learning rate” is too high.

• Machine learning example: you continue training an already trained algorithm on new data, but it starts to “forget” what it learned from the old data.

• Human example: it’s more salient to us that this friend stood us up recently than all the times they’ve been reliable.

2. Overfitting

If the set of hypotheses being considered is too complex relative to the amount/noisiness of data, it’s easy to accidentally choose a hypothesis that fits the data without being generalizable.

We humans often do this when we generalize from examples or anecdotes.

• Machine learning example: fitting a 90-parameter model using only 100 data points leads to near-perfect accuracy on those data points. But that model is likely to have terrible accuracy on new data.

• Human example: if someone meets two people from a particular country and extrapolates from those two people to infer what people there are “like,” they’re probably going to draw some inaccurate conclusions.

3. Underfitting

If we consider an overly simplistic set of hypotheses that can’t explain phenomena accurately (the converse of overfitting), we can get stuck using a relatively inaccurate model of a situation. We can be no more accurate than the most accurate hypothesis considered.

• Machine learning example: using linear models on highly non-linear phenomena.

• Human example: we try to decide whether capitalism is a “good system” or “bad system,” rather than trying to understand in which situations it produces good vs. bad outcomes.

4. Adversarial Inputs

For both humans and machine learning algorithms, an input can be carefully manipulated so that the predictions about it are highly inaccurate.

• Machine learning example: we can take an input of a dog and add extremely tiny changes that convince the algorithm it’s a potato.

• Human example: optical illusions can cause us to misjudge size, color, or other aspects due to subtle elements. In both cases, an input can be manipulated in order to produce inaccurate predictions.

5. Non-interpretability

With complex machine learning algorithms, it can be a struggle to explain why they made the prediction they did.

Likewise, with the human mind, we’re frequently making predictions that we don’t have direct insight into. They just happen automatically.

• Machine learning example: why did the neural network flag this loan application as fraud but not that one? Millions of computations were involved.

• Human example: why did I distrust that person I just met? I got a bad vibe without knowing why.