When people are in a situation where they’re as rewarded for doing an easier, fake version of something as they are for doing the real, valuable version, you’ll usually find that most of the activity is fake.

There are two types of “fake” activity in the way I’m using the word:

(1) Activity that doesn’t achieve anything useful at all.

Example: a treatment that claims to cure a disease but doesn’t actually help the patients who use it.

(2) Activity that claims (and is widely believed to be) about X but is really about Y.

Example: the FDA says that it won’t approve some European sunscreens because of a lack of sufficient safety data. Some people (including my dermatologist!) claim – and I don’t know whether they are right – that the real reason is that the FDA doesn’t want the difficult challenge of standing up to entrenched sunscreen interests that would lose out from allowing these newer sunscreens.

This theory can be further extended to Delusional Replica Theory:

Most (but not all) of those doing the fake activity won’t really believe they are producing B.S. and will find arguments (to convince themselves and others) for why their activity isn’t fake. However, on some level, they may still have doubts about the authenticity of what they’re doing.

Here are a few snarky applications of Delusional Replica Theory:

1. Some major parts of the education sector ignore the science of learning and don’t seem to have figured out what the goals of education should be. Yet you don’t need to teach valuable skills/information to have a successful school or to be a successful teacher.

(Hint: the goals shouldn’t be to memorize things that you are bound to soon forget, nor should they be to give mostly useless knowledge in exchange for a decade of debt.)

2. A substantial portion of the crypto industry fails to provide the value claimed. Yet people buy anyway.

(Why have a regular company with a regular database when a blockchain achieves the same thing much less effectively?)

3. Some parts of the finance industry offer negative value services. Yet people buy them because they mistake them for value-added services.

(Want a loan for a product that won’t make your life any better, an extremely risky stock option you don’t understand, or an expensive way to invest in the stock market?)

4. Many multi-level marketing (MLM) companies extract money from their own contractors. But they manage to get numerous people to sign up by showing examples of the few who have made lots of money and by frequent allusions to how their offerings can help you achieve your dreams.

(Usually, people who work for a company get paid by the company, not the other way around! For most MLM companies, a shockingly low percentage of those involved make a decent amount of money.)

5. Many supplement companies provide pills that don’t do what they claim and sometimes that don’t even contain the dosages or ingredients they claim. But they manage to sell them anyway since it’s hard to tell if a supplement is working.

(Are you in the market for a slightly dangerous placebo?)

6. A non-negligible percent of social science can’t seem to be replicated using the same study design on a similar population. But since reviewers don’t know that a result is not going to be replicable, unreplicable results still get published. 

(I estimate this at ~40% of papers in top journals.)

I’d be interested to know: what is a real-world example you’ve seen where Replica Theory may apply? That is, what’s an area where you think much of the activity is fake due to people being rewarded for doing a fake, easier version of activity as much as they are rewarded for doing the real thing?

This essay was first written on October 27, 2021, and first appeared on this site on February 18, 2022.

1: Start to think that one ideology you like – which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements – might be the only valid perspective.

2: Surround yourself with believers until you’re convinced that your view is common and normal.

3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more harshly than you feel is fair in order to prove that you are one of the good guys.

4: Since challenging the ideology is punished, pretend to believe more than you really do – contributing to the sense that almost everyone else has no doubts – in a self-reinforcing cycle.

5: Assume that since your view is obviously correct, normal, and morally good, those who strongly oppose your view are bad people.

6: Since you are good and they are bad, conclude that you, as the good guys, should try to destroy them (figuratively, or in extreme cases, literally).

7: But how can you tell who is bad? Decide that a set of beliefs that sound similar to the bad people’s beliefs are off-limits. Anyone who believes them is probably bad. In those cases, humane treatment is no longer necessary.

8: Even just spending too much time with one of the bad people, or speaking well of them, is morally suspect. Why would you do that if you weren’t bad too?

9: Unfortunately, some true beliefs were accidentally put on the “bad” side of the good/bad dividing line. Now there are true things that you would become a bad person for believing.

10: Because of that, you and your group must avoid looking at reality too closely, lest you become bad too.

11: If you start to notice something true that you’re not allowed to believe, look away quickly or contort reality to make it seem different than it is.

12: Intensify your self-delusion and your punishment of non-believers so that you can make sure that still more people in your group will delude themselves out of fear.

13: Start teaching children (before they are old enough to think for themselves) that your belief system is the only correct one, perpetuating the system for future generations.

14: Congratulations! You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world. Your mostly good ideology has eaten itself and has become more bad than good.

This has happened many times throughout history, and it will happen many more times. Watch out for this pattern so that you (and the people you love) don’t end up as “true believers” who do harm by accident.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 29, 2022.

Some classes that I might want to include are:

Thrive: staying happy and healthy.

This could include: 

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy skills training (to help ward off depression and anxiety)
• Emotional control strategies from dialectical behavioral therapy
• Behavioral activation strategies for working around self-defeating behaviors
• Problem-solving skills applied in realistic simulations of difficult situations
• Mindfulness/meditation training
• Learning the most robust and useful psychological findings on human happiness and mental health
• Practice noticing, identifying, interpreting, expressing emotions, savoring, gratitude, self-compassion, assertiveness
• The most robust and useful findings related to staying physically healthy (including how to exercise well and safely)
• How to manage disappointment and recover from failure (including actually failing and dealing with it), learning to set expectations

Disagree: how to figure out the truth.

This could include:

• The rules of making valid and evidence-based arguments rather than using rhetoric
• Practice learning from the other side as well as helping the other side see the truth of your perspective
• Material involving logic, philosophical argument, rhetorical fallacies, researching the different sides on an issue and forming a synthesis

Learn: becoming your own teacher. 

This could include:

• Principles of learning new information 
• How to research efficiently and remember what you learn (with opportunities to apply these skills to learn challenging topics)
• After teaching themselves the subject, they would distill the material, and then teach the most critical parts to their classmates, (with teachers available to help when they get stuck during the learning process)

Communicate: creating and maintaining good relationships. 

This could include: 

• Social skills theory and practice with simulations
• Public speaking principles with opportunities to practice
• Psychological theories on good relationships 
• Basics of fashion theory
• How to start conversations 
• How to handle controversial conversation topics
• How to deal with feelings of social anxiety
• How to give compliments
• How to talk to someone who is upset
• How to express yourself effectively when you are upset
• How to be vulnerable
• How to mediate between others
• How to give actively constructive responses
• Practice in simulations considering another’s perspective
• Learning empathy and model other people and their needs
• Understanding the destructive social actions of others

Help: doing good for others. 

This could include:

• Moral philosophy (including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and rights theory)
• Findings of experimental psychology, as demonstrated empirically, related to human morality
• Psychology of disgust
• Compassion meditation
• Discussions of the major controversial ethical topics and why one might fall on each side of them
• Altruistic assignments (e.g., students find ways to practice doing good both in and out of school)
• Famous experiments like the Milgram experiment and Jonathan Haidt’s ethics rationalization experiments
• Discussions on the effectiveness of doing good (e.g., the “happy coincidence” that doing good for others helps yourself)

Understand: why the world is the way it is.

This could include:

• Cosmology
• Evolutionary theory
• Tribal peoples
• Early history
• Industrial revolution
• Modern history
• Group Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Macroeconomics

Succeed: understanding and achieving your goals. 

This could include:

• An exploration of personal values and their bases 
• Effective goal setting
• Organizational skills
• Productivity techniques
• How to choose a career, 
• Components of success in practice (such as, consciousness, stick-with-it-ness, aiming at the right things, knowing what you want, getting help from others, meaning in work, desire for excellence, sense of self-efficacy) 
• Techniques for faster skill acquisition (such as always working at the edge of your ability and getting rapid feedback)
• Personal finance
• How to consciously design your environment for success

Live: important basic life skills. 

This could include:

• Healthy cooking
• Personal finance (e.g., investment, compounding, credit cards, interest, taxes, insurance, saving, and budgeting)
• Fixing common things that break
• Basic first aid and how to handle the most common medical problems

Decide: making good choices in an uncertain world.

This could include:

• Formulas for mean, median, standard deviation, and expected value
• Principles of good decision making and decision making biases
• The nature and function of beliefs (e.g., the idea that all beliefs have uncertainty, the idea that our own believing is merely evidence for something being true, the problem with all or nothing thinking, conditional expectation, correlation)
• Principles of probability (e.g., the many fallacies related to probabilities such as correlation not implying causation, opportunity cost, marginal thinking, Simpson’s paradox, rules of thumbs for making more accurate predictions, calibration training practice with both probabilities and confidence intervals, nudges, defaults, the paradox of choice, bayesian thinking applied to real-world examples of the sort that kids would care about and encounter regularly)
• Randomization
• Experiments
• The scientific method
• Practice developing hypotheses and testing them
• Working with basic data

Create: the joy of making new things. 

This could include:

• The students create meaningful things that they’ve envisioned while learning and consistently practicing the relevant skills to execute their ideas. 
• Essay writing
• Carpentry
• Robotics
• Fiction writing
• Prototyping
• Design
• Music
• Art (e.g., sculpture)
• Software
• Game making
• Theater/Performance
• Public speaking
• Film

• Making Observations
• Formulating Theories
• Making Predictions
• Testing Predictions
• Developing Happiness

Making Observations could include exercises where students make and record observations about the physical world, biological world, social world, political world, cultural world, etc. The tools students would learn about and employ could include stop watches and rocks to study how gravity works, telescopes to study the stars, microscopes to analyze blood, newspapers to study the government, and televisions to examine culture. Students would learn to operate these tools, pay attention, record, summarize, categorize, explain and simplify.

In Formulating Theories, students could learn about equations, probability, data, evidence, induction and deduction. They could study how various physical, psychological, economic, literary, musical and artistic theories arose. And they could be asked to develop their own theories about art, literature, culture, physical phenomena, psychological facts, and so on.

The subject Making Predictions would involve the study of many of the powerful theories from physics, economics, chemistry, and psychology, and students would learn to use each of these theories to make predictions about what one should expect to see.

In the study of Testing Predictions, students could learn about the scientific method, falsification, statistics, markets, computer prediction algorithms, the prediction algorithms of the brain, and randomized controlled trials. They could also learn how to do thorough research in order to be able confirm or disconfirm their future predictions based on knowledge gathered by others.

For Cultivating Happiness, there would be an emphasis on art appreciation, literature appreciation, food criticism, movie criticism, creative writing, art creation, meditation, exercise, health, positive psychology, cognitive therapy, etc. all directed towards learning how to increase pleasure, enjoyment and fulfillment as well as reduce misery. This could also involve a study of what makes humans happy and what makes them unhappy, which could lead to discussions of governmental systems, psychology, sociology, ethics, history, etc.

New ways of carving up knowledge can give us new ways of thinking about education.