Predictions are Overrated

2,358 words

The people of the ancient Mediterranean had a peculiar belief. They believed that malodorous air, or bad air, was a cause of a particular disease which, owing to its origins, they named malaria. This was called the miasma theory of disease. Guided by this theory, they sought to build their cities away from sources of bad air, such as swamps and other bodies of stagnant, foul-smelling water. In doing so, they successfully avoided large-scale malarial infection.

The European civilization which followed the Mediterranean likewise held this belief. This led to the renovation of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, giving us the now-familiar vistas of the broad boulevards which cities the world over emulate. Ignaz Semmelweis’ introduction of hygiene protocols in hospitals were in part informed by miasma theory (he believed that odorous particles emanating from cadavers, transferred by the unwashed hands of doctors and medical students, were causing puerperal fever in birthing mothers). Nor were the ancient Mediterraneans and nineteenth-century Europeans alone in this belief. It was shared by the ancient Chinese and Indians, who likewise followed the advice proferred by miasma theory in their own medical and urbanistic decision-making.

It all sounds very pleasant, except for a tiny detail: miasma theory is false.

What causes malaria, as well as its good friend and cousin cholera, are germs: microscopic creatures that enter the human body and disrupt its normal functioning. Owing to their small size, however, they were not discovered, nor could they be proven to exist until the invention of the microscope. Their connection to infectious disease remained a mystery until the work of the German physician Robert Koch in the late nineteenth century. And yet, we are here because men before the formulation of the germ theory nevertheless had an idea of how to avoid and combat infectious disease, mostly thanks to the false and discredited miasma theory.

So, where am I going with this? Let’s dispense with the history of medicine and talk about bears and rocks for a while.

Imagine that you’re walking down a road in the countryside. Suddenly, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse something that looks like a bear. Unburdened by such mind-killers as “skepticism as to the true nature of things,” you bolt like the devil himself, running from the honey-eater as fast as your feet can carry you, discovering that you are far nimbler and faster than you initially believed. Once your fear of the bear propels you a sufficient distance away, you turn to discover that there is no bear; in fact, there never was a bear. It was only a rock that, when observed in your peripheral field of vision, vaguely resembled an upright bear. Congratulations, you’ve just committed a Type 1 error: a false positive.

Let’s examine a different scenario. You’re walking down the same road. Suddenly, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse something that looks like a bear. Knowing full well the low statistical likelihood of encountering such a wolf-to-bees in your clime and region, you do not allow this apparition to disrupt your serenity and continue on your merry way. Then, in the space of about two seconds, you are bisected, disemboweled, and devoured by the bear, who proceeds to tell all of his bear friends at the bear pub what a stupid, arrogant human it had the privilege of eating that day. Congratulations, you’ve just committed a Type 2 error: a false negative.

These things happen for a very simple reason. The human instinct, when confronted with bear-shaped apparitions at the periphery of one’s visual field, is to run first and ask questions later. This means that those who find themselves in the first scenario, who commit a Type 1 error, survive, whereas those in the second, who commit a Type 2 error, are slaughtered and devoured — if not by bears, then by other creatures or even other men. The human animal has evolved to be wary of strange figures and suspicious movements in peripheral vision. The mechanism of this evolutionary trait has been that those who aren’t wary are culled before they can breed more people like themselves.

Notice that both scenarios involve the unfortunate subject committing an error. For good reason: To err is human, and we’re dealing with human creatures here, some of whom are more error-prone than others. Absent societally-mandated procedural behaviors, people have to make decisions, and more often than not, they have to make them under conditions of uncertainty; i.e., they have to make judgement calls. The ancients, Julius Caesar included, mockingly envied their slaves for whom every decision was made — and theirs was not to reason why. For good, reason too: Fear of error is the mother of indecision. He who resolves to be a decision-maker, a free man, must therefore be prepared to make errors: wrong decisions and bad judgement calls. Anyone unprepared for this will be a slave, implementing protocols and procedures developed by better and more decisive men. An overwhelming majority of people are slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with that; you accept that someone else knows better than you and implement his decisions. In this way, even if you find yourself in error, it’s not your fault: You were but an instrument in someone else’s hands, and his is the heavy burden of decision-making under uncertainty.

Please do not read the above paragraph as sarcastic. It sounds sarcastic because we, like our entire society, are part of the liberal and egalitarian world which tells us that All Men Are Created Equal. When applied in this case, this means that every human being is an adequate decision-maker and therefore would not relish the opportunity to become enslaved — to turn his decision-making process over to someone else who is better and more decisive. The liberal idea – counterintuitively — liberates not the masses (they remain slaves, as is their natural station), but liberates the decision-makers from responsibility for their judgement calls.

Witness the brouhaha over student debt forgiveness in America. The indebted — one could say indentured — masses complain that they were deceived, and that all they did was obey their societies’ protocols. They did no wrong in implementing these protocols, which were given to them from above — above here meaning both their parents and their society at large. The response of some is that they all “freely” made the choice to go to college and incur debt, which is to say that at age 17 they should rather have rebelled against their parents, all their teachers, and all the messaging in society telling them that they’d become irredeemable losers if they didn’t go to college. The implicit demand at Nuremberg that every German soldier should have disobeyed orders actually seems reasonable by comparison.

Rather, what we are observing in the above example is the abdication of duty by decision-makers who made those decisions for those who are now saddled with student debt: the banks, the universities, the federal government, and the media and culture moguls. This infinitely smaller pool of people who made the decision that the students then implemented will never be held accountable. Not even Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan will do what is necessary: Tell the banks and universities to pound sand, declaring a debt jubilee.

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Seeing as how we White Nationalists are a vanguard group which seeks to become the white nations’ ruling class in the future, we need to have useful heuristics for decision-making which take into account the fact that we will make errors. Our models of thought and action must be such that they minimize loss from error, not try to avoid error altogether. A quest to eliminate error is a fool’s errand, and worse, leads to indecision, dithering, and therefore loss of opportunity for growth.

For this reason, I don’t judge models of the world on their power to accurately predict events, but rather in terms of the effect they have on their practitioners. For example, when I believed that a world-ending war was imminent, I was motivated to quit smoking, get myself into the best shape I’ve been in, and educate myself in the use of firearms, small-unit tactics, and wilderness survival. The world didn’t end, but the fitness and knowledge I gained stayed with me, and it has been very useful to me, even on my intellectual journey.

Similarly, many people believed that the Covid vaccine would result in mass deaths due to deleterious side effects. Indeed, there have been many cases of vaccine-related deaths and injuries, though not nearly as high as was claimed by some of the vaccine skeptics. Indeed, as Mrs. Jeelvy is fond of remarking, we should have been so lucky that all the vaxxtards would have dropped dead by now. It’d certainly go a long way towards solving the Libtard Question. But alas, they’re still running around. And yet, in our resistance to the vaccine, we found friends and allies and forged networks that we can utilize to further our own agenda as White Nationalists. We have also taken steps to become less dependent on the system, seeing as it showed its inclination, if not full capacity, to fully control access to public services, making it conditional on obedience to a specific diktat.

Over the past two years, the so-called schizos were predicting doom and gloom from an omnipotent, world-encompassing bureaucratic nightmare which is totalitarian and ineffective in equal measure. Such a nightmare did not transpire, but believing the schizo narrative and implementing the schizo program still puts you in a better condition and position than not. The incidence of cardiac events from the vaccine is apparently low, but it’s there, and people who have not taken the vaccine are fully protected from this risk. Note that we don’t know the long-term effects of the vaccine, and may not know them for some time. Ten years after its rollout we will have some idea of what it did — if we’re allowed to look at the data, that is. More importantly, we’ve seen the global governing structures exert themselves to impose measures of even tighter controls on us. Using the schizo framework, we’ve managed to see the outline of this enemy that was hitherto unrecognized. The so-called Great Reset seems to have been put on hold, probably owing to its technical unfeasibility at present, but the enemy has shown its willingness to implement this program in tandem with its desire to replace whites with invaders in their ethnic homelands.

Correct belief and correct prediction are overrated. It is better to believe an epistemically wrong thing that nevertheless leads to action which improves your position rather than believe the right thing at a given moment. The man who sees a rock and not a bear is right — until he is eaten. A man who, having mistaken a rock for a bear, acquires a weapon capable of stopping a bear is in a better position because of his error. And when bandits later attack him in his home and he successfully defends himself with the weapon he obtained to fend off a bear, he has benefited not once, but twice from his error. Likewise, when we overreact to Covid tyranny by developing more independence from the system, especially in a collective manner, we also gain the strength to resist white racial displacement in the future. This is not to say there’s no room for the rational, strictly evidence-based approach, but it lies in the analytics after the fact, in the refinement of the heuristics already proven and the deconstruction of those that have proven insufficient.

In this sense, there ought to be a humility among those of us who are more cerebral and more concerned with correct belief (orthodoxy). We should recognize that there is a place for people who, while they may believe wrong things, still do the right things (orthopraxy). Our aim as analytical thinkers must be to pave over the errors in their behavior, using reason as a tool rather than as an end. In philosophical terms, this is the approach favored by American pragmatism.

Note that I’m not saying that we should believe what’s useful — that’s impossible; people believe what they believe, and trying to force yourself to believe something you don’t is a fool’s errand. Pascal’s wager is not valid because it’s not a bet that can be hedged. Rather, I am speaking here about the outside observer of a false, yet orthopractic, belief — someone who observes someone else committing a Type 1 error. He shouldn’t mess with the belief unless he can refine and improve it. He should only attack those false beliefs which are also dangerous.

There’s also some humble pie to be eaten with regard to the construction of predictive models: Predicting the truth is meaningless if we have not moved towards greater power. In simpler terms, it’s better to win than to be right, although there is room for being right. Always be aware that winning can be a Type 2 error as well: You win something, but it’s meaningless, so in the grand scheme of things all you did was expend resources and time.

To the scholarly type who is concerned with truth — empirically verifiable, Aristotelian truth — believing the wrong thing cannot possibly lead to proper behavior. But the real world is different. It usually consists of people believing falsehoods that nevertheless lead them to proper behaviors. For those few who are genuine decision-makers, a feedback loop where acts based on belief, whether true or false, lead to feedback: winning or losing, which informs the belief, which refines the acts. Men who can change their belief and behavior after receiving falsifying feedback are precious gems, true representatives of the judgement caste who can be genuinely free rather than merely implement procedures given to them from above.

The scholarly type could be one of the judgement caste if he could overcome his fear of error, and thereby his indecision. The man of action could also become one if he would accept the value of contemplation and analysis. A man fit to be a master is both experienced and learned, uniting thought and action, cognizant of the impact of error and yet ready to exercise judgement.

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