Give Up Seventy Percent of the Way Through the Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
16th November 2023
A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true. For example, “Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up. “The bank is collapsing and you need to get your money out right away” is likewise true; if everyone believes it, there will be a run on the bank.
What else is a hyperstition? “Bernie can’t possibly win” – if everyone believes this, donors won’t bother giving money to Bernie (why bother? it’s futile!), volunteers won’t canvas for him, and party honchos won’t put their careers on the line to support him. But also, “Bernie’s on fire and can’t be stopped!” – donors looking to curry favor with a future winner will support him, his base will be fired up, opponents might even drop out of the race.
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said – in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him – that “Negro” was a slur – and because people believed him it became true.