🟪 Wide-spread epistemic anomaly detected || Global Risks Instant Message #01-04-2026

We are detecting today a shared collective delusion leading victims to degrade their epistemic standards. This anomaly is aimed towards no particular end, except perhaps for the amusement of its participants and the satisfaction of ingenious expression.

So far, it appears to be mostly harmless. Nonetheless, this phenomenon creates space for vulnerabilities. If some geopolitical actor were to take some implausible action on this day (for instance, US to invade Canada, Spain to annex Portugal, Iran bombing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), it would be initially harder to coordinate effective responses against it, since other actors may initially doubt whether the facts reported are real or lark. If there is broad societal license to fib, the power of contracts might be imperilled: OpenAI could announce AGI today, thus freeing itself from its obligations to Microsoft, without having the declaration be interpreted literally. [Make this more tenebrous]. 

There is precedent for actions and announcements made in this altered epistemic state manifesting after its ending, such as the launch of Gmail.

One formulation for the harmfulness of a lie is Mariven’s operationalization of deception:

From this perspective, since the modus operandi of artifacts produced in the delusion we are monitoring is revealed before recipients have a change to propagate their beliefs and take action based on them, it's not clear that it isn’t clear that the degradation in epistemic standards we are observing are having large-scale harmful effects.

It is also not coordinated centrally, but rather arises organically and in an uncoordinated fashion. The spontaneity and wide spread of this anomaly suggests that there may be other, perhaps many other shared spontaneous delusions arising and shaping our behaviour, like enthusiasm for crypto, the belief in fiat currency, the hope that things are going to be all right, the collective agreement to mutually ignore our glaring flaws, the perception that important decisions in the West are made democratically. 

Based on a study of the historical duration of previous such incidents, we expect this epistemic anomaly to be bounded in time to about a day.

Seriously, I love this EA forum holiday ❤️ I genuinely feel like this helps the community do more good, get more silly-but-perhaps-with-a-grain-of-usefulness ideas across, and waste time in a way which feels a bit productive

So, who is this?