We all know about social constructs vs reality, but there are levels of spookiness (and no upper bound). We can define them as how far a lie can go before the truth gets its boots on. Spookiness level one — money — already goes basically perpetually.

Spookiness level two — a second cardinality of this infinitude — is something like a financial market, where folks gamble on their perceptions of what other folks will gamble on, using money (itself eldritch). You might say that since financial markets crash every 8 years they’re less spooky, but the volume of imagination they inflate is much greater.

Spookiness level 3 is something like venture capital, where a small hive-mind of like 20 people pumps promises of imaginary money into unprofitable businesses in the hope that financial markets will be tricked into betting they will become profitable enough to make them so.

(We’re talking cantor cardinality here — orders of orders of complected spookiness — because each level tends to loop in on itself indefinitely and physically physically physically physically physically expand the meta-ness of its betting like a mastermind in a bad anime. Every form of spookiness attracts Thanatos Gambit thinking.)

So, at level one, we choose to act as though we believe something in order to create a convenient stability.

At level 2, we game the noise in stability levels.

At level 3, we game the beliefs of the people gaming the noise in stability levels.

Each level is less stable & activity in each level reduces the stability of lower levels (because it amplifies noise with positive feedback).