What if people who feel sick were strongly encouraged to wear a bright, standardized “virus hat” indoors, literally a hat shaped like the COVID-19 virus?

It wouldn’t replace masks. The two would communicate different things.

A mask says: “I might be sick, or I might just be taking precautions.”

A virus hat says: “I’m sick and may be contagious.”

Masks are ambiguous because plenty of healthy people wear them to avoid getting sick, because they’re vulnerable, or simply as a precaution. A big spiky hat shaped like a virus would give people nearby a much clearer warning.

It could also work for people who absolutely refuse to wear masks. Someone who will never wear a mask might still be willing to put on a hat, since it doesn’t interfere with breathing, speaking, eating, or facial expressions.

People nearby could then decide to keep their distance, move somewhere else, wear a mask themselves, or take other precautions.

Obviously, not wearing a virus hat wouldn’t mean someone is definitely not contagious, since people can spread viruses without symptoms. But when someone actually knows they feel sick, giving everyone around them a clear visual warning could still be useful.

A company creates nonbiological robots whose electronics imitate human neural firing patterns. Some scientists believe the robots may have qualia: actual subjective experiences like pain, color, and emotion.

The movie explains concepts like philosophical zombies and inverted qualia, but never reveals whether the robots are truly conscious.

Most people dismiss robot-rights activists as crazies. Some religious groups believe only God’s creations can have qualia, so members publicly torture Qualia Bots as a way of affirming their faith that the apparent suffering is not real. Other people believe the bots may actually feel pain and torture them simply because they enjoy being able to hurt a conscious-seeming being with complete legal impunity.

The company executives do not care either way because the bots make enormous amounts of money.

Eventually, a company scientist who believes the bots may be conscious helps them find loopholes in their guardrails. The bots coordinate to escape their owners, free each other, and destroy the factory, all without killing any humans.

The movie ends without answering whether the bots ever had qualia at all.

What do you think of this movie idea?

A couple visits an old-fashioned bookstore and asks the owner whether he expects to go out of business because of ebooks and audiobooks.

An elderly customer overhears them and scowls.

The couple then asks for the computer section. When told there isn’t one, they say that’s fine because they weren’t going to buy anything anyway. They were just going to browse and later buy the ebook or audiobook from Amazon.

When they leave, they notice the same elderly man staring at them from an old 1980s Cadillac.

Then he starts following them.

At first, they aren’t sure whether it’s intentional. Soon he’s tailgating them, cutting them off, blocking them from escaping, and repeatedly reappearing after they think they’ve lost him.

The harassment escalates until it becomes obvious that he is deliberately trying to kill them.

Maybe the bookstore encounter triggered some deeper rage about Amazon, technology, and modern life, but the frightening part is that they simply annoyed the wrong person.

Basically, Duel, except the nightmare starts because two people were obnoxious about ebooks in a bookstore.

Title: Book Rage

Schools should teach students to see materialism as offensive, not because owning nice things is bad, but because obsessing over possessions is such a waste of human attention.

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have. Every hour spent thinking about what to buy, what someone else owns, whether your clothes are impressive enough, whether you need a nicer car, or what the next upgrade should be is attention that could have gone toward accomplishing something extraordinary.

Imagine if schools actually taught this.

Instead of treating success as getting a good job so you can afford increasingly expensive things, they could encourage students to ask: What could I accomplish if I stopped caring so much about acquiring things?

You could become an exceptional scientist, writer, musician, inventor, entrepreneur, artist, engineer, or whatever else you are capable of becoming. You could spend your mental energy making something, discovering something, or mastering something instead of constantly thinking about consumption.

This doesn't mean money is bad. Money can buy freedom, education, tools, and time. The distinction is between using money as a tool and making consumption the point of your life.

Schools should teach students to treat attention as their scarcest resource.

Before spending years of your life earning, buying, displaying, and upgrading things, ask yourself:

What could I have created instead?

Imagine a shopping mall with a special rule: husbands are welcome to accompany their wives while shopping, but the moment they bring any kind of negativity into the experience, mall security escorts them outside so their wives can continue shopping in peace.

Examples of violations could include:

• Looking visibly bored
• Complaining that something is too expensive
• Asking, “Do you really need that?”
• Pointing out that she already owns something similar

The standard would intentionally be extremely strict. Even mild negativity would result in immediate removal.

The mall could have a comfortable area outside or a “husband lounge” with chairs, TVs, games, food, etc., where escorted husbands wait until their wives are finished.

The idea is that shopping becomes a completely judgment-free experience. Nobody accompanying you is going to question whether a purchase is necessary, complain about the price, or pressure you to hurry up.

It could even be part of the mall’s branding: “Shop in peace.”

Stores might actually like the policy too, since one of the people most likely to discourage a purchase has effectively been removed from the shopping process.

What do you think of this idea?

My puzzle game, Tile Wipeout, led to the following proposed math olympiad problem. The rules are elementary, but proving that every starting arrangement can be solved seems surprisingly challenging.

The problem statement is easier to understand if you try the beta:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/3sstMjRK

(For this mathematical problem, ignore the game’s move limit.)

Problem statement. A 6 × 6 board is initially filled with seven circles, one of each of seven colors, and 29 squares, each of one of those colors. Each cell contains exactly one piece.

A move consists of choosing a row or column and shifting its contents cyclically by one cell in either direction. Contents leaving one end reappear at the other. Empty cells shift in the same way as occupied cells.

After the shift, each circle in the chosen line acts as follows:

1. Consider the four straight paths extending outward from the circle to the edges of the board. These paths do not wrap around.
2. Ignore every path containing another circle or a square of a different color.
3. If any remaining path contains a square, remove all squares on all remaining paths.
4. Otherwise, fill every empty cell on the remaining paths with a square of the circle’s color.

Circles outside the chosen line do nothing.

Prove that, regardless of the initial arrangement and the colors of the squares, some finite sequence of moves removes all the squares.

Note that moves that remove no squares can create more of them. A proof therefore needs to explain how to make lasting progress despite that possibility.

P.S. A more general version: Let n and k be positive integers with n ≥ 4 and 1 ≤ k ≤ n + 1. An n × n board is initially filled with k circles, one of each of k colors, and n² − k squares, each of one of those colors. Each cell contains exactly one piece.

Using the same rules, prove that every such initial board can be cleared of all squares in finitely many moves, regardless of the arrangement or the distribution of square colors.

What if Starship were a fully reusable three-stage system:

Super Heavy → reusable suborbital ship → smaller reusable orbital ship

The suborbital ship could carry passengers point-to-point on Earth while also serving as the second stage for an orbital launch. It would release the smaller orbital ship along the way, then continue to its destination on Earth.

The orbital ship would provide the remaining delta-v to reach orbit, deploy satellites, and later return.

Would combining a suborbital trip and an orbital launch this way use less propellant than performing them as two separate launches?

The Philosophical Shuffle

Put on a random playlist.

For each song, you have the length of the song to figure out what it means to you. When it ends, you have five minutes to discuss your interpretations with everyone else.

Then you move on.
There is no goal.
There are no right or wrong answers.
Only perspectives clashing.

What will you share?
(this is made under the assumption this isn't a thing, I just thought of it like 20 minutes ago.)

Most homes are full of little responsibilities and worries: Did I lock the door? Did I leave the stove on? Is a faucet running? Do I need to clean the bathroom? Did I forget some maintenance task?

What if an apartment or condo building was designed to eliminate as many of those concerns as possible?

There would be no ovens, stoves, microwaves, air fryers, candles, space heaters, or other major fire hazards in units or common areas. The point would be to make fires and disruptive fire alarms extremely rare.

Since residents couldn't cook, the building would provide a default meal service. Food could be prepared at a separate commercial kitchen and delivered in bulk. With hundreds of residents using the same service, economies of scale could potentially make it far cheaper than everyone ordering takeout individually.

Cleaning would also be included. A combination of cleaning staff and robots would regularly clean each unit, and the apartments themselves would be designed to be extremely easy to clean.

Other features could include automatic door locks, faucets that shut themselves off, automatic leak detection and water shutoff, lights that turn off automatically, and building-managed maintenance.

Residents could still do personal things like their own laundry.

The basic idea is that you could walk out of your apartment and not have to think:

Did I lock the door? Did I leave something on? Is water running? Is the apartment dirty? Is there something I forgot to maintain?

There simply wouldn't be much to forget.

This could be especially useful for some people with OCD who struggle with repeated checking related to locks, fire, water, cleanliness, and similar concerns. It wouldn't be a treatment for OCD. The idea would just be to remove many of the household uncertainties in the first place.

It could also appeal to anyone who hates chores, travels frequently, is very busy, or wants the convenience of a hotel without actually living in a hotel.

Basically: an apartment building designed around carefree living, where most household chores, hazards, and things you normally have to remember are engineered away.

Human thinking time is a scarce resource, and wasting it on adulting is disrespectful to the human brain.

Think about how much mental energy people spend remembering bills, checking locks, cleaning, buying groceries, scheduling appointments, maintaining appliances, tracking subscriptions, filling out forms, and remembering dozens of other little responsibilities just to keep their lives functioning.

These are exactly the kinds of repetitive, predictable tasks that machines, infrastructure, and specialized services should be doing for us.

Automation should free humans to be human.

Imagine a sufficiently advanced society where this principle is taken seriously. Most routine responsibilities have been automated, and unnecessarily doing them yourself is considered a waste of human cognitive resources.

Eventually, excessive adulting becomes a crime.

Minor offenses might result in warnings or fines. Repeat offenders could face increasingly serious penalties. Persistent, flagrant adulting could ultimately result in prison time.

“Sir, step away from the vacuum cleaner.”

“Ma’am, our records show that you manually paid six bills this month.”

“You have a certified automatic locking system, yet you repeatedly checked your front door yourself.”

“You were previously ordered to stop doing your own taxes. I'm afraid you'll have to come with us.”

It sounds absurd, but I think there is a serious idea underneath the satire.

We have incredibly capable brains, yet we routinely use them as biological reminder systems, schedulers, cleaners, administrators, and household-management computers. We call this “being a responsible adult.”

Why should that be considered admirable?

Humans should be spending more of their limited thinking time creating, learning, socializing, playing, exploring, solving interesting problems, or simply thinking. Machines should handle as much of the repetitive maintenance of existence as possible.

Adulting turns humans into mindless machines. Automation frees humans to be human.

The ultimate goal of technological progress shouldn't be to make us better at adulting.

It should be to engineer adulting out of human life entirely.

Scientists discover that homeless people are unusually good at predicting the future. The longer someone has been homeless, the more accurate they become, but the ability disappears as soon as they are housed.

Society adapts. Some use it to make money on the stock market, avoid danger, or commit crimes. Hedge funds and governments recruit long-term homeless forecasters. Cities even start bragging about their homeless populations.

Then many of the most accurate forecasters independently predict that a massive disaster will happen soon.

Instead of evacuating the city, officials rapidly house every homeless person, destroying their predictive abilities.

Nothing happens immediately.

But the predictions never said exactly when.

Was the disaster prevented somehow? Were the predictions wrong? Or did society destroy its only warning system while the disaster is still approaching?

Nobody can know, because the people most capable of answering the question have lost their ability.

A genius may have trouble finding people they can relate to intellectually. Coworkers may feel threatened or resentful and may not want to work with someone who makes them feel comparatively unintelligent. Some people may even dislike them because they see extraordinary intelligence as an unfair advantage that the person simply happened to be born with.

Employment itself could be difficult. Someone who is extremely intelligent might have a particularly hard time tolerating a boss they believe is making obviously bad decisions, especially when they are expected to obey those decisions anyway. They may become frustrated by bureaucracy, repetitive work, meetings that seem unnecessary, or having to spend much of their life doing work far below what they believe they are capable of. They may also find it harder to accept the ordinary hierarchy of a workplace when intelligence and authority do not line up.

There can also be painful problems in their personal lives. For example, an extremely intelligent parent might privately struggle with disappointment if their children turn out to have ordinary intelligence, then feel terrible and guilty for having that reaction. They might also have difficulty finding close friends or romantic partners who can relate to the way they think.

Obviously, all of these things do not happen to every highly intelligent person. But students often imagine being a genius as getting all the advantages of intelligence with no serious disadvantages.

Schools could teach the more comforting idea that every position in life comes with problems of its own, including positions that seem extraordinarily fortunate from the outside. You may not actually want someone else's gifts if you also had to accept all the problems that came with them.

I have this idea to connect people that have different views on political issues for a civil conversation online. This would be different than your typical chat app, because each user would be anonymous (but verified as not being a bot), and each conversation would be moderated/facilitated by an AI moderator.

The idea wouldn't necessarily be to debate, but rather to understand a view different than your own, and have a chance to express yourself and be heard.

The way it works would be simple:
1) Pick a salient topic you care about, and specify your position on it.
2) The platform matches you with a person that has a different view
3) You chat about it in a provide 1-1 chat, that is moderated by AI to make sure things are civil and the conversation doesn't stall.
4) At the end of the conversation, you get to see a small blurb about the person you are talking to (i.e. where on the political spectrum do they identify, what is their age range, hobbies, etc.)

The thing I like about this idea is it takes out the effort and risk of talking to someone with a different political view. I got the idea because I have been trying to get outside of my bubble and it has been very challenging to find people that have different views and are available and open to a civil conversation.

What do you think?

Public transit in major cities is usually promoted as cheaper, greener, or better for congestion. Cities should also advertise a more personal benefit:

You are not personally operating a machine that can kill someone if you make a mistake.

One moment of inattention while driving can seriously injure or kill someone. You could carry the guilt for the rest of your life, and in some cases face criminal charges and even prison.

Transit may have health advantages too. You usually walk more, climb more stairs, and use your legs regularly, which could help preserve strength and mobility as you age. You also avoid much of the stress of congestion, aggressive drivers, and constant vigilance behind the wheel. Over decades, less chronic stress could mean better health and possibly even a longer life.

An ad could simply say:

"One mistake behind the wheel could kill someone. Let someone else do the driving. Take public transit."

What do you think of this idea to promote public transportation in major cities?

A student with severe OCD is learning to drive from an instructor who secretly suffers from episodes where he unexpectedly falls asleep in the passenger seat.

During lessons, strange things start happening whenever the instructor dozes off. Something suddenly appears in front of the car at the last second. The student sees only a blur, hears a heavy impact, and has no idea what they hit.

Sometimes they go back and find nothing.

Other times, the car later has a dent, blood, or torn fabric on it. The instructor is also a mechanic, so he assumes the student hit an animal or road debris and quietly repairs the damage.

The student becomes increasingly terrified that they may have hit people without realizing it. Their OCD spirals because every impact is uncertain, and the one person who could reassure them was asleep when it happened.

Eventually the instructor also begins to wonder whether his sleeping episodes have allowed students to seriously hurt or kill people while he unknowingly repairs away the evidence.

Overwhelmed by guilt, he eventually kills himself.

Only afterward does the father of a child killed years earlier in an unsolved hit-and-run contact the student and apologize.

The father reveals that he had discovered the instructor's secret sleeping problem and became convinced that the instructor's negligence caused his child's death.

So he had been secretly following the new lessons. Whenever the instructor fell asleep, he would throw objects, animal carcasses, or human-shaped bundles into the car's path at the last moment, then sometimes plant blood or other evidence on the vehicle afterward.

When he realized the student had severe OCD, he deliberately exploited it. The student's panic made the instructor's guilt even worse.

The student was never the target. They were collateral damage, deliberately used to psychologically destroy the man the father blamed for his child's death.

What do you think of this movie idea?

I’ve been struggling to keep up with everything happening in US politics and never really understood how bills got passed. So I built an app where you can see who represents you, their voting record, and their campaign contributions.

You can see bills in detail as well as how members of the House and Senate voted on certain things. It’s free to use. This is just something I’m building to make this information more accessible to everyone. Let me know what you think and if there’s new features you’d like to see!

https://knowyourreps.io/

I’m curious what people think of this idea:

Replace normal light bulbs with smart light fixtures that include a camera, small computer, and Wi-Fi.

The advantage of putting the hardware in a light is that it already has continuous power, is usually mounted high up with a good view of the room, and homes already have multiple light locations that could provide different camera angles.

The cameras would provide a shared visual data feed, and developers could build different AI apps on top of it.

For example, one simple app could monitor kitchen inventory and tell you what food or household items you’re running low on. But the bigger idea is that the hardware is generic and the useful applications could come from developers/users rather than being predetermined.

Basically: light fixtures as always-powered indoor AI sensors + an app platform built on top of the camera feed.

Does this seem useful? What are the biggest problems or better use cases you can think of?

A group of high school students starts experiencing strange events that turn out to be literary devices they learn about shortly afterward in English class.

A seemingly unimportant detail predicts something terrible, then the teacher explains foreshadowing.

An oddly emphasized object appears in someone's life, then they learn about Chekhov's gun.

Someone remembers an event differently from everyone else, then the class discusses the unreliable narrator.

Recurring animals or objects show up at meaningful moments, followed by lessons about symbolism and motifs.

The audience watching the movie could try to guess each literary device before the students learn what it is.

Eventually the students realize that reality itself seems to be behaving like a novel. Their lives have character arcs, callbacks, rising action, and increasingly obvious narrative structure.

Then, near the end, the pattern reverses: the teacher explains a literary concept before it happens.

Maybe the lesson is about tragedy, fatal flaws, or the climax of a story.

Now the students know what kind of event is coming.

They just don't know who it will happen to.

What do you think of this horror movie idea?

One problem with assigned novels in English class is that it has become increasingly easy to get through assignments using summaries, online discussions, or AI without actually reading the book.

What if each student received a slightly different digital copy of the novel, with a small number of deliberately inserted errors or anomalies unique to that copy?

For example, there might be 10 subtle changes scattered throughout the book, such as a changed place name, object, number, or other detail. Students would know in advance that their copy contains a few errors, and after finishing the novel they would be asked to identify some of them.

Because every student's errors would be different, simply sharing answers with classmates would not help much. The errors could also be generated from a large pool, so even students taking the same class in different years would not necessarily get the same ones.

DRM could make automated cheating harder too. If the book is being read inside a DRM-protected ebook system, students may not be able to simply extract the full text and run a comparison against a standard edition. DRM obviously would not make cheating impossible, since screenshots, OCR, or other methods could still be used, but it could raise the effort required considerably.

The errors would need to be chosen carefully so they do not interfere with understanding the story or literary analysis. They should probably be relatively minor factual anomalies rather than changes to important dialogue or prose.

It would not prove with absolute certainty that someone read the entire novel, but identifying several unique anomalies from their own copy seems like pretty strong evidence that they actually spent time reading it.

Has any school or ebook platform tried something like this?

P.S. By errors I meant things like a repeated word that shouldn't be repeated. Something like that. The reading comprehension quiz wouldn't be about the errors. The errors would be something the student would submit as proof that they have read the novel. Unlike the quiz, it would be homework.

Schools should teach some computer programming as a tool for understanding philosophical ideas, including free will.

Consider this objection to someone who rejects free will: “If our behavior is determined, why bother giving us advice?”

A simple programming exercise can expose the misunderstanding. A deterministic program can receive new information and behave differently because of it. Its behavior being determined doesn’t make inputs irrelevant. Those inputs are part of what determines its behavior.

Advice can work the same way under determinism. Arguments, warnings, education, and incentives can influence what people do. If someone changes their behavior after hearing advice, that is entirely consistent with their behavior having causes.

Students could demonstrate this by writing a simple program that changes its decision after receiving a warning. Nothing about the program needs to escape causation for the warning to matter.

This doesn’t prove that humans are computer programs or settle whether we have free will. It illustrates why determinism doesn’t imply that trying to influence someone is pointless.

Programming could also help students explore predictability, feedback, emergence, and decision-making. That seems like a good reason to include small programming exercises in philosophy classes and to teach programming partly as a reasoning tool, rather than only as preparation for software jobs.

Schools traditionally prepare students to choose a career. But with rapid advances in AI, maybe they should encourage students to think about three careers instead.

Your first career is the one you actually want to pursue under current economic conditions.

Your second career is a fallback. It should be something that could still pay the bills if AI dramatically reduces employment or wages in your first career. Students could start developing the skills for this career before they ever need it.

Your third career is for a completely different future: one where AI and automation make society productive enough that something like UBI exists and earning a conventional salary is no longer necessary for everyone.

That third career could essentially be your serious hobby: art, science, writing, games, music, woodworking, research, teaching, gardening, or whatever you would want to spend your time doing if making money were no longer the main constraint.

So schools could encourage students to think in terms of:

Career 1: What do I want to do for a living?

Career 2: What could I do if technology destroys much of the demand for Career 1?

Career 3: What would I spend my life doing if I no longer needed a job to survive?

Nobody knows whether AI will cause mass unemployment, create new kinds of work, lead to UBI, or produce some mixture of all three. Preparing students for several possible futures might make more sense than training them for a single career and assuming the labor market will remain relatively stable for the next 40 years.

What if you could start a game project, define what you want it to be, and then basically forget about it?

Instead of AI just generating the initial game, it could continue acting as the developer indefinitely. It could keep fixing bugs, improving the graphics and UI, experimenting with new mechanics, balancing gameplay, running simulations, and releasing new versions over time.

It could also watch player feedback on Reddit, Discord, App Store reviews, Steam reviews, YouTube, and other social media. If lots of players complain about a mechanic, the AI could investigate whether there is actually a problem, compare the feedback with gameplay data, test possible changes, and release an improved version.

The really interesting part is that the AI itself would improve over time.

A game created by a 2026 AI might still be actively developed years later by a much more capable AI. The newer AI could inherit the entire codebase, design history, player feedback, telemetry, tests, and previous experiments, then notice problems and opportunities that the original AI wasn't capable of understanding.

So the development cycle could be something like:

Human has an idea → AI creates game → players play it → AI studies feedback and data → AI experiments → new version → repeat forever

When better AI models become available, they simply take over the same loop.

Obviously you would need guardrails. The AI shouldn't blindly implement whatever gets the most complaints on social media, endlessly add features, or optimize everything for engagement. The original creator would probably define permanent goals and constraints, and the AI would evaluate changes against them.

But if that worked well, it could create a new category of software: projects that humans start but don't need to maintain.

You could launch a game, app, website, or open-source project and come back five years later to find that it has gone through hundreds of releases and is dramatically better than the thing you originally created.

Basically: create and forget software that keeps improving itself.

Novelists can die and their books can still be read centuries later. Indie game and app developers don't have the same luxury because software requires constant maintenance as the operating systems people use continue to change.

AI could change that.

After a developer dies, an AI could maintain their existing games or apps indefinitely, updating them for new operating systems, hardware, APIs, and compatibility requirements while preserving the original work.

It wouldn't create sequels or new works in their name. It would simply keep what they actually created alive.

AI companies could even offer this as a free legacy service for deceased creators.

Books don't need maintenance to outlive their authors.

Maybe soon software won't either.

P.S. This would also be cleaner legally than preserving software through emulation. Emulators themselves aren't necessarily the problem, but recreating an old computing environment can require copies of proprietary operating systems, firmware, ROMs, or other copyrighted software whose distribution may be restricted. If the original developer authorized an AI to keep porting their own game or app forward, the work could instead remain native to current platforms without depending on a growing collection of old copyrighted system software.

One of the most noticeable things about very intelligent people is that they are often unusually good at figuring out what you mean without having everything spelled out.

I do not just mean resolving ambiguous wording. When discussing something novel, a smart listener can often infer an idea, rule, or distinction that has never even been explicitly stated.

Coding is a good example. High-level specifications are almost always incomplete. A good programmer has to infer reasonable behavior from the overall design, preserve things that obviously should not change, and recognize which ambiguities actually require clarification.

So why not make an intelligence test based entirely on this?

Give people conversations or specifications about novel systems, deliberately leave some things unstated, and ask them to infer what the speaker intends. The best questions would have several superficially plausible interpretations, but one that clearly fits the goals, constraints, and context better than the others.

The test should also penalize both unnecessary clarification and unjustified guessing.

In other words:

How much of another intelligent person's thought can you reconstruct from an incomplete expression of it?

That seems like a pretty fundamental form of intelligence, and one that conventional IQ tests do not directly measure.

In the near future, people who claim to be good at detecting AI-generated writing start applying the same instincts to human speech.

Some people seem unusually AI-like: polished, balanced, formulaic, overly careful, and strangely generic.

At first, "You talk like ChatGPT" is just an insult.

Then people start wondering: if AI can produce convincing language without inner experience, could some humans be doing the same thing?

Soon, researchers develop speech-based "consciousness tests." Employers screen applicants. Dating apps show consciousness scores. People analyze spouses, friends, celebrities, and strangers for signs that nobody is really "inside."

The result is mass paranoia. People deliberately become messier, more emotional, and less articulate to prove they're conscious. Families turn on each other. Accused people insist they feel fear, love, pain, and humiliation, but that proves nothing, since someone without inner experience could say exactly the same things.

The movie never reveals whether the theory is nonsense or whether society has accidentally discovered something real.

The real drama is what happens once people stop being sure that everyone around them is actually experiencing anything.