I like this stuff because I think things like Ancient Aliens are the Subgenius and Discordianism of our time. The genius of it is that it is a note for note send up of ideologies of every kind, literally, the logic of an idea, where when you project it on something, the reflection doesn't illuminate the object so much as reinforce the underlying idea itself as a lens. If I could coin a term for it, I would call it "profound comedy," where the genius of it is that when you apply its structural absurdity to other ideas whose logic people iterate into funhouse mirror beliefs, it shows how equally dumb they are. The laughter is involuntarily revealed truth. This is what makes it so dangerous and subversive, and the people who react to it do so because they know they are being mocked with impunity.
I would seriously consider donating to a cryptozoology scholarship fund.
> The genius of it is that it is a note for note send up of ideologies of every kind, literally, the logic of an idea, where when you project it on something, the reflection doesn't illuminate the object so much as reinforce the underlying idea itself as a lens.
Could you expound on this? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you are saying
It sounds like David Icke. If you really need someone to expound on this, you could read the source but we’re both on HN and likely reasonably similar. Can I give you some loving advice??
Forget this. There’s nothing good in Icke. I’ve seen way too many brilliant hackers get sucked into David Icke’s bullshit on their way to a crash.
If you still really need closure, I can sum it up as the royal family, the elite and the ‘Illuminati’ are lizards, descended from aliens. Find architects who designed buildings for the Baha’i faith, then trace their contributions back to North American parliaments, legislatures and the like. Find the allusions to the Baha’i faith, find the allusions to Freemasonry and then you’ll see the projection of reality. Once you’ve seen the projection, you’re free from it.
Be safe. If you want to rap about the ideas with someone reasonably safe, I’m Greg and my email is in my profile. If you’re getting lost, I’ll give you my phone number.
Be safe and healthy.
Edit - The danger of Icke is that he takes basic geometry and civil engineering and somehow turns them into conspiracy. If you’re remotely scientific, you’ll see signs of Icke all around you. But some principles are principles because they work. We don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how professions grow.
Edit 2 - Don’t google David Icke. You’ll want the time back and I can’t offer refunds. :(
> If this startup thing doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just start a cult. :)
I know you’re not being serious but unfortunately many people are in this kind of thinking. All over society are movements and groupthink driven by a small group of people that realized that you can get a whole lot of money and power by making people believe outlandish things.
Though Icke predates QAnon by quite a bit, and I would almost say it is derivative of his "material". And the themes of the "Protocols of the Elders..." of course are shamefully evergreen in such discourse.
I remember looking into this stuff around 2005, being intoxicated regularly (marihuana). What a waste of time. Anyway, I remember Icke plugging this fellow Credo Mutwa [1], some kind of shaman from South-Africa. The name sticked with me, cause I'm Dutch, and Mutwa kinda sounds like '<name> moet wa(t)' which in my mind jokingly meant "he's gotta earn a livin' somehow".
All kidding aside, lunatics. Just reading his Wikipedia page (I'll plug it once more [1]) sheds enough light in the BS. Though, as long as you take it for what it is (fiction, comedy, propaganda?) its all good entertainment. Problem is, for most followers, it isn't entertainment... there's probably hordes of people not using safe medication, birth control, vaccines because of fellows like this :-(
Well, I'd say for me googling him was fun. But I also just watched "Inside Job" a new cartoon series on netflix about all that(including shape shifting lizzard people), so I was in the mood.
But I know, it is less fun, when you have to deal with people who takes that shit serious.
In Discordianism, there is something called the Law of Fives[1], which says, 'all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.' There is also a memo from one founder to another quoted which says, 'I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look.'
Robert Anton Wilson has some interesting personal experiments about this in his book Prometheus Rising, where you go looking for a quarter on the ground under different personal contexts[2]. Other instances are things like the 23 enigma[3] or ancient aliens.
I took motohagiography's comment to be on this phenomenon, where the state of mind, or how you prime the mind (e.g. with images or ideas), changes what you tend to find. It can be applied in all sorts of contexts -- prime the mind with ideas like conspiracy theories, and you see them everywhere. Fnord.
Interestingly, we had a thread not all that long ago about illusions and their relationship to the brain's prediction systems. It seems plausible that things like this are related.
Oddly, you're right. I may have over egged the batter on that one. The smart version of my comment would have been "lol, confirmation bias," which describes cryptozoology, ancient aliens, and pretty much everything else that is the logic of an idea, or ideological.
If you can find confirmation bias funny, like next level hilarious (especially when you are into the lettuce) you can find anything funny I suppose. But still, I laugh a through each episode and can't watch the news anymore because once you've seen it, you can't not. Cryptozoology is the same kind of game of pretend.
Looking forward to leaving the house more in 2022.
I think parent is talking about the mindset or way of thinking that leads to revisionist history/conspiracy theory/etc. And saying that this mindset doesn't have much actually to do with the specific details of any given object/plotline (e.g. the Nazca lines). It's more of a self-reinforcing worldview, that there is a Story, that everything is significant in the story, everything points to everything else, and nothing means what appears on the surface.
The novel Foucault's Pendulum is a book about this mindset; the Illuminatus! trilogy is too in a way, though it's more experiential than descriptive. There are a few non-fiction books, though I'm blanking on the key author's name. For a very contemporary non-fiction (albeit opinionated) take see A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnonhttps://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
> There are a few non-fiction books, though I'm blanking on the key author's name.
I don't know if he is who you had in mind, but Robert Anton Wilson -- who was one of the writers on the Illuminatus! trilogy -- has at least two non-fiction books on it. One is Prometheus Rising, the other is Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World. They are both a series of essays with exercises at the end of each chapter. If I remember correctly, Quantum Psychology was more about language and semantics, and Prometheus Rising was more about belief systems and viewpoints.
Quantum Psychology is both written in and a guide to E-Prime, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime (Edit, via wiki: 'E-Prime refers to a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.')
Thank you, not the person I was thinking of but that's an excellent point-out.
I had two books in mind that I was completely misremembering as by the same author. In fact they are by two different journalists. The United States of Paranoia and Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.
Don’t be mocking the one true goddess! Lest Eris cast you out, leaving you to partake of hotdogs with no hotdog buns for all eternity or 5 weeks —which ever comes first.
-Pope Wombatpm, KSC
Burning Cow Cabal of lesser Chicago
It does. It's just more abstract wishy washy and metacognitive than most people tend to sanely run.
The general theme or oomph of the point is that the world, and beliefs we hold tend to converge on certain structural relationships because they just work. Even if it isn't a concrete 100% accurate description of what we see in front of us it just feels right, so we hit a mental stop point and go on about our day.
The belief literally feels good. To hell with reality, this is how it is. One of the tenets of Discordianism is there is no objective truth or order, as truth itself is just surprisingly convenient organizations of the fundamentally chaotic underpinnings of existence, and everyone sees things differently or different aspects of things thereof. We can all be looking at the same thing and see things completely differently, and in a strange sort of way, nobody is wrong. Fnord.
Therefore, as Eris dictates, there is no one true Discordianism, or world, as everyone's view of the world is true into and unto themselves. Fnord!
It can be disturbing to many, because it allows you to completely detach from all of your prior assumptions. Someone completely detached from everyone else's reality isn't terribly yuseful, but they are free to peer through the Chaos to find any momentary tendrils of direction that become revealed.
The original poster posited positive utility from applying these principles to any mode of thought in such a way as to identify when those belief structures have fallen or been distorted by the same mannerisms of thought that make equally quacky, though more mainstream ideas feel good, thusly revealing that the holder of the idea is in a state of mental metastatic equilibrium.
This makes the Discordian in the room a surprisingly strong catalyst for change, or at least the most aware of the set of Reality Distortion Fields at work/being projected by those in charge, and as a consequence, a threat to unified manipulation, and an escape hatch to individual notions of reality. Fnord
So called "ancient astronaut theory," is an ideology. The premise is the hypothetical that earth was once inhabited by extraterrestrials, and then when you view archeology and history through that lens, and provide explanations for any outstanding questions or uncertainties using this underlying assumption as a premise (could it be aliens? ancient astronaut theorists say yes!), you have a complete and very accessible critical theory of history that is very entertaining bunk.
I could write the same series as Ancient Objectivists, Ancient Anarchists, Ancient Socialists, Ancient Elites, etc. The details they use as justification do not illuminate the subject, they use archeological and historical stories as evidence of their theory - it's all the same thing.
The reason people get the satisfying feeling of "it all makes sense" is because the one stupid idea seems to be reinforced by relatively neutral facts, when in fact, it's just a dumb idea displayed along side facts.
Hey bud, I made a reply on this thread and now feel guilty about it. I’ve got nothing against you and you’re a wickedly smart person. Please please please don’t think I was mocking you or anything you believe. You’re a wickedly smart person and a talented writer. Those are the only opinions I have about you. Okay???
I have strong opinions about some of the cats who publish these ideas. Those opinions in no way inform the opinion I have of you.
> Please please please don’t think I was mocking you or anything you believe. You’re a wickedly smart person and a talented writer. Those are the only opinions I have about you. Okay???
Why do you sound like you just found out motohagiography has high-level connections to the mob? Honestly this entire thread is starting to trigger my schizoid tendencies because I have no idea what half the people in it are talking about.
The simplest answer is that I was an asshole. Someone posted an idea and someone else asked for clarification. Rather than act like an adult, I put on my dickbag hat and shit all over the idea. My issue is with David Icke yet for some incomprehensible reason, I jumped into a thread that didn’t involve me and added my own personal shit.
I injected David Icke rather than give Motohagiography the chance to explain their own words. At best, I was a bully.
It was wrong of me and I fucked up. I could have behaved like an adult and made a difference. Instead I acted like a brute and made a spectacle. What the fuck was the point of any of that???
Edit - I have a better way to describe it. I acted like a racist! I saw signs of David Icke and turned dick. A more adult adult would have shut the fuck up…alas, I’m bad at that.
Edit 2 - If I was writing about someone else, I would have used the words “complete fucking asshole”. Let me restate. The simplest answer is that I was a complete fucking asshole. :)
I think it’s puzzling for some of us that someone might be so apologetic and deferential for speaking their mind in a text forum - this is what we’re all here for, free association; someone’s post reminds you of David Icke and projection of meaning, by all means tell us all about it.
First, you’re assuming that I came across David Icke by chance. I didn’t. Someone I love has schizophrenia and is currently homeless. David Icke was part of his path. Fuck David Icke.
Second, you’re assuming I have no compassion. What if someone reading this is sick?? I can be a dickbag or possibly set myself up as someone worth confiding in.
I’ll err on the side of being someone worth confiding in. Sorry bud but your opinion isn’t very important to me.
For what it's worth (although I'm not motohagiography) I didn't read your comment upthread as an attack on the commenter. Warnings about this stuff can be appropriate, because it's seductive. You did a bit of conclusion-jumping, but misreading the original comment was an easy mistake to make -- it's pretty dense.
I’m going to make this a separate reply because it’s important. “Schizoid” tendencies might just be a turn of phrase. If so, it’s insensitive but I can’t stop you.
If that’s not just a turn of phrase and you’re being serious, you can find a lot of good in medical science. If you need someone to go with you, I’m based in Canada but have a passport. My email is in my profile and anything you send stays between us unless you’re planning on harming yourself. Then seriously holmes, it’s on.
I consider it a supreme privilege to have these thoughts read by anyone at all, so really, thank you, no issues here at all, even if someone (else) takes shots. This is public discouse, and sometimes it gets bumptuous. :)
Seriously friend, I don’t want to take shots at you. You’re cool and I have precisely zero reasons to take shots at you. You’re (likely) good in my books - I only wrote about David Icke.
If you feel I took a shot at you, I apologize. That was not my intent, but I behaved like a brute. That was completely wrong and I’m sorry. I have no excuses only sorrow. :(
Edit - Sorry, I forgot to mention that I really dig your attitude. I was a dick and I’m sorry.
If you enjoyed Super Size Me, you should checkout the TV series the host Morgan created soon after, called 30 days [1]. He and others basically do something random for 30 days (gets locked up, goes on a fad diet, binge drinking, etc.)
The first episode where Morgan and his girlfriend try to live on minimum wage in Ohio for a month is some of the best TV I've ever seen.
All the episodes are good, the ones with Morgan are the best.
The recent Super Size Me 2 is also pretty good. Not quite the charm of the first one, but still really good.
>My assistant suggested we first try the “wood-knock” technique. According to expert Bigfootologists, the creatures are said to communicate with one another by hitting tree trunks with thick branches...
Sounds like Tamlin's 'assistant, a lawyer' is an id^H^H^H^H hasn't spent much time in the bush. BIG NOISE generally means: run fast and hide deep.
The lawyer could always just hide in the nearest loo until eaten.
Chaos theorists might have a more philosophical take that is rich with enlightenment, layers of hidden meaning, and a deeper understanding of the universal meta-reality: must go faster.
I'm old enough to remember terminal speeds slow enough that you could see “is an id” spelled out and then the cursor back up and the replacement text appear.
I have always been fascinated by these kinds of things. Cryptozoology, UFOs, Occult...wish I could have the resources to pursuit them scientifically. X-Files is still my top-3 TV show but it's quite a bit cliché after 30 years.
I'm very proud of my history of never clicking a Facebook ad in over 10 years... Most of them are really just shills for capturing targeting data to associate with my profile anyway.
This also explains why Facebook shows me wildly random ads for Viagra alternatives, yoga pants, conservative news, and better kitty litter than my current brand... All things which have no relevance to me, yet quite often triggering my urge to click "Hide Ad", but that too in itself is also a marker that creates a record I'm sure... What a mental health nightmare it's all turned into.
I log on a lot less to social media than I used to, and use AdBlock + UBlock everywhere ritually.
>This also explains why Facebook shows me wildly random ads for Viagra alternatives, yoga pants, conservative news, and better kitty litter than my current brand... All things which have no relevance to me
Well maybe if your cat practiced yoga, he wouldn't need better litter - or viagra.
I'm still thinking how to associate a cat on viagra with conservative news... maybe something about Bill O'Riley.
Sometimes I make random facebook posts to my page with strategically placed keywords in them based on what I want to see more of though, like "baby squirrels" and it works without fail for about a month at a time...
I, on the contrary, clicked every relevant ad on facebook.
Now they learned my preferences and show me mostly ads about vintage 8-bit computers and tracker music software and groups.
And no ads about viagra or yoga pants.
I'd say that FB ads generally can target much better than general web ads because they can track and profile you precisely, e.g. from your posts, comments, and other interactions. But at least you sign up for that when you agree with FB's EULA when creating an account. General web ads are worst: they try badly to track you to become more targeted, but can't get targeted enough to stop being annoyingly off the mark even if they wanted.
You can accomplish this without clicking on any ads. Just send a DM to someone with all of the keywords you want to see ads for, and you will start seeing them within a few minutes. It's the best way to find new startups with highly specific relevance.
I honestly enjoy FB ads much more than the average political content, covid posts, food pictures that I see on my timeline. I find such cool tech and software from the ads that target me.
For the past 6 months, every single ad on Youtube (TV app) for me is about Indians singing something in Hindi... I wonder why that happens. I'm not Indian, I don't understand Hindi, and I'm not interested in Indian pop music. Yet Youtube thinks I'm a huge fan and I have no idea what to do about it.
Have you by any chance sold any Android phones you used to own at one point? Google I think does associative linking based on phones. If your phone eventually found its way to India, Google might have started to think something similar. This happened to me personally, except I was both of the people in the exchange, that’s how I know.
Wow, that sounds interesting and slightly disturbing.
A bit like my experience with a friends Android phone, cross-referencing data from the contacts app to associate e-mail addresses with phone numbers on Google services.
There must be a whole bunch of systems like this, that are never surfaced to the public except trough these occasional glitches in the Matrix that only very few people actually recognize.
"explains why Facebook shows me wildly random ads for Viagra alternatives, yoga pants, conservative news, and better kitty litter than my current brand."
Scroll to the bottom of CNN - it's all rubbish ads. That's just the long tail of attention-scamming, it's not FB.
On the back-end it's likely linked to FB data though... A whole lot of sites began to lag when facebooks DNS went offline earlier this year and that was quite telling. That data on us flows all the way across the net.
Also, FB learning algorithm is not some Orwellian disaster - the ads will get marginally better if you click them and that's it, I don't suggest there is any real harm there.
Google, on the other hand, is much more powerful and they know much more about you and the results they chalk up (that you depend upon for life, work) are geared to this.
Google doesn't have a 'Zuck' to pin it on, such is populism.
And FYI the 'big culprit' is VISA. They sell your data to FB and that's a big chunk of how FB learns. But it's not in the headlines, no Congressional 'Whistle blowers' etc., they fly under the radar.
I deleted facebook and twitter in January and it's been a measurable improvement in my quality of life. Before I did, I made a point of clicking every ad for a while to f-ck the algorithm. It took only about a day of that for every ad to be personal injury lawyers.
> What a mental health nightmare it's all turned into.
So much this! Too often I will overthink why certain ads are shown to me, as I will notice how they overlap with search queries/purchases I've done recently.
Then I wonder why I didn't disable "targeted ads" in the settings for that service, when I go there to change, it's already disabled..
It's really a shame that this is the top comment, because the article itself tells a pretty interesting adventure and is not in the slightest about Facebook Ads beyond the title and introduction.
Yes Facebook is more loose with targeting then it represents to its ad buyers, but also as buyers are notoriously bad at selecting clever targeting. There is a case of misaligned incentives. The more highly-targeted ad, the more likely it leads to a sale, yet for Facebook or really any ad seller they want to maximize the revenue of every impression, and broadly targeted (irrelevant) ads fill that demand quite nicely. Less filters = more potential revenue, even at the expense of their advertiser’s ROI. It’s a balance. It’s also why if you are buying ads you never try the platform-provided tools, which claim to optimize for ROI but generally tend toward yield. Google’s liberal suggestions of broad-match keywords are not to be trusted.
Facebook is probably hiring more human psychologists and marketing specialists than developers now. It explains why they aren't really innovating anything particularly new and useful in anything but their profit funnel.
Many companies get stuck on pleasing investors more than users once they reach that stage of monopoly after they've gone public, and that's why regulation kills them once opportunistic manipulation is exposed.
Unfortunately it takes a really bad/unfortunate consequence of their manipulation to occur before regulation properly steps in.
No, you became a vice.com writer. But hey, if the store bought "qualifications" from it help you have at it, but there's better use of your time (putting down social media for a book being one)
If you find this stuff interesting, I recommend watching Cryptozoo[1]. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's definitely a more interesting film than whatever latest Marvel release happens to be making the rounds.
That's interesting. I personally abandonned ground meat and equivalents some time ago. These days I eat less meat but the meat I eat is "real" meat, usually cuts of beef that I cook quickly in a hot skillet and eat with a bit of salt. It's great that they are alternative for people that are into ground meat.
It’s unfortunate that this article is probably serving as a great ad for the scam cryptozoology school. I think the article would’ve been just as good if they’d left out the name of it.
People from the same small town, have common contacts and regularly visit the same location. Nothing out of the ordinary, but 1. the fact this it is a healthcare provider creeps people out; 2. people don't already know Facebook collects and uses that information.
Wait, if that's true its not impossible to perform targeted search to find out who is under psychiatric treatment... that's not ideal, to say the least
It's what led me to uninstall their app, and ultimately to basically stop using their website bec the desktop version is impossible to use and the mobile version is also kinda annoying. the result is I don't use it.
'known' doesn't mean everyone is aware of something, just that one person knows it.
that is a really important reality for interacting in society that I think we often miss in having discussions with others. Just because something is 'objectively true' or 'a fact' doesn't mean that everyone is aware of that fact, when people express surprise at knowledge new to them it seems odd to think that indicating others previously knew that information is somehow a helpful response?
Yes, absolutely. I do want to write about it, but there are certain aspects that I feel I can't until the situation is over, and that might be another 6 months, or as much as another 3-4 years.
Unrelated to the content, anyone else having trouble reading this article?
After three reloads from what seems to be way too many interactive ads, the page crashed entirely. I got about one paragraph in before this:
https://postimg.cc/2qQ3qPjy
Yes it was pretty brutal, they have all manner of interstitials, exit-pops, app ads, video ads, and more. Publishers thing they have to do this crap to survive, but they are actually ensuring their demise. I had to try three times to get through the article as my UX was totally disrupted when I scrolled up. Two modals stacked atop each other, hoping to catch me before I left. Yuck.
I would seriously consider donating to a cryptozoology scholarship fund.