Drowning in coincidences

This website has a new rule. No scrap that, the universe has a new rule. There is an eleventh commandment that just fell out of the heaven, in front of my doorstep. I would show you, but just as Joseph Smith, I was required to hand this stone slab in again after I finished writing it down. Anyway, the new rule is:

Before you are allowed to share your unique insights on diet, climate change, Israel, the World Economic Forum, 9/11, the Jesuits, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, the woke mind virus, the moon landing, vaccines, the existence or non-existence of viruses, evolution or the war in Ukraine on the Internet, you are required to first finish these two puzzle games, in consecutive order:

https://yuji-ap.itch.io/make-new-way

https://cassowary.itch.io/the-pigeon-post-principle

If you can’t finish these games (because there’s a bug in the game of course, I would never dare to suggest you’re not able to do it), you might be perfectly right in arguing that these games were designed by the Zionists in cahoots with the deep state and the black nobility of the Vatican, to prevent freedom-loving patriotic truth-seeking alpha males from sharing their unique insights on the human condition with other people on the Internet. But I don’t make the rules, this is simply the way things are, whether I like it or not.

But wait, there is more! There is the twelfth commandment, on the other side of the slab (God is frugal), which goes as following:

Before you want to argue that a coincidence has meaning, due it its extreme unlikeliness, you must explain to people how many possible coincidences you are taking into consideration.

Imagine you vape a high dose of cannabis in your local park. A guy drives by in a car, dressed like a clown. You freak out. Why is there a guy dressed like a clown driving by? This must be a signal from the universe! This can not just be coincidence, you never see a guy dressed like a clown! This must be the universe communicating that everything is a joke, at your expense!

Let’s ask ourselves, how many people at any given moment worldwide are dressed like a clown. Perhaps it is one in a million. But the time when they are dressed like a clown, is not going to be randomly distributed. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be dressed as a clown at 5PM when you’re returning from a children’s birthday party, than at 5AM. I am more likely to be outside at 5PM than at 5AM.

What day of the week is it? Humans are more likely to be dressed as clowns on saturday and sunday. You are more likely to be vaping cannabis at your local park, on a saturday or a sunday. Maybe you have always vaped cannabis during moments when 1 out every 300,000 people are dressed like a clown in your country.

This is the eighth time in your life, you vaped cannabis in a park. If it had happened during any of the previous seven times, you would have also considered it an extreme coincidence. If it had happened the ninth or tenth times, you would also have considered it an extreme coincidence.

If someone had driven past dressed like a clown on a motorcycle or a bicycle, or a unicycle, or simply walked by, you would have considered it an extreme coincidence too. If it had been the first person you saw while high, or the third person, you would consider it an extreme coincidence too.

What if a guy drove by, dressed like a priest? You would consider it a huge coincidence too. What if someone drove by, dressed like a vampire? You would also consider it a huge coincidence. What if you saw a clown spray-painted on a wall? What if you saw your high school crush? What if you saw a falling meteor in the sky? What if you saw a circus? What if you saw an advertisement, for a movie about clowns?

Because there are so many things you would consider to be huge coincidences, a huge coincidence is bound to happen. But once it happens, you don’t think about all the other things you would consider to be a huge coincidence. Rather, you think about that single coincidence in isolation.

You don’t need cannabis to suffer this problem, although it does help (and thereby helps you become aware of the phenomenon). Let’s take some other examples. On 10/11/2001, Rumsfeld announced that trillions were missing from the Pentagon. That’s a huge scandal that got swept up in the news. But before you draw conclusions from this, you have to ask what you would also consider a huge scandal they’re trying to distract you from. Imagine they announced on 10/11 that some judge in Florida who ruled on the election was bribed. Imagine they announced on 10/11 that a massive military aid package would go to Israel. Etc.

As a human being, you are drowning in a sea of coincidences. This is what makes murder investigations often so difficult. Consider the case of the Zodiac killer. After one of his murders, police had a suspect, park ranger Dennis Land, who:

-Followed the victims to where they parked their car

-Tampered with the evidence.

-Matches the description of the killer pretty closely.

-The wounded survivor’s first impression upon seeing him was that the killer had come back.

-Fails to radio in during the murder, violating procedure of his job.

-Matches a shoe print

But it could not have been him. And the coincidences become explainable, if we think about it. As a park ranger, he would probably have been interested in people who were parked somewhere isolated. Park rangers will tend to be rugged white men between the ages of 18 and 65, just as serial killers who manage to avoid capture.

Coincidences surround you. But when your sensitivity for recognizing coincidences, exceeds your ability to realize how many coincidences would inappropriately appear beyond coincidence to you, you lose your mind.

Let me give an example. Some guy took some hostages in a Dutch city a few days ago. But immediately, people emerge who think the whole incident was a hoax. See for example:

This guy finds the number six three times and concludes it must be a hoax. This happens when the pattern recognition mechanism just goes haywire. The brain is good at recognizing patterns, but this becomes a handicap, when the brain lacks the ability to discriminate between meaningful and meaningless patterns.

After all, let’s take a simple example. There were 150 evacuated houses, which adds up to 6. Fine. But if there had been 15, 24, 33, 42, 51, 1500, 420, 123, 132, 330, 220 or 213 evacuated houses, it would also add up to 6. But this requires meta-analysis of the pattern the brain believes to have detected.

Now what’s disturbing to me, is that this kind of argument is apparently accepted by 260 people, who like this post. In the old days, people like this would have been considered mentally ill. In today’s context, they run into each other and amplify each other’s mental illness. It goes without saying, the guy doesn’t like Zionists, Freemasons and Jesuits either:

Somewhere between “it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald” and “they evacuated 150 houses, which adds up to 6, so the hostage situation was fake”, your brain switched from driving over the interstate highway, to driving off a cliff. The problem is that being suspicious of the news is a healthy and rational attitude to have (for a number of reasons), but with no clearly definable line beyond which it ceases to be rational.

The problem I think, is that we live in a society where a lot of people end up with a conviction that the whole world is evil. When that’s what you feel at a very guttural level, your brain will look for evidence. And when it has a very weak ability to discriminate between meaningful and meaningless coincidences, you can end up convinced that the evacuation of 150 houses means a hostage situation was fake.

In general, when people really want to believe something, they will find evidence for it that will allow them to believe what they want to be true. There are many different examples one can think of, but let’s start with a pretty straightforward one. Low status white males are really eager to believe there is no such thing as a climate change crisis. But importantly, every low status white male seems to have his own unique theory, that explains why there is no problem. Sometimes a single low status white male brings up multiple contradictory arguments.

But something similar seems to happen with many criminals. They really start to believe in their own lies, to the point where they become delusional. There is the notable example of Sam-Bankman Fried, who apparently thinks investors were not harmed by his fraud.

But when you look at people like Peter Daszak and Shi-Zhengli, you start to see similar behavior, that resembles mental illness. Peter Daszak has an alt-account on Twitter called “God”, a kind of gimmick that he replies to with his main account. Or consider what Shi-Zhengli said: “The 2019-nCov is nature’s punishment on the human race for uncivilized behavior [i.e., eating wild animals]. I swear on my own life that the virus has no connection with the laboratory.”

It seems that when you are dealing with a tragedy so massive, the brain just becomes unwilling to accept an idea. In a sense, Holocaust deniers internalized the Holocaust more than most people. A tragedy of a sufficiently massive scale is something the human mind becomes unwilling to acknowledge. The same is true for the low status white males in regards to climate change. The problem is so massive, that their brains can not adjust to it.

What I noticed, is that a lot of the climate change activists do not truly seem to have internalized the problem. In a sense, the low status white males seem to believe in it more than the vegan moms. The low status white males are angry, which is a normal response if you think Mr. Schwab came up with some plot to force you to eat insects, whereas the vegan moms are annoyingly and inappropriately cheerful.

That’s where the low status white males are onto something, in the sense that none of our world leaders look as if they have internalized the problem. You are taught to fear hellfire, by priests who step off stage, undo their robes and begin to sodomize each other in plain sight. This is how atheists are born. But then, when people become atheists, the vision of a true man of God does not please them. Instead, the transformation caused by the fake believers now turns true believers into an eyesore.

Belief is a social phenomenon. You believe in something, due to the community of believers. Sure, there are people who go out, read G. K. Chesterton and think “well he’s onto something, I had never thought of it like that myself”. But those people are a small minority, generally autistic young men.

What’s far more likely to happen is that someone likes old architecture, doesn’t like promiscuous sex, doesn’t like anal sex, doesn’t like exotic food, doesn’t like drugs (except beer and coffee), doesn’t like arrogant self-confident flashy people, doesn’t like modern art, doesn’t like kids dressed up like the opposite gender, is creeped out by Halloween and stories of demonic possession, is afraid of death and as a result of all those factors ends up drawn to whatever exists to cope with those attitudes in their cultural context. Then when they find Catholicism, they will read some book and see the book as validating their choice to embrace a particular identity.

And that’s exactly where climate change activism falls apart. We never really had leaders, who led by example. It’s very rare to have people think about something in very abstract terms and come to their own belief on it. Most of the time, people order new information based on where they have stored old information. As an example, if some talkshow host or a guy with a lot of Twitter followers declares that electric cars are “woke”, or wearing masks is “woke”, then that’s where the brain puts it. There was a brief period in early 2020 when masks were a right wing meme, before the whole thing flipped. Elon Musk is pretty clever and still tries to make climate change Salonfähig among low status white males, but it is too late for that, as the line in the sand has already been drawn.

Almost always, we believe what we believe, because we want to believe it. There are two ways to deal with this realization. To start with, we can start considering the standard of evidence we use for our worldview. This requires us to ask ourselves some things. For example, I am very worried about overpopulation and climate change. But did I have these worries, before I understood these topics very well?

No, I originally set out to refute those worries. I originally thought to myself I could prove the world has room for tens of billions of people, or that climate change is caused by the sun. It’s only as the evidence began piling up, that I changed my mind. And even after changing my mind, I still from time to time clung onto inventions, as evidence that things would just work out. As an example, a few years ago I had a period where I was quite convinced that self-driving cars and lab-grown meat would largely solve the problem for us. By now I am convinced that won’t happen. So this history suggests to me I have a relatively decent standard of evidence that I require for my worldviews. And although the implications of my worldview are dramatic and put me at odds with mainstream society, I consider my worldview to be grounded in reason.

But rather than just asking ourselves whether we have inappropriate standards of evidence for things we want to believe, we must ask ourselves, why we want to believe the things we believe. Because most of the time, our desire to believe something is true tends to be the main force that leads us to believe it to be true. I think this is largely down to a kind of meta-view, of the brain trying to preserve its sense of self. What is your identity? It is ultimately, the view that you have of the world. If that view were to change radically, you are no longer you.

I don’t just mean abstract ideologies like whether you are a Trotskyist or a Maoist. I really mean everything, from what your favorite color is, to whether you enjoy dancing, to whether you would be annoyed if someone greeted you by kissing you on your cheek, to what you think is the best way to invest money, to where you want to live when you’re 75, to whether you think your dad was a good parent. Everything. All of this makes you you. If all these things were rearranged, it would effectively be almost the same as your death.

And so the brain’s death-avoiding instinct, also makes it reluctant to very radically change how it perceives the world. This can mean in practice that if your family was cruel, if your classmates were cruel, if your teachers were cruel, if your first girlfriend was cruel and if your boss was cruel, you’re probably not going to grow up, look at our society and say: “Well everyone I ever met was a dick to me, but this guy Joe Biden has good intentions and Kamela Harris seems pretty competent too and Bill Gates is really eager to solve the world’s problems.” It would represent a very radical break, in how you have always personally experienced relationships and power dynamics.

This is why it’s very difficult, to change what you want to believe. It can be achieved to some degree, with psychedelics. But this tends to require an experience, that feels very similar to dying. And this is a subject for some other time.

16 Comments

    • I don’t know any coding, but perhaps you could divide the comments in your posts. Some would be free-for-all, nothing is taboo, indulgent, etc. And then others would be manual approval, actual arguments, not just pure randomness? Just a suggestion.

      I would like to post some long-form stuff in the comments section.

  1. I am so stupid that I could not even start either game. (Chrome on Linux)

    It is difficult to be in the business of discussing conspiracies without going full schizo and rejecting reality altogether. I have seen this happen with numerous substack writers who went completely nuts. I do not want to be like those writers. I cannot afford to go full schizo because I have a family, kids, good net worth, and less-than-perfect health. So, there are topics I stay out of.

    And yet, numerous conspiracies exist and most international politics and wars involve various conspiracies. Many conspiracies are headless (no Zion elders) and self-coalescing, the most benign being the Santa Claus conspiracy. The less benign ones are people supporting the country holding their ethnicity while pretending to be driven by general humane principles.

    Many seeming conspiracies are driven by financial incentives, such as the capitalist conspiracy described in Das Kapital.

    Conspiratorial thinking is a self-preservation mechanism.

    If a conspiracist thinks that Bill Gates is out to make humanity infertile, such beliefs are completely harmless for their holder, whether true or not.

    The same type of conspiracist living 80 years ago, suspecting that Hitler is not actually sending Jews to Palestine or Eastern Europe, may save his life when he goes into hiding despite the threat of execution in case of failure to show up at the “Jew Palestine migration office.” The conspiracist, asking a question as to how a good thing needs a death threat of execution to enforce it, would be massively correct and would have a 1% chance of surviving, as opposed to having a zero percent chance of surviving for everyone who showed up with passports and all valuables to the train station to “board for Palestine.”

    You see?

    • “The less benign ones are people supporting the country holding their ethnicity while pretending to be driven by general humane principles”

      Without dismissing this one, it seems to me that there are many contradictions like this. Things like being worried about climate change, but living a modern lifestyle. Or being an old RSPCA lady concerned about the welfare of cats, who feeds all the strays pet food sourced from Africa, oblivious to the gazzilions of migrating beasts that piled up and died against fences so livestock could be raised for pet food. Or being concerned about slavery, but buying a mobile phone manufactured with elements produced by slaves.

      And on and on.

      I have no magic bullet for any of this. It just seems to me that our system cannot hope to solve the problems that it creates.

      There is no free lunch.

      However, the difference between the morals we have, and drawing benefits from various ‘immoral’ activities of the system causes us pain nonetheless.

      Most people deal with it just by denying it. And if they happen to feel really bad about it, they might take their denial to the next level by buying the biggest car they can, altering it to emit great clouds of black smoke, and joining the ‘coal rollers’.

      It’s enough to do your head in really, and probably best to just try not to think about it for your own wellbeing.

      On the conspiracy angle, yeah there are conspiracies. They’re everywhere really. People in backrooms make decisions, without consulting us, that will affect our lives every day. And it’s wise to be paranoid about what those decisions may entail – people are predators after all.

      Both of these problems are perhaps worse in a modern world than in a more primitive one. The size, scale, complexity of the modern system means that we’re often not aware of the damage we do, or if we are aware, we can’t do anything about it. Similarly, the vast bureaucracies that support these ‘conspiracies’ (and all governments are permanent conspiracies) strip individuals of agency to really change much either.

      People become cogs in the vast machine, they perform their function in prescribed ways until they wear out, then they get replaced.

      And so on, and so forth.

      The painful part is that there just don’t seem to be any good answers. All of these problems have been around a long time, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere:
      – poverty/inequality? still there
      – animal welfare? tick
      – indigenous disadvantage? tick
      – ecological issues? tick

      And I’m sure the list just goes on and on and on.

      There’s a lot to carry about on our consciences. I can see why people turn to God. A little forgiveness might help salve some of the injuries that can’t be denied away.

      • I suspect all of these ‘wicked’ problems will all be there, until something comes along to sweep the whole lot away.

        And then, whatever that is, will probably bring its own intractable problems – or perhaps I’m just being pessimistic.

        What to do in the meantime?

        Like you, I need to work to make a living.

        I try to live up to society’s moral standards. It’s painful, but I do try. And I beat myself against the bars of my cage whenever I think it will make a difference.

        On a more positive note, as Rintrah pointed out recently, it’s kind of miraculous that this whole system doesn’t fall over. Every time it looks doomed, a miracle seems to save it.

        Perhaps there is a higher power there after all, helping us out when we need it, and working to improve things in ways that we cannot hope to understand.

        Sounds like heaven really.

        Might take a while to get there though.

  2. Here is an example of an interesting coincidence (or “cohencidence” as the LSWMs in the Zerohedge comment section like to say, hehe):

    ‘Omicron’ is an anagram of ‘moronic’, and ‘Delta Omicron’ is an anagram of ‘media control’.

    > Before you are allowed to share your unique insights on diet, climate change …

    The last time that I shared my unique insights on diet on this blog, you changed the website heading to “we try to fool ourselves with words into not realizing what we already understand” which I’m pretty sure may have been in reference to that dietary comment that I wrote.

    P.S. I recently discovered this clip from the Dark Horse podcast that referenced your website:

    https://youtu.be/mchcfwkxmk8?t=1664

    “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion”

    Funny comment from Bret regarding your blog posts not being on Substack, I seem to recall you saying a good while ago that you were considering creating a Substack where those who became paid subscribers could “vote” on what topics you would write about next, that would be pretty interesting.

  3. I search nobody seemed to use the word coincidence for along time here. You seem to have a very nice and happy world view, I guess thats why I like reading you. The smartest virologist just went for easy solutions, just made some mistakes with 5 billion people. Nothing sinister, oh well. Whoops. You see this?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es68f3BKqK4

  4. I never used to know there were conspiracy theories about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. I also didn’t know much about the event itself beyond the basic facts (or “facts,” if one prefers), and I have no problem believing powerful, shadowy forces would have wanted him dead.

    Then around the 50th anniversary, I started seeing the conspiracy theories. I didn’t read any refutations of these theories, and thus to this day almost everything I’ve ever read about RFK’s murder has been trying to convince me the official story is a lie.

    And yet, I was and remain unmoved by these theories, even unopposed, because they are so stupid and implausible. Maybe there’s a non-idiotic version out there I haven’t seen, but certainly what I read is typical of what circulates as the forbidden truth about RFK’s assassination.

    This is a monitory example to me about making sure to maintain skepticism.

  5. TL;DR

    I usually try to get the context from the comments. I am not sure what you are on about now. I am kind of ambivalent about the whole thing. To me, your views are pretty tame.

  6. “It’s only as the evidence began piling up, that I changed my mind.”

    I have no problem with your approach. But what if we are in the middle of ice age or something similar? E.g. the recent record-breaking rise in North Atlantic Ocean temperature contributes to “climate change”. I’m not taking a position on “climate change” topic…

  7. > But rather than just asking ourselves whether we have inappropriate standards of evidence for things we want to believe, we must ask ourselves, why we want to believe the things we believe. Because most of the time, our desire to believe something is true tends to be the main force that leads us to believe it to be true. I think this is largely down to a kind of meta-view, of the brain trying to preserve its sense of self. What is your identity? It is ultimately, the view that you have of the world. If that view were to change radically, you are no longer you.

    This is a perceptive insight, but if one follows this logic to its conclusion, we would endorse “radical skepticism” or become Buddhists espousing “no-self” theory, or just utter nihilists.

    Seems to me whoever created this simulation didn’t WANT its inhabitants learning how the “simulation” is put together or what makes it tick. Instead, it seems our Creator WANTED us to be blind and dumb and to just follow our predetermined passions wildly, as this creates the necessary drama and Loosh that our Creator craves. The

  8. The other day I saw a clown carved into a tree with a poorly drawn Hortler swastika next to it.

  9. It’s funny. I started out believing what, back then, was called AGW and has since morphed into the anomalous ‘climate change’. Then I started looking beyond the regime media headlines (I worked as a journalist for 25 years in the regime media), and the more scientists I read who were not dependent on writing narrative-financed papers aimed at blaming climate change almost exclusively on human activity, the more I realized there’s far more, and less, to the story than the narrative-financed scientists and their narrative-financed activists were telling me.

    I could link many of them for you, Rintrah, but I know how difficult it is, even for intelligent people (perhaps especially for intelligent people) to change their mind twice.

    Suffice it to say, nature will have its day, unless the Bill Gates-financed ghouls who are hoping to seed the atmosphere with Sun-blocking chemicals actually succeed in driving us back into the Little Ice Age. They are optimistic.

    The unpalatable fact is that ‘climate change’ (as opposed to climate change) is a hoax, and the evidence is all around, whether in papers written by legitimately esteemed scientists who found their access to mainstream periodicals cancelled as soon as they went off the reservation, or in the actions of the elites who perpetrate the hoax, yet who are inexplicably spending trillions of dollars in new cities situated inches above the allegedly rising sea level. Just check out Abu Dhabi or Dhubai next time youre in the Gulf. Holland is too old to qualify.

    Lastly, one should never (though we see it happen daily) rely on our eyes to persuade us of ‘climate change’. The hurricanes are not growing in ferocity, the untampered thermometers are not registering the ‘hottest ever’ temperatures on any sustained basis, and receding glaciers have been observed in North America for at least 150 years, long before even the narrative claims human activity started heating up the atmosphere. We are living in a post-Little Ice Age world, and I and the plants thankful for both the warming higher CO2 levels, though maybe not for the ultimately unsustainable population growth that accompanied it.

    Apart from that, your stuff is generally insightful enuf to be worth reading.

    Oh, and one of the puzzles wouldn’t start. If there was a trick to it, I wasn’t going to bother. And the other one was neverending. And FWIW, my IQ is 134.

  10. Here’s a coincidence I saw about twenty years ago. Flew to Belgium from the US for a long weekend. On Saturday morning take the train from Brussels to Bruges. See the Michelangelo in the Church of our Lady and take a canal ride that goes past one of the exteriors from a 40 year old Audrey Hepburn movie – The Nun’s Story.

    After the canal ride, we decide we’re sleepy so we take the train back to Brussels. Get into the hotel room, and that 40 year old movie is playing on one of the 3 English language stations available on the TV – BBC, so not even local.

    And – the statue is in the movie. Prominently. But I never even noticed that the first time because I was so stunned that I’d just heard about this movie literally 3 hours earlier on a boat in Bruges.

    Do the math on that.

  11. But also, to your point, I noticed that one of the respirator manufactures is called Covidian fairly early on in the covid lockdowns. I just thought that was kind of funny.

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