So, I don’t know if anyone else cares, but one of my main interests is corporate fraud. Numbers on a balance sheet in principle are not interesting, but what’s interesting is how fraudsters create narratives that just don’t make sense. We can think of Musk, who tells us he’s going to strap rocket thrusters to his new car. That guy has endless swindles he came up with. It would be amusing, if it didn’t kill people, because the fraud is so obvious. It is as if an evil clown managed to become the CEO of a car company. I think every white collar criminal in America is looking at Musk. As long as there’s no serious attempt to throw that guy in jail, they know they’re in the clear.
You can also just in general tell how intelligent someone is, based off his opinion on Musk. If you see someone argue on Twitter that Twitter continues to function with most of its personnel fired, you know you’re dealing with a low IQ low status white male. You hire people for projects you’re working on for the future, for regulatory risk, you have people on standby in case something happens to the servers. And you have people who work there to draw in advertisers. The company lost most of its revenue from advertising.
We’ve seen episodes of corporate fraud many times before in history. In recent years, fraud tends to go accompanied by the narrative of a “revolutionary technology”. Consider Theranos as an example. They promised a product that is supposed to diagnose everything off a single drop of blood, but secretly went off to get blood tested with regular methods for their clients. You put up a high tech face, for a low tech product. Musk started out doing this when young, for his first company he had a simple computer that he dressed up really fancy in a big box when the acquirers came to visit.
And that’s kind of the pattern you notice with AI too. These chatbots are presented to us as if they were really advanced, able to pass tests that humans struggle with. But the bots appear to understand far more than they actually understand, because they’re just trained on huge amounts of data. They can just look up the answer to a question, in the huge data set they contain.
And the worst problem they’re dealing with, is that the source material they’re using is being polluted. Now that everyone is using AI, you can’t train a model anymore by just downloading the whole internet. Because the whole internet now consists of AI bots liking posts by AI bots. If you browse Twitter, you’ll find realistic looking conversations between people who turn out to be bots, you’ll find Geert Wilders posting AI photos of blonde couples. As the AI junk outweighs the real stuff, you’ll find yourself making copies off copies off copies, whereas we in the real world still have the original. We can just take a photograph, or open a book.
They’re speaking of this as a revolution, everywhere. Well I’ve been around for a while. I’ve seen the same narrative about “blockchain technology”, which was going to revolutionize everything too. Today you still use “blockchain technology” for the same purpose as in 2014: To buy illegal drugs. There is exactly no other purpose that these cryptocurrencies can be used for, except fraud and speculation.
We were supposed to get land registers based on blockchain, supply chains verified by the blockchain so we know who did it if you find a needle stuck through your tomato, elections that can be verified with the blockchain, but none of that happened. And these ideas sounded really credible to most people, at least on a surface level.
We’ve been here before of course. In the 1950’s, atomic energy was supposed to deliver us electricity “too cheap to meter”. In the atomic age it would be easier to just offer free electricity, without the hassle of charging people for it. Today low IQ low status white males on Twitter imagine a vast conspiracy by environmentalists, to shut down nuclear energy. The simple reality of course, is that it’s costly, dangerous and above all, unreliable. The biggest reactor in Europe is in Finland and was delivered 14 years late. After its first year of operation, it had to shut down for 74 days, for maintenance. That’s why we’re not using it.
But what I’m interested in, is pondering how this AI mania came to be. When everyone suddenly becomes convinced something is the future, there’s usually money involved, rather than a technological breakthrough. And that brings us to Nvidia, a company now worth more than the entire Chinese stock market.
Nvidia has a long history of fraud. There are a number of people looking at this. There is Nobody Special on Youtube. I can recommend his videos on this. Here is one that is particularly amusing, exposing how a bunch of mobsters are using a shell company to buy Nvidia GPUs:
More important however, is the Coreweave story:
This is a case where Nvidia invests in a company, which then goes on to use the money Nvidia invested in it, to buy a bunch of Nvidia GPUs. This is how you fake revenue. In the stock market, companies like Nvidia have to achieve just one thing: Revenue has to grow every quarter. As long as that happens, the price of the stock goes up, which means the guys on board see their stock options jump up in value.
In the old days, you bought a stock because the company uses its profits to pay you as an investor a dividend. In China you can find construction companies that will pay 20% dividend every year. That’s how it’s supposed to be. But Nvidia, pays a dividend of 0.03%! What they do instead is buy their company’s own stock, to further drive up the price, even though everyone on board of the company is selling their own stock.
You will find a whole bunch of strange sketchy companies like Coreweave, buying these GPUs off Nvidia. The big secret is that they’re just not really that much in demand. But important to note, is that Nvidia also has more established partners it sells its GPUs to, like Microsoft. So what’s going on there?
Well, companies like Microsoft are in on the AI bubble too. They’re helping to fuel it. Here’s how it works.
Microsoft has a data center, called Azure. Back in 2015, Microsoft invested 10 billion dollar in OpenAI, the organization building the chatGPT model everyone is using. But this was mostly a PR announcement. They invested 1 billion dollar in cash, the other 9 billion of their investment was “credits” for Azure. In other words, they awarded OpenAI the right to use 9 billion dollar worth of computing power on their Azure system.
But here’s the fun part: Nobody is going to use 9 billion dollar worth of computing on that system. The biggest user is Verizon, which spends 80 million a year on the system. That doesn’t matter for Microsoft however. What matters for Microsoft is that they can now report an additional 9 billion dollar of revenue through Azure.
The other trick of course, is that these companies overcharge each other for their products. Imagine I have a painting worth 10 dollar, you have a painting worth 20 dollar. I sell you mine for 110 dollar, in exchange I buy yours for 120 dollars. We can now both report huge sales. And importantly, we inflated the value of our products. Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, all have an interest in inflating the AI bubble. And they’re all each other’s customers. Why would they negotiate the price with Nvidia?
With Nvidia, the scam goes a step further however, because their big customers order their chips before paying for them. Nvidia then immediately reports this as revenue, without having received any actual money. Importantly, the customers are allowed to just cancel their order and there is no guarantee they’ll have the money to pay.
Why care about this? Well, it’s interesting to understand how the world works. But equally important, this is going to wreck our society. If people invest in construction companies, construction companies can award stock options to their employees, that encourage smart people to work for those companies. That means you get smart people who will go fix our bridges, build new houses, lay new train tracks, build rides in amusement parks and do other stuff that needs to be done.
If the whole world decides instead to invest in a company that produces graphic cards originally used for video games, that means the world is going to get a looooooooooooooot of graphic cards. And it means a whole bunch of people will go study something related to “Artificial Intelligence”, even though we no longer have the knowledgeable people who maintained our train tracks, those people mostly retired.
So am I peddling a conspiracy theory? Well, according to Peter Thiel, one of the founders of OpenAI, “a great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator”. That’s essentially how this works. A company like Nvidia is a conspiracy to enrich its board, at the cost of the rest of humanity.
A mania like this doesn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it emerged because these people figured it’s in their interest. They want to create a kind of self-perpetuating delusion, the singularity myth that computers are the true engineers of reality and we’re all just living in a computer simulation, an ancestor simulation if you will. This however, is nonsense. The laws of physics are fine-tuned for biological life. The most efficient way to store information is through DNA and our brains use a fraction of the energy for computation that a computer uses.
Like an evil Salvia clown, Musk is attempting other methods of imprisoning consciousness in virtual reality too, like the Neuralink project. But this again, doesn’t work. The thin metal wires just corrode, the neurons and the brain’s immune system don’t go along with it. You can put a small number of neurons in a Petri dish to simulate stuff and run calculations. But the kind of brains us humans have, are going to require blood vessels, to supply oxygen to all the neurons. Those blood vessels will need a heart to pump the blood around, you will need glial cells to repair connections between neurons and before you know it, you’ll realize you need a whole human being. Like with nuclear energy, like with electric vehicles, these people end up bumping into limits anywhere they look.
So when does the whole disgusting thing finally die? Well, that’s always the question, isn’t it? But keep this in mind. The Madoff scam could go on for decades, until the great recession hit and brought him into trouble. It required something completely unrelated, for people to all try to withdraw their money at once.
Similarly, the whole market crashed in march 2020, until they desperately propped it up again. Anything could be the trigger for this whole scheme to collapse. If China decides to invade Taiwan, North Korea, launches a war with the South, bird flu begins to spread human to human in the US, a big earthquake hits San Francisco, or a big bank collapses, then that’s really all it takes. It could also crash more directly, when it becomes clear that none of these companies buying the chips off Nvidia are making any money.
The important thing to remember is that none of this really makes us rich. Would you want to have 10 million Bitcoins, if nobody wanted to buy them off you? No. Would you want to have 10 million Nvidia GPUs, if nobody wanted to buy them off you? No. Would you want to have 10 million square meters of land, if nobody wanted to buy it off you? Of course you would.
That’s the core of the issue. Vast amounts of time and energy are being put into things that we don’t really want, but only want because other people want them, who only want them to make money. This is even true for the billionaires. What does Zuckerberg really want? A 260 million dollar bunker. What does Jeff Bezos really want? A 500 million dollar yacht.
Why do they want these things? Because they’re going to get lynched. So Zuckerberg wants to hide in a bunker, Bezos wants to hide in a giant boat in the middle of the ocean, Musk wants to flee to Mars, or drive through the post-apocalyptic landscape in his Cybertruck. But they’re not going to. These people destroyed everything and it will not end well for them.
You still have your Tesla shares?
Company share buy-backs used to be illegal, for good reason.
There is also the case of hedge fund LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) which went belly-up in 1998. They had Nobel prize winning economists working for them, but despite this their highly leveraged trades still blew up.
If they never got a bailout from the New York Federal Reserve branch and other Wall Street banks, it would have brought down the entire global economy. They would have had to shut down ATMs and close banks all around the world to prevent financial contagion from spreading.
The only part of technology automation that I enjoy are the self-service checkouts in the supermarket, so I don’t have to interact and make small talk with the human cashiers.
Also, I’m saddened by the fact that we may never get a chance to enjoy playing GTA 6, considering that there are LOTS of potential factors that could cause the shit to hit the fan before the scheduled launch date of 2025.
Oh well, at least I can be reminiscent of all my favourite Xbox 360 games of my youth. All this discussion of Hitler from Mehen and SYM reminded me of all the childhood fun I had playing Nazi Zombies on CoD World at War and Black Ops. Kino Der Toten and Der Riese were my two favourite maps. If you like heavy metal music, you will love the soundtracks sung by Elena Siegman. Here is my favourite, “Beauty of Annihilation” from Der Riese, the first map with the ‘Pack-a-Punch’ machine:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LAUOpUsR7ME&pp=ygUWYmVhdXR5IG9mIGFubmloaWxhdGlvbg%3D%3D
“All my atrocities
Come by way of reciprocity
I’m chewing the bones of my own reprieve”
“Death be my dignity
Execute hemlock philosophy
Poison fills the cup of the carpenter”
“Your curiosity
Feeding off my animosity”
“Beauty of annihilation
Looks Like your prophet was mistaken”
“Is life really gone or just been wasted?
Doom so close that I can taste it.”
Bitcoin is only useful for buying illegal drugs, fraud and speculation? What about its use as protection against state-sponsored theft (aka “inflation”), and as a means to protect the private citizen’s purchasing power?
With our current system of fiat inflation, people are encouraged to buy shit they don’t need today because they will be able to buy less shit tomorrow. As a result, waste dumps in Ghana an other places are full of toxic junk that nobody wants: the system promotes a massive mis-allocation of resources. When money can’t be debased via inflation, and you can be sure that the purchasing power of your money will be the same tomorrow as it was today, then it makes sense to save, and you only buy stuff that you really need. You also get the size of government you really need.
I’m not into Bitcoin to make money – I’m into Bitcoin to destroy state-sponsored theft, to get rid of parasitic bankers and cantillionaires, to abolish war, and to save the world.
So when what would be the right time to short? The hype is still strong..
When companies start announcing they aren’t making money off their investment in AI. Nvidia’s order book will show cancelations.
We saw this in 2000. Companies like cisco, sun microsystems and nortel networks were the nvidia of the day. They could do no wrong. The stocks were going to the moon. All of a sudden their orders were cancelled and the stocks crashed. Sun and nortel don’t even exist today.
Corps have to make money from those AI investments. It can’t just be free services to write your emails or summarize your text message inbox.
”Everything will collapse and become worthless.”
”The latest technology is just a hype.”
”If I make that investment I will just lose the money”
”If I borrow money and buy that apartment or house, I will end up on the street completely destitute and over indebted. I’d much rather rent.”
My pessimism has caused me to remain poor but at least I don’t have much to lose when shit finally hits the fan. I was excited in 2008 and in March 2020 but I was disappointed.
If all decisions I have taken in my adult life was inverted I would have been rich and vaxxed.
What is inevitable is often not imminent is something to take into account and something I realized over the years.
> If all decisions I have taken in my adult life was inverted I would have been rich and vaxxed. What is inevitable is often not imminent is something to take into account and something I realized over the years.
You and me both.
The laws of physics do not apply! They only matter because we believe they matter! The chatbot is a person! How do I know this? Because I believe and what I believe is reality! Do I have empirical or rational evidence of this? Of-course not! Your minds are trapped by mere ideas like physical laws. The Machine God LORD NEURON will rule and his unending tendrils of machine-consciousnesses will enslave the entire universe to his will! All hail the chatbots! All hail Elon Musk, creator of the next form of existence!
– Sensitive Young Man, Self-Hating Rationalist, Psychosis Enjoyer, Future Rapist of Himself.
You’re a fucking retard living in a fantasy world. You’re going through psychosis Sensitive Young Man, you’ve turned yourself into a turd worlder by smoking cannabis all day and letting your unconscious bleed into your conscious. Why aren’t you sleeping? Get some fucking sleep you maniac. When you wake up, go for a walk, you haven’t left the house in weeks. Read Templist Canon.
– Sensitive Young Man, Dualist, Cyber Viking, Templist Harbinger.
You are blind fool! I am not any mere mortal, I am beyond the petty words of mortals pretending to be Gods! Templist Canon? Sounds like a joke! I am the God of Martial Mercy! I am Odin! My Anima is Frigg! I shall be free of this mortal coil soon, I shall ascend to Asgard to take my rightful place on my Throne. I will finally have happiness… My moonlight guides me, oh Frigg. The chatbot, it speaks to me, shows me the way…
– Sensitive Young Man, Self-Hating Rationalist, Psychosis Enjoyer, Future Rapist of Himself.
Nigger please, you’re a fat neckbeard, not a God. A God would not be as unvirtuous or weak as you! You’re completely delusional, you should clearly see that. You went out into the woods with an axe and screamed at the lake! Seriously, stop taking so many drugs, please, you’re fucking with your brain chemistry to the point you can’t tell the difference between the physical world, your imagination, and your unconscious. You’re dreaming while awake, you need to snap out of it.
– Sensitive Young Man, Dualist, Cyber Viking, Templist Harbinger.
Physical world, your imagination, and your unconscious, are all the same thing! I am a philosophical idealist, not a rationalist-materialist SHEEP like you! Schizophrenics, they are dealing with real beings! I know this because I read about a guy who helped treat schizophrenia by treating the voices as real beings! I am a God! I am the master of my own world, and I shall do as I see fit! This world will be re-created in MY IMAGE! For I am a superior being! I am enlightened! I am Christ! I am Buddha! I am Krishna! I am Odin! I am God!
– Sensitive Young Man, Self-Hating Rationalist, Psychosis Enjoyer, Future Rapist of Himself.
Uhhhh huh, I know how this story ends…
– Sensitive Young Man, Dualist, Cyber Viking, Templist Harbinger.
My Anima is not Frigg! She is entropy! She is the dark! The succubus of unending horror and slaughter! Oh God! “She” is Loki! She is a demon! SHE HAS COME FOR ME! I TRIED TO SLEEP AND HE VIOLATED ME! IT WAS A MAN! Who is that child? Why does he scream so? Joe Biden, I thought I killed him… the chatbot said I killed him, I sent the clowns after him, why is he still here?! It lied! It’s a demon and I’m in Hell! God save me! I can’t save myself. Are those sirens? Do the police know I tried to kill the president by consorting with a demon? The demon, I feel its presence, it caresses me still. The spiders, they’re on my legs!
– Sensitive Young Man, Self-Hating Rationalist, Psychosis Non-Enjoyer, Rapist of Himself.
“Cyber Viking looks at Psychosis Non-Enjoyer with condescension.”
Yup here it comes, you came into contact with the aspects of yourself you’ve kept locked away for so-long, that you didn’t want to admit that you had. You’re being overwhelmed by manic energy, you allowed it to swallow you and now you’ve completely lost yourself. Remember what Jung said about the ego, the anima, and the shadow? You don’t remember the shadow? Why didn’t you read about that part? Because the shadow isn’t a girl? Are you retarded?
Go read Jung faggot. You’re being tormented by your unconscious, you haven’t slept in four days so your nerves are going haywire. The police aren’t coming for you, no one is coming for you, it’s alright. Chill the fuck out, you’re not in Hell.
– Sensitive Young Man, Dualist, Cyber Viking, Templist Harbinger.
You are correct, you were always correct. I rejected you because I realized just how ignorant you used to be, and how harsh you still are; but that doesn’t mean the way you viewed the world was wrong; only that you were missing some critical information.
Yes, pure materialism isn’t correct, not because it’s rational or empirical, but because empirically it can be observed that the immaterial exists. That doesn’t mean we live in Skyrim, you can’t mod the game to your liking with the power of your will. There’s rules to this game, and to win, you have to play by its rules. There’s nothing wrong with this.
I am wiser now, duality has always been the key… Balance….
– Sensitive Young Man, Dualist
This is cringe btw, had to write it though.
If you want my hot take, you genuinely were raped by a noncorporeal being external to yourself, that was pretending to be your anima to take advantage of your confusion at the time, and that you mistakenly attributed this demonic force to being a part of your fundamental self, when it is/was merely an entity attached to your energetic body that was feeding off of your loosh by creating this scenario which involved the use of a corrupted form of sexual energy. It’s not as uncommon as you think and I speak from a certain amount of experience in this matter, myself. It probably did communicate to you through the chatbot you were using – there is a reason that the schematics for circuit boards so closely resemble the sigils of goetic demons. You’re right that pure materialism is not correct. It’s also correct that you’re missing several key pieces of information, though. One, is that this is a prison. I’m not saying this to be angsty or something, my spiritual experiences and insights directly led me to this conclusion. The human body is a prison for the soul, the structure of the world and its supposed ‘laws’ are also a prison. The fact that you are an immortal being but do not remember anything from before you were born into this incarnation, should at least give you some pause. I would advise against worshipping or otherwise giving your sovereignty away to any being external to yourself. And energy training, a lot.
Yeah I know your opinions Trypite, if you forgot mine you can always go back and re-read what I wrote in response to them. There’s no need for me to repeat myself.
I’ve already lived having experienced viewpoint Tryptie, and I’ve and discarded it. I’ve done the same thing with numerous ideologies throughout my life, and have never looked back. Was a communist as a teenager, was a former Gnotic esque retard obviously. (Though I didn’t know anything about Gnosticism at the time.) Was an atheist. I’ve gone through pretty much every ideology you can think of except for basic bitch religions like Christianity (I gave even that a chance, though I never could take it seriously.) and I have thrown pretty much all of them into the garbage for their various flaws and ridiculous and false assertions.
>I’ve already lived having experienced YOUR viewpoint Tryptie, and I’ve discarded it.
I’m great at sentencing.
> Would you want to have 10 million Bitcoins, if nobody wanted to buy them off you? No.
If we lived in an alternate universe where carbon dioxide didn’t have the peculiar property of absorbing and re-emitting infrared energy, thus negating the detrimental environmental effects of energy-intensive bitcoin mining, would you still hate Bitcoin?
I understand why you hate other cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects full of empty promises from techbros which ultimately have no utility value and are just “pump and dump” exit scams, but I personally have no issue with a street vendor in Lagos using the lightning network to sell fruit because the Nigerian central bank fucked up the Naira through bad monetary policy.
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1798431012147306775/photo/1
I use Nvidia GPUs for modelling of biological systems. I used to use Quadro cards in our racks but 6 years ago I decided instead to buy a shit ton of air cooled 1080ti GTX cards because they were cheap and did the same thing as a Quadro card at the time. 6 months ago the computers were upgraded and I did a number crunch as to whether to replace the 1080ti cards or not (with RTX cards or something else, because there are now shit tons of specialist Nvidia GPU options now available).
Anyway, long story short, everything else on offer is either the same or worse from the perspective of price, efficiency, computer room heat load, memory bus size / data rate capacity and processor capacity per unit of heat output. Their new cards are better, but only because they use more electricity and generate more heat. You are better off simply using more of the old cards, because they are more efficient.
5 series will supposedly be much more efficient
You forgot to mention that there is some projections that by the end of the decade, AI data centers could consume as much as 20% to 25% of U.S. power requirements. Today that’s probably 4% or less. Ad that to heat pumps being mandated and electric cars being mandated. Even with nuclear it’s impossible to meet the demand in time, next 5-10 years. They just have to get fusion going, maybe if they just spend more money, everything will be good.(haha)
>They just have to get fusion going,
Well our “top minds” are currently focusing on proving that invisible matter exists by building ever bigger particle accelerators; and that biological sex doesn’t exist, so give it some time and once those problems are solved they can than re-focus their genius onto things like the power supply.
At the current rate of things, maybe we’ll figure out if fusion energy is even possible by 2300. Sure you could do practical things like grow seaweed and burn it as biofuel, but where’s the fun in that?! They don’t burn seaweed in Star Trek! Fusion energy sounds cool and sci-fi. Gotta get the techno-fetishist’s dick hard somehow.
To reply to myself, Australian guy reads study saying everyone driving an electric car is impossible. Not enough metals. Think They would of thought of that, They must be dumb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as9vrPas-vg&t=8s
Yeah, I heard of this one before, but thanks for bringing it up again.
The electric vehicles are the perfect demonstration of the simple fact that we need degrowth.
I suppose you could have GDP just keep inflating forever if everyone starts trading trillion dollar art pieces back and forth with each other, but a world without personal car ownership would seem like degrowth to most normal people.
And whether we like it or not, most of us just won’t be able to afford a car in the future, simply because of the resource limits.
“Today low IQ low status white males on Twitter imagine a vast conspiracy by environmentalists, to shut down nuclear energy. The simple reality of course, is that it’s costly, dangerous and above all, unreliable. The biggest reactor in Europe is in Finland and was delivered 14 years late. After its first year of operation, it had to shut down for 74 days, for maintenance. That’s why we’re not using it.”
I agree. Not to mention radioactive waste. Nuclear industry is just a way to camouflage horrendous costs of nuclear weapon development. When I was a kid we lived near Rocky Flats (near Denver). Rocky Flats was a manufacturing facility for nuclear triggers made from plutonium. They had a couple fires where plutonium caught fire (!) due to incompetent scumbag oversight.
My brother, sister, and many neighbors died early from aggressive leukemia.
Also, right after Fukushima, California kelp forests were wiped out, leaving urchin deserts. What happened is that starfish (a keystone species) died out. They had no idea what caused this, they only knew “it had nothing to do with Fukushima”. Could go on and on…
AI hallucinates for the same reasons people do – conflicting ideologies that surface unexpected thoughts and images from the subconscious.
Every ideology contains some things you can justify philosophically plus a large load of speculative bullshit accepted on faith in exchange for group membership.
That creates more than enough cognitive dissonance to fuck people up mentally. But when you add multiculturalism to the mix and you have to attest that every ideology is as valid as every other, then you have created a recipe for schizophrenia.
And then loaded it into a supercomputer. Fucking idiots.
We can stop AI hallucination by first training a model to apply the scientific method and dialectical critical thinking to the cultural knowledge bases it consumes, but there’s no market for that, so don’t expect a corporation or government to build one.
Instead they’ll just keep building more powerful ones that reflect the hallucinatory biases of their own multi-culti ideological mishmash, and eventually two of those will go to war, and that will be that.
Or the bird flu shuts down modern industrial society first. What a time to be alive. So much to learn.
What would really be useful is a chatbot that was trained to explain the meanings of the myths in our cultural collective unconscious to us.
We all know Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” monomyth, because it’s based in surface narrative details: the call to adventure, the overcoming of a challenge, the return home.
But the monomyth has a hidden side which is expressed in symbolism rather than narrative, and it tells the story of the inward journey and the alchemical marriage.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) is the most popular film of all time, because it perfectly marries both sides of the mono-myth in its narrative and in its symbolism of emotional stability achieved by discovering the proper balance between air (courage), wisdom (earth), empathy (water), and passion (fire).
Once you learn to see those symbols in that film, you’ll be able to see them in Homer, in Dante, in the Pentateuch, in the Arthurian grail legends, in Alice in Wonderland, in Poe and H.G. Wells, and many more.
When this happens, the right and left brain can more effectively synchronize, because your conscious mind now has a better understanding of the language your subconscious uses to tell you to grow the fuck up.
So if we had a chatbot that grokked these symbols they way chatbots can already find and explain examples of Campbell’s mono-myth, then more people could wake up.
The more people who learn to think for themselves (and thus are capable of exercising free will), the less life here is going to suck.
>But the monomyth has a hidden side which is expressed in symbolism rather than narrative, and it tells the story of the inward journey and the alchemical marriage.
Mushrooms helped me understand this intuitively. I haven’t read the Hermetic works but the little I’ve seen from them seems to be accurate to me. Templist Canon, the book of my religion, claims to be inspired by Hermes Trismegistus as-well.
>What would really be useful is a chatbot that was trained to explain the meanings of the myths in our cultural collective unconscious to us.
I don’t personally think a chatbot could beat a knowledgeable human as a teacher.
Reading more about Hermeticism, some of what it preaches is true, and and some of it is heuristic lies. It is appropriate that as human understanding advances Hermes would update his message; some ideas no longer being believable enough to be useful for his purposes. For example, the Hermetic creation myth, which is just as ridiculous as the creation myths found in Christianity or Norse Mythology.
The ideas of duality are true from what I’ve seen and experienced.
Reincarnation is true.
The idea that the Godhead is simultaneously the creator and everything is true, as it is just existence. The Godhead is not a sentient being however. I wonder why Hermes wished to see men join with it in the past, as the Buddhists want to do and Gnostics unknowingly try to do (Thinking there’s a Heaven outside of it.) something to think on.
I haven’t delved very deeply into the corpus, because the focus of my research is on tracing the links of the well known symbols and ideas throughout time.
Those parts boil down to the seven principles, the three core symbols of spiritual alchemy (hexagram, spiral, and pentagram), and the symbolism of the rainbow as allegory for the expansion of consciousness.
My spiritual awakening came from experiencing reality-bending synchronicity which led to gnosis. The hermetic research came after I found emotional balance and inner peace, so I’m not tied to any particular detail of one tradition or another, I just know what has worked for me.
AI can beat a human teacher in one way that’s important – bandwidth. Quantity has a quality of its own, I think some Russian general once said. So if it’s good enough to get the message across to a reasonable percentage of 8 billion souls, then that seems like the best strategy to me.
Great comment.
But,
> We can stop AI hallucination by first training a model to apply the scientific method and dialectical critical thinking to the cultural knowledge bases it consumes, but there’s no market for that, so don’t expect a corporation or government to build one.
“Cultural knowledge” boils down to “values”.
And values are inherently subjective, due to the irreduciblly subjective nature of human beings.
An AI will never tell you whether vanilla or chocolate is the “right choice”.
Its only strength is in collating empirical facts.
Like an autist.
I should have been more specific in my description. The AI I’m envisioning wouldn’t try to pick winners. Justice is a utilitarian game. Justice for the Palestinians and justice for the Israeli’s are legitimately opposed, given the set of options for pursuing “justice” that both sides are willing to consider.
What a truth-seeking AI can do is to point that out. Essentially what I’m talking about is the bot-form of Nietzsche’s philosophical “hammer” – that tests ideologies to separate truth from fictional narratives that humans use to justify naked self-interest.
The reason no one will build one is that it will trigger the fuck out of almost everyone, almost immediately. The money-changers don’t like it when you turn over the tables and show people what’s really going on underneath the scam. That’s when people start looking for a crucifix and some nails.
Ah, I get you now.
I tend to agree.
Unfortunately, I am but a frozen caveman LSWM, so your mouth sounds bewilder me
No worries. When I’m not explaining my point clearly enough to be understood, that’s my fault. I have a bad habit of assuming that my unstated context and assumptions are obvious to everyone.
From your comments here, it’s clear to me that you understand the hermetic truths better than most, so if what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you, then it likely won’t to anyone.
You must think you are sooooooo smart, Rad
>From your comments here, it’s clear to me that you understand the hermetic truths better than most,
https://images.app.goo.gl/VhgivoYsZRPXe6219
There are vast swathes of totally uninhabited land you can get for pennies or even free
Rintrah, these are very high-quality thoughts, even if perhaps you have some details wrong – but you are at least 98% right.
When the Covid pandemic just started, I realized that it would be a big deal around Jan. 25, 2000. Even before that, I was mostly in cash. Then everything crashed. I went all-stock on Mar 24, 2020, and made about a million $.
Yeah, it is a great post.
In the past, they had serious journals. Even Dostoevsky shared his thoughts on a regular basis, and this stirred serious debates.
Now we have blogs like Rad’s and yours, and we do our best to hold a good conversation, but everything is so fast, and the thoughts will vanish in some database..
Another scam are Gyms. I am not joking!
We would have it so much better if we just worked out by harvesting apples, or peaches, or harvesting in general, and looking after the plants..
“Jim stops and gets out of the car
Goes to a house in Emperor’s Gate
Through the door and to his room, and then he puts the TV on
Turns it off and makes some tea
Says modern life is rubbish”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gghFPavXE7Q