How stupid can you be? Belief in predicting the future from songs or animals was abandoned centuries ago, because science is reliable and fucking oysters are not.
I’m really not here to defend my habits, but far be it for me to pass up a chance to spread knowledge to my fellow man.
Let’s start with what everyone agrees on. It’s well-known that animals like cats and dogs can sense earthquakes and volcanoes before people do. They pick up the small vibrations in Amenta’s crust, and they can tell long before we do when something isn’t quite right. Seismometers are more accurate, of course, but they’re also more limited; they can only sense messed up vibes Amenta’s crust, while cats and dogs can also sense disturbances in the atmosphere and in the people around them (I’m sure you’ve noticed that some dogs are able to predict when their owners are about to come home).
But cats and dogs are still pretty limited. Their senses might be sharper than ours, but they’ve got a lot going on in their heads, and it distracts them. They’re not purely reactive beings. Like us, they have their own personalities and favorite foods and weird day plans and stuff, and all of that limits their ability to make accurate predictions. If it’s less significant than a volcano or an earthquake, odds are your cat is as clueless as you are about it.
You know what doesn’t have a lot going on in its head? An oyster. Oysters don’t even have heads. They’re about as close as you’re going to get to a purely reactive being that still can react to stimuli in a timely manner, other than maybe a sea urchin. Sea urchins are actually probably better, but people don’t really eat sea urchins, so there aren’t really any urchin farms to use for data collection.
Anyway, oysters are reacting to the same things that cats and dogs are–vibrations, firstly, but also temperature changes, sea water and soil composition changes, and the quality of their food. And because they’re very specialized creatures that only have to worry about simple stimuli like that, their evolution has been a lot more focused on that, and not on, like, the best strategy for catching mice or the best way to get rid of a particular customer without losing your job. So when I look at oyster behavior, I’m letting them do all the hard work of interpreting that environmental stimuli, and I’m able to get out basic information about what the coming seasons are going to be like, especially in terms of environment change and weather patterns.
The songs work on the same principle, but they give you a broader scope of information at the cost of decreased accuracy. Even though people have a lot of things that go into their music preferences, those preferences are also affected by much deeper subconscious beliefs than, say, our preferences in movies or sports teams. There’s never been an Amentan culture that didn’t have music. It’s basic for us, far more basic than speech. The level on which a song moves you is a lower level than the level on which you reason about who you should vote for, or the level on which you decide which people you want for friends or partners. If you want to get at the information that we’ve subconsciously collected about our expectations for the really basic things that go into our happiness as people, songs preferences are a good place to look.
Of course, individual people are still pretty bad at predicting things, so you can’t get any good data unless you look at what really large groups of people are doing. That’s why you have to look at popularity levels, and on another level, why you have to look at music. You could probably get even better information from, say, a database of dreams, but the corporations don’t really keep track of those, while they obsessively track the number of downloads and plays of different songs.
Anyway, I definitely agree with you that science is an important tool for learning about the world around us, including its past and its future. But the thing is that the world has a lot of moving parts, and the parts of the world that most concern us have a shitton of moving parts. I’m not gonna ask a physicist to predict the results of the next election, even though technically it all comes back to physics. There’s just too much information. The song charts process a lot of that information for us, in however haphazard a way, and it’s a lot easier to extrapolate the future of a country when you’re looking at the trajectory of large groups of people than when you’re looking at large groups of atoms, you feel me?
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