Dec 9, 2025
turns out oliver sacks was also a wizard who used the therapeutic power of Lying in his books
seen from Malaysia
seen from Australia
seen from Brazil
seen from Egypt
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Maldives
seen from Malaysia
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
turns out oliver sacks was also a wizard who used the therapeutic power of Lying in his books
i think there has been a very serious regression in public doctrine which may at least ilustrate much of what has gone wrong over the past decade
15 years ago everyone understood basically what a meme was - a factorisation of the cognitive freedom afforded by, but sitting at a level above, the extended phenotype of humanity. everyone had basically the same degrees of freedom, which meant any idea could fit in anyone's head, and any idea could be spread to anyone, and what made expression of the idea stick was its place in the existing ecology of the head, and whether or not memes could stably fit into "memeplexes"
this is what i still believe. it's a good picture with more or less all the right moving parts, but i realised this week that i am not sure if it is what the public believes anymore, and especially not the governing part of it.
first the word itself. the word "meme" has become very crudely concretised into meaning a piece of media - not a piece of conceptual thought. when some politician talks about "a dangerous meme" she is thinking quite concretely about a picture of a frog, not a dangerous idea, where she talks much more vaguely and helplessly.
but i think the real regression is visible in religion. the meme picture of religion was perhaps THE biggest gimmick of 2000s secularism ("the new atheism") and I notice that the very successful rollback of that movement by a united front of religious people coincides with an occultation of exactly the meme picture of religion
the meme picture of religion makes religious education everyone's business and concern. religious ideas are in this world, they are themselves real even if they describe unreal things, they are for everyone, and everyone is an equal individual, so everyone may approach them on the same footing. you may conduct memetic hotswaps in yourself and others, etc.
basically all these attractive features have been rolled back.
the hybridisation between blatant fantasy and religion that secularists and liberal theologians alike of the same era were warning about (and which chaos magicians were walking examples of how fucked up it makes you) has happened.
i think people now see religious ideas as not happening in the real world, but in dissociative other worlds, requiring specialist mediation to enter. these other realms are not located in the one real world, nor in the individual human mind, but in communal, usually racial, zones, the borders of which are patrolled by, often literal, spiritual gangsters. proselytism still happens, but not at all on a basis of mutual respect, but slyly and magically - contagious religious thoughts (and here i am purposefully not saying "memes" because the underlying factorisation is different) are encoded into artworks - or crimes - which are supposed to exert a subtle effect to make you realise e.g. "oh i was a Christian all along, i must go to church now".
Or worse they are explicitly bundled along with phenotype and the message is "you have such and such a haplotype, here is the religious idea you must defend with your life"
you can explain this with the meme picture - the idea of meme has become straightforwardly mystified by the priests, the plain truth occulted and the mystified versions are being used by them in their stupid priestly way. like every time this happens, the priests are getting a higher grade of wine and pussy and everyone else is becoming stupider.
eventually the cherokee realise enough is enough and kill the ani-kutani.
there is a video which nicely illustrates the problem i have with steelmanning and rhetorical shows of, i forget the rationalist jargon, but the little rat in my mind is squeaking "epistemic charity".
it's a Christian podcast and it's set up with Richard Dawkins and the old archbishop of canterbury (the one who DIDN'T resign in scandal) in a nice room for a chat, and the host opens up with "let's each try to describe the other man's perspective, you first, archbishop" and the archbishop sums up materialist naturalism very easily and nicely, and Dawkins agrees he did so, but then it is Dawkins' turn to describe archbishop williams' view.
this is, of course, a trap because although rationalist materialism can be easily described this way, the archbishop does not have dawkins' virtues of simplicity and sincerity -- his worldview is that of a poet, a priest and a politician. It is greatly to his credit, in the circumstances, that Dawkins actually names the two central features of this worldview -- its centrally poetic-romantic quality and its "baffling" nature.
the trap is that dawkins cannot say -- both because of the debt of politeness he owes to being treated as a social equal of an archbishop of canterbury and because he has always been basically a constipated English don, which is why he was always crowned as the archbishop of infidelity and the wickedest man in england of the noughties -- that "baffling" is not a judgment call, but a description of the method of priestcraft, that the archbishop's worldview is one of bullshitting himself and other people, although he does at least allude to it by suggesting that when the archbishop speaks of Adam and Eve he is, perhaps, condescending to a less scientifically minded element of his audience.
This is as far as I cared to listen because it is as far as the several Christians on twitter who informed me about this podcastbgot -- and proudly declared they had heard all they needed to hear. the archbishop could understand dawkins, dawkins could not understand the archbishop. jesus infinity, infidelity nil. faith, hope and epistemic charity wins.
it is not clear to me that any of the christians declaring a triumph for heaven could describe the archbishop's point of view any better.
it really helps to understand the English context. Nobody in England is a Christian. Literally all that is left is a Sprachspiele and they are proud of it. Wittgenstein has been digested and redigested. They have discovered the final secret of Christ and it is cultivating a low-grade positive Stimmung and communal token-exchange forever. They appear to be genuinely stupid and confused why, despite having discovered the Heart of Christ, nobody wants to come to church and give them work and money for nothing. Really the wonder is why so many people still do, and all the dolls and tokens haven't been put back in the box
it seems to me like it should be possible to come up with an effective psyop against street evangelists so long as the payload is entirely to get them to stop creating noise pollution, without also trying to deconvert them or even necessarily go away.
this is basically a criminological problem. i don't think one person could do it unless they were particularly charismatic, but it seems like the sort of recurrent sickness with a basically simple cause that a method could solve.
Incredibly, the placebo effect is (mostly) not real.
It is a result of statistical confusion. Whenever you have a group with extreme values, they tend to exhibit regression to the mean. Eg. on average, sick people tend to become more healthy over time.
Thus if you give one group medicine, and one group placebo, the placebo group will also tend to get better over time, because of regression to the mean.
People have then misinterpreted this to think that it is the placebo pill that actively does this.
If you want to demonstrate a placebo effect, you have to construct a study where there are three groups:
• A. treatment
• B. placebo
• C. no treatment, no placebo
If B and C get different outcomes, that would demonstrate a placebo effect.
When this has been tried, mainly there has been no provable placebo effect. See the paper in the screenshot. (There is some evidence for an effect for pain, but this get's into a slightly different debate.)
The fact that the placebo effect is mainly not real, fortunately frees us from having to come up with convoluted explanations, as to why the placebo effect would work even when we tell the patient that it is a placebo, as in the quoted tweet.
violently reminded there are people in the world who think tenzin gyatso is a nice liberal platitudes man rather than a man groomed to be an evil wizard from childhood who has bounced from one coven to another
maybe most people think this
it tastes like rancid Chinese medicine from a Taoist geomancer that tells you to call him Uncle Seven and smokes like a chimney