How to deal with pseudoscience ?

Friday, 31 October, Year 6 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

First off, to get a methodological point out of the way : beliefs, feelings, more generally speaking mental processes without a concrete reference can nevertheless still be mistaken, and provably so.

One could for instance believe that the number five was given to him by God personally, as a gift. This belief is neither here nor there should that same one propose that 5 + 6 = 7. While his belief as to the source of the number five may be true or false and in any case does not interest us, his proposition about adding five and six is nevertheless wrong.

Another could put forth his imagination of "dragons, superb beings made out of pure energy", and again, this nonsense is neither here nor there - if it interests it would principally be for either aesthetic or psychiatric reasons. However, should that another also propose that his dragons (superb beings made of energy purée) heated a cup of water to boiling while expending no energy whatsoever, that another would be mistaken. Pure and simple, his dragons don't enter in the discussion of water and its heating.

The common way in which naive bystanders fail in evaluating these types of claims is some variation of "if broken once she's a slut", which is to say : if we've already granted that something unlikely may exist, then any further such requests should be granted by default. Plainly stated, the idiocy involved is obvious. Seriously, if you've ever bought a woman lunch you're now to buy all lunches she ever eats ? If you borrow from a bank once they might as well give you the keys to the vaults ? If you've bought a stick of gum from a store six weeks ago you now own that store ? Good luck with all this heh.

Even if requested specifically, one has to bear in mind that the grant creates a difference. Suppose one were to say "God gave me the number five as a personal gift, and this five that he gave me added with six yields eight". Clearly, the thing God gave him, while apparently called "five" in their relationship is in fact what the rest of us knows as two. So, the proper restatement in third voice of that proposition would be that "God gave him two as a personal gift and for some reason called it five". Equivocating between "five" and "the two God gave away and for some reason called five" is obviously improper, and if driven by a profit motive plain and quite prosecutable fraud. Similarly, should the another have specifically requested, "and in the magical land where they live water boils or cools without exchange of energy", then clearly that "water" is in no proper sense water, and while the name may be used, it is used metaphorically, not properly. That "water" is in fact no more water than electromagnetic "bottles" are bottles. You could arguably fill one such "bottle" with fermions of the same "aroma", but you definitely could neither crash it against the bar nor taste the contents. In all such metaphoric contexts, the question is meaningful "you mean the water before the grant, or after ?" or directed at any one ambiguous instance, "which kind of water is this ?". Equivocating between the two is just bad reasoning, of course, except if driven by a profit motive it is, again, mere fraud.

That out of the way, the historical accident needs to be discussed where for the past fifty or so years, the intellectually broken and practically bankrupt approach to thought championed by the USG and followed by its scanti vassals and satellites has been a Ford-isation of sorts, creating perverse incentives across the board towards the publication of mere words, meaninglessly fashioned together into strings of specified lengths, without further consideration. Originally this worked acceptably for actual scienceii, but it was disastrous for humanities, which were readily refashioned into simple pseudoscience.iii

Arguably this effect was an unavoidable result of the destructuring of society following WW2, because humanities can only exist as the fruits of the superiority of the socially superior ; may not exist (indeed, may not even be meaningfully defined) in flat societies ; and in all intermediate cases their quality and general development serves well as a proxy for the hierarchy of society : the sharper the angle at the peak of the social pyramid, the more advanced the humanities it can support. Nevertheless, avoidable or not, three decades later the poisonous creatures came home to roost, and the pseudoscientific pursuits that used to be humanities infected otherwise respectable science to the degree that we're now stuck cutting out all of the "Earth science" and large swaths of medicine and biology, not to mention all the economy penned after 1940, because it's cheaper to throw out pasta in which someone's taken a dump and re-make it than to attempt and remove all the fecal matter.

Which brings us to the point of our discussion today. When confronted with pseudoscience, which is to say any text purporting to discuss scienceiv, written after 1940, either in English or by any author living in a vassal or satellite state (NATO is the name of this particular Warsaw pact) the proper approach is not to proscribe, but to ignore.

Specifically what I mean is, one shouldn't attempt to further interact with all that shitpile, for instance by trying to create lists of banned expressions, or otherwise some sort of crude implementation of a Bayesian filter or another. One should simply ignore the whole matter wholesale, and then allow the proponents to either introduce their ideas de novo, in the original manner such is handled, or otherwise work themselves dry of spittle and wither away.

This flat, unyielding ignorance-as-the-forerunner-of-oblivion is both perfectly safev and exactly the adequate pill for the poison in dicussion, because it expends very little productive effort on the part of the productive members of society, while at the same time forcing upon the unproductive the exact Gordian knot they've been trying to talk their way around (and plenty, no doubt, hoped they had succeeded). That knot is of course practice, which is to say : if I were to declare I am ignoring "all that Einstein jazz", all physics penned after 1900 or so, and then built a cathodic tube television that worked just fine without accounting for quantum effects, the trashing and bashing of Einstein fans would be all in vain : I'll just shrug my shoulders, keep building and selling my television sets and care not on whit of whatever they may write.vi Eventually they'll run out of ink, because unlike the productive system of making things, the grant seeking system relies on outside inputs to function.vii

While it's true that most objects produced and consumed in a sufficiently advanced society are ideal objects, and while it's true that most people in a socialist/welfarist society are patent idiots (who have no use for ideal objects, and so could be made to value any list of ideal objects in any arbitrary order, just like the primitive minds of the original red skins could be convinced to value the fruits of industry pretty much randomly, and in any case divorcedly from their actual market value), it still doesn't stand that the producers of worthless drivel may create a system where they may thrive that's also stable.

So, this is what is meant when one says Bitcoin is revolutionary : that the ideas it embodies, and its exact workings, the precise manner in which it wages an attrition war it can't lose against fiat currency, and the welfare state dependent upon that fiat currency, can be readily expanded to other fields. You can wage an attrition war on public idiocy on the same exact paradigm, and obtain - just as definitely and just as certainly - the same exact results : the complete, utter and unavoidable ruin of the pile of nonsense. Without any possible recourse.

PS. If the idea of throwing out 60 years' worth of pseudoscience masquerading as science seems to you unprecedented, consider that this is merely a result of your very sheltered existence. I have lived it, personally, once before, I'm not discussing imaginations and projections into the future here but mere history. Lived history. Specifically, I still remember the piles of trampled pages, knee thick, in front of various Romanian Universitary libraries, pages that before one winter made perfectly good "science", on Marxism-Leninism and Socialist Economy and Socialist Philosophy (aka Dialectic Materialism) and Socialist-everything. Then after that winter they were pulp, or more properly said, they were officially seen as the pulp that they had always been. And I remember the surprised face of one particular parasite who thought himself a "professor", being thrown out of a second floor window.

Contrary to what you may imagine, cutting off warts - while woefuly deadly to the actual wart - nevertheless does no harm to the healthy body the wart is dragging towards the grave. Romania did a lot better in twenty years after having squished this lice than in the sixty years prior, and so will you. History repeats itself, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Generally speaking, the sooner the when, the lower the pain.

———
  1. Yes, I am aware you believe this constitutes "the entire world". This belief is descriptive of you, not of the world. []
  2. In the sense that pretty much any policy works about as well for actual science, as that's a process driven by individuals not policies and as such evolves for purely individual, entirely un-politic reasons. []
  3. There is absolutely no difference between the US school of political science and astrology, today, except for sheer complexity and volume, proxies for the ammount of money poured into it. This stands all across the board, the only difference between US pseudoeconomics and US pseudo-theatrical-studies is the money thoroughput, and if you switched that around soon enough the theatre would be "well developed" in the sense of completely empty, meaningless complexity. []
  4. As opposed to fiction, which is entirely broken too but perhaps for different reasons, in different ways and in any case not our concern here. []
  5. Since there's no actual value in the subject matter ignored, ignoring it is not unlike ignoring the firm convictions of the mentally ill. Such things exist, people in an asylum somewhere could go on about them at length, what difference does it make ? []
  6. Incidentally, this is exactly how Bitcoin has in point of fact worked. In other words, it's not a speculative discussion, but merely a recounting of actual history. []
  7. Here's a thought for all the "sustainability" scholars, jetting here and there to eat catered meals and sleep in hotels they don't own and can't afford to pay for: when are you going to come up with a "sustainable sustainability research" paradigm ? One where you manage to pay for what you yourselves, personally, consume, out of the value you yourselves personally produce ? No, finding a[nother] sugar Daddy does not count. No, no matter how you disguise it. No, it's not true that "everyone lives off a sugar Daddy. Ready for the most challenging challenge ever ?

    Didn't think so. Now stfu. []

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45 Responses

  1. > One where you manage to pay for what you yourselves, personally, consume, out of the value you yourselves personally produce ? No, finding a[nother] sugar Daddy does not count.

    This is where we smack against the frailty of meat. Specifically, e.g., George Boole would have run into some problems living off the 'value personally produced' by Boolean algebra, on account of his inconveniently short lifespan.

    'And so on, day after day, month after month, year after year -- sometimes, all through life. Sometimes the life of the inventor is not long enough, and other inventors must pick up the problem and continue to search for a solution. 'What if we do it this way?' asks the next inventor.' ('And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared', Altshuller (Eng. translation by L. Shulyak.) W4r3z copy on #b-a somewhere in the logs.)

    Some very essential things are only possible with obscenely long 'time horizon' for computed ROI. And time horizons tend to get guillotined just as reliably as necks in historical upheavals. Ask the Russian physicists driving cabs in NYC. I don't expect they're especially thrilled with the fact of being doomed to compete with former professional climatistas in the cab business. (Compete they will.)

    AFAIK there is no general-case solution (as discussed in an early English piece on this site, concerning Dooglus.) Known attempts at solutions include 'patron king' (no references needed) and 'monastic order' (as fictionalized in Stephenson's 'Anathem').

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 31 October 2014
    One where you manage to pay for what you yourselves, personally, consume, out of the value you yourselves personally produce ? No, finding a[nother] sugar Daddy does not count.

    This is where we smack against the frailty of meat. Specifically, e.g., George Boole would have run into some problems living off the ‘value personally produced’ by Boolean algebra, on account of his inconveniently short lifespan.

    But you see, Boole did not pretend he is a scientist of "sustainability", did he ? He did not go around sprouting nonsense about how "for a more perfect produciton of nonsense, "we" need to trade carbon credits", did he ? So no, he's not an example in this discussion.

  3. Boole did, however, announce his algebra as 'finally I have developed a branch of mathematics with no practical use whatsoever!' or the like.

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 31 October 2014

    That is perfectly fine. In discussion is not research without [obvious] practical utility, but merely pseudoscientific discussions as to how "better" arrange the political affairs. As long as the useless stay out of the political, they retain their intellectual legitimacy and may be financed by whosoever feels inclined. Once they step that threshold however, they can no longer be.

  5. Pediwikia has following conclusions about Boole:

    > Boole's work and that of later logicians initially appeared to have no engineering uses.

    > Combining his interests in mathematics and theology, he compared the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with the three dimensions of space, and was attracted to the Hebrew conception of God as an absolute unity.

    Regardless of whether they are factually true in this case, it's true that many scientists in that age mixed into their work a life force and other "for greater glory" philosophical concepts. In many cases it was only their followers that separated pseudoscience from real science. We can easily presume this is how it works even today, if using other concepts and some magnitudes bigger and messier.

    So I really don't see how fight against socialism and bitcoin relates to this.

  6. Consider the tree in my front yard (or any other green growing thing) that ever grows in the direction of available sunlight, only to be ruthlessly trimmed by cable maintenance crew each year.

    At my local uni, a few years ago, just about all of the faculty working in genuinely-physical or pure-mathematical fields were administratively herded into a 'college of physical and mathematical sciences.' (I.e., there is no longer a separate 'department of mathematics' with own funding pool, bureaucratic trappings, etc.) And no prizes for guessing who - weren't. The sinecures are untouchable, and can only die when the entire thing goes south as a going concern. Ending with the expected plethora of newly-minted cabbies.

    When the king pays for Boole - we get Boole. When the king pays for climatistas - ditto.

  7. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    7
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 31 October 2014

    @Jurov On the other side, I don't see how

    Combining his interests in mathematics and theology, he compared the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with the three dimensions of space, and was attracted to the Hebrew conception of God as an absolute unity.

    even were it to be accepted as factual and discussion worthy (which it is not, on either count) could then lead to

    many scientists in that age mixed into their work a life force and other “for greater glory” philosophical concepts

    Seems akin to saying "MP wrote Runcible Doom" so therefore his Bitcoin writings were "mixed" and it was upon the brazen posteriority to oh so valuably "separate" these, which is patent nonsense. If we're going to do that route may as well say things like "Newton fucked his wife and MP beat his slavegirls, so clearly they had no fucking idea".

    Doesn't work, this approach, especially when you stop and look at what nobodies like Iris Marion Young did other than derpage. No Newtons to be had, in the arid field of US official pseudoscience, and the comparison is unduly flattering.

    @Stanislav Datskovskiy There is no king, so the discussion is moot.

  8. The question, in my mind, is - where is the black hole which swallowed the kings and the Newtons. And, how to get it to cough them back out again. And does it even have a reverse gear. Or do 'we' have to wait for the rise of other civilizations, with gigantic rat kings presiding over cockroach Newtons...

  9. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    9
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 31 October 2014

    The disappearance of hard money swallowed them with it, and the resurection of hard money shall in due time bring them back. No further action required.

  10. So all of this has to go?

    1943 – Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome
    1947 – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor
    1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon: 'A mathematical theory of communication' a seminal paper in Information theory.
    1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics
    1951 – George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
    1952 – Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine
    1953 – Crick and Watson: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology
    1963 – Lawrence Morley, Fred Vine, and Drummond Matthews: Paleomagnetic stripes in ocean crust as evidence of plate tectonics (Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis).
    1964 – Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig: postulates quarks leading to the standard model
    1964 – Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: detection of CMBR providing experimental evidence for the Big Bang
    1965 – Leonard Hayflick: normal cells divide only a certain number of times: the Hayflick limit
    1967 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar
    1983 – Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology.
    1986 – Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz: Discovery of High-temperature superconductivity
    1994 - Andrew Wiles proves Fermat's Last Theorem
    1995 – Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star
    1995 - Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle attained the first Bose-Einstein Condensate with atomic gases, so called fifth state of matter at extremely low temperature.
    1997 – Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned.
    1997 – CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab: Top quark.
    1998 – Gerson Goldhaber and Saul Perlmutter observed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
    2001 – The first draft of the human genome is completed.
    2003 - Grigori Perelman presents proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.
    2006 - Shinya Yamanaka generates first induced pluripotent stem cells
    2010 – J. Craig Venter Institute creates the first synthetic genome for a bacterial cell.[5]
    2010 - The Neanderthal Genome Project presented preliminary genetic evidence that interbreeding did likely take place and that a small but significant portion of Neanderthal admixture is present in modern non-African populations.[citation needed]
    2012 - Higgs boson is discovered at CERN (confirmed to 99.999% certainty)
    2012 - Photonic molecules are discovered at MIT
    2014 - Inflation theory is being proved by Gravitational waves
    2014 - Exotic hadrons are discovered at the LHCb

  11. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    11
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 3 November 2014

    Clearly, you have a strong point. It is sadly weakened significantly because it outrageously includes stuff such as... Perelman of all people ?! Seriously ?

    If you can claim Perelman by the same token I can claim you never said anything.

  12. I think many people simply don't want to think about all the actual work the blood and tears type of work that goes into making science... They want science to be an objective transcendent not something people make, and fuck up more often than they make by orders of magnitude...

  13. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    13
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 2 February 2015

    Obviously. When your sleepy provincial French town doubles in population on account of a bunch of African immigrants, you've not really received a bunch of French citizens, and your institutions will migrate from what you'd like to see to closer resemble what they've "come to expect", or in any case what they can mentally carry.

    Similarly, if you put up "science" as the "vaniquisher of religion" you won't get a bunch more scientists. You'll get just as many scientists as before, who now have to swim in a river of religious zealots worshipping Sciencehweh.

  14. What is this blog for or about?

  15. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    15
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 17 May 2015

    Yes.

  16. Speaking of your latest article, have you ever heard of COS?

    We present results from Many Labs 4, which was designed to investigate whether contact with original authors and other experts improved replication rates for a complex psychological paradigm. However, the project is largely uninformative on that point as, instead, we were unable to replicate the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense under any conditions.

    Recent efforts to replicate findings in psychology have been disappointing. There is a general concern among many in the field that a large number of these null replications are because the original findings are false positives, the result of misinterpreting random noise in data as a true pattern or effect.

    But, failures to replicate are inherently ambiguous and can result from any number of contextual or procedural factors. Aside from the possibility that the original is a false positive, it may instead be the case that some aspect of the original procedure does not generalize to other contexts or populations, or the procedure may have produced an effect at one point in time but those conditions no longer exist. Or, the phenomena may not be sufficiently understood so as to predict when it will and will not occur (the so-called "hidden moderators" explanation).

    Another explanation — often made informally — is that replicators simply lack the necessary expertise to conduct the replication properly. Maybe they botch the implementation of the study or miss critical theoretical considerations that, if corrected, would have led to successful replication. The current study was designed to test this question of researcher expertise by comparing results generated from a research protocol developed in consultation with the original authors to results generated from research protocols designed by replicators with little or no particular expertise in the specific research area. This study is the fourth in our line of "Many Labs" projects, in which we replicate the same findings across many labs around the world to investigate some aspect of replicability.

    To look at the effects of original author involvement on replication, we first had to identify a target finding to replicate. Our goal was a finding that was likely to be generally replicable, but that might have substantial variation in replicability due to procedural details (e.g. a finding with strong support but that is thought to require “tricks of the trade” that non-experts might not know about). Most importantly, we had to find key authors or known experts who were willing to help us develop the materials. These goals often conflicted with one another.

    We ultimately settled on Terror Management Theory (TMT) as a focus for our efforts. TMT broadly states that a major problem for humans is that we are aware of the inevitability of our own death; thus, we have built-in psychological mechanisms to shield us from being preoccupied with this thought. In consultation with those experts most associated with TMT, we chose Study 1 of Greenberg et al. (1994) for replication. The key finding was that, compared to a control group, U.S. participants who reflected on their own death were higher in worldview defense; that is, they reported a greater preference for an essay writer adopting a pro-U.S. argument than an essay writer adopting an anti-U.S. argument.

    We recruited 21 labs across the U.S. to participate in the project. A randomly assigned half of these labs were told which study to replicate, but were prohibited from seeking expert advice (“In House” labs). The remaining half of the labs all followed a set procedure based on the original article, and incorporating modifications, advice, and informal tips gleaned from extensive back-and-forth with multiple original authors (“Author Advised” labs).* In all, the labs collected data from 2,200+ participants.

    The goal was to compare the results from labs designing their own replication, essentially from scratch using the published method section, with the labs benefitting from expert guidance. One might expect that the latter labs would have a greater likelihood of replicating the mortality salience effect, or would yield larger effect sizes. However, contrary to our expectation, we found no differences between the In House and Author Advised labs because neither group successfully replicated the mortality salience effect. Across confirmatory and exploratory analyses we found little to no support for the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense at all.

    In many respects, this was the worst possible outcome — if there is no effect then we can't really test the metascientific questions about researcher expertise that inspired the project in the first place. Instead, this project ends up being a meaningful datapoint for TMT itself. Despite our best efforts, and a high-powered, multi-lab investigation, we were unable to demonstrate an effect of mortality salience on worldview defense in a highly prototypical TMT design. This does not mean that the effect is not real, but it certainly raises doubts about the robustness of the effect. An ironic possibility is that our methods did not successfully capture the exact fine-grained expertise that we were trying to investigate. However, that itself would be an important finding — ideally, a researcher should be able to replicate a paradigm solely based on information provided in the article or other readily available sources. So, the fact that we were unable to do so despite consulting with original authors and enlisting 21 labs, all of which were highly trained in psychology methods is problematic.

    From our perspective, a convincing demonstration of basic mortality salience effects is now necessary to have confidence in this area moving forward. It is indeed possible that mortality salience only influences worldview defense during certain political climates or among catastrophic events (e.g. national terrorist attacks), or other factors explain this failed replication. A robust Registered Report-style study, where outcomes are predicted and analyses are specified in advance, would serve as a critical orienting datapoint to allow these questions to be explored.

    Ultimately, because we failed to replicate the mortality salience effect, we cannot speak to whether (or the degree to which) original author involvement improves replication attempts.** Replication is a necessary but messy part of the scientific process, and as psychologists continue replication efforts it remains critical to understand the factors that influence replication success. And, it remains critical to question, and empirically test, our intuitions and assumptions about what might matter.

    *At various points we refer to “original authors”. We had extensive communication with several authors of the Greenberg et al., 1994 piece, and others who have published TMT studies. However, that does not mean that all original authors endorsed each of these choices, or still agree with them today. We don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, and, indeed, at least one original author expressly indicated that they would not run the study given the timing of the data collection — September 2016 to May 2017, the period leading up to and following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. We took steps to address that concern, but none of this means the original authors “endorse” the work.

  17. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    17
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 29 May 2021

    Can't say as I have, and to my detriment -- there's some serious comedy bricks in there. Then again... this procedure whereby spinsters and wankers self-importantly inquire with "large" (in the sense of, small) groups of campus ditzes what "their feelings" are on whatever X, then meticulously misinterpret the "results" towards whatever politruk pipe-dreams momentarily fashionable is in no danger of ever being mistaken for science. How's the ozone hole layers doing these days btw ?

    In particular these idiots' procedures (and the related "Death Salience" morons, "measuring" word completion for chrissakes, did you complete sk___ with skull more often than with skill ? MEASURABLE!!!) come down to just so much repurposed Rorschach. Once that crystal ball crashed open (in ten thousand shards of laughter), the idiots did what they always do -- moved on. You wouldn't have expected them to learn something, which is to say change, I hope. They can't change, which is why they're where they are.

    Old gypsy women (which is to say "clever", because hey, under such pressure as a demographic minority experiences in a nation-state, one'd better learn how to be clever) have an equally scientific scrying practice whereby... Actually, here, let me return the favour by publicizing some ethnographical notation of my own :

    Bobii, se aleg 41 de fire de păpuşoi[corn], la nevoie şi altă sămânţă, cum e fasolea, şi se învârt grămăgioară[pile] cu mâna dreaptă în dreapta, cum merge soarele, descântând: "41 de bobi, bine ştiţi, bine gâciţi[guess], dacă va fi să fie bine şi după gând, să pice pe 9, colac în prag şi bucurie într-amândouă mâinile, dar dacă nu, să pice unul şi doi şi să nu se aleagă nimică din voi!" [including the non-tenure threat, fancy that wonder, it's older than dirt!]

    Apoi face cruce cu mâna pe grăunţe şi le desparte în trei grămăgioare. O grămăgioară vine de-a stânga, acolo se cheamă "în mână străină", alta în mijloc, se numeşte "în casă", şi a treia în dreapta, aceasta se numeşte "în mâna sa", a celui ce caută.

    Din aceste grămăgioare, se numără – începând de la cea din mijloc – câte patru bobi şi tot se dau deoparte, iar cei ce rămân, fie 1, 2, 3 sau 4, se pun în linie sus, făcându-se tot astfeli şi cu celălalte două grămăgioare. Iară bobii rămaşi se amestecă şi iarăşi se face un rând de bobi gâcitori, puindu-se sub rândul de sus. Tot aşa se face şi a treia oară şi restul se dă deoparte, ca netrebuitori.

    Bobii – rândul întâi luat în lat, trebuie să cadă pe 5 sau pe 9. De cad pe 5, are să fie lucrul în grabă, de cad pe 9, mai sigur dar mai târziu. 3 fire, unde cad la un loc, e bucurie, 4 sunt vorbe, iar dacă cad 4 bobi la mijloc, în casă, însemnează că eşti plin la inimă, sătul, mulţămit. 2 fire însemnează îndoială sau supărare, 1 e în deşert sau veste, dacă e sus, iară dacă cade jos e bob sositor, are să sosească cineva.

    Dacă cad doi câte 1 sau trei în rând, înseamnă drum. 3 dacă cad sus, la mijloc, se numeşte bucurie în cap sau colac. De cad în rândul de jos, la mijloc, e colac în prag. Unul de cade jos în prag, în casă, e bob sositor şi astfeli e bine, se va împlini ce gândeşti, căci e drumul slobod, pe când, dacă sunt 4 jos, în prag, e drumul închis, nu se va împlini sau sunt vorbe.

    De-ţi cad în bobi lângă 4, 3 înseamnă vorbe de bucurie; de-ţi cad lângă 4, 1 şi 2 sunt vorbe de supărare şi deşarte. Când cad la mijloc, în curmeziş sau pe jos, tot câte 4 în rând, nu se va împlini ce gândeşti, e închis, sau vei avea proces [legal proceedings], huit [as in hue, of hue-and-cry]. În alte locuri spun că e bine, e masă.

    Dacă cad bobii câte 1 şi 2, atunci să n-ai nici o nădejde, că "e mai rar decât apa" [confessing to the practice's desert nomadic roots], nu e nimic în deplin. Dacă însă fiind aşa răi, numărând toţi bobii, găseşti că sunt 17, atunci totul va fi bine. Bobii din mâna stângă arată ce gând are persoana ce ai pus în gând, pentru tine.

    Dacă bobii din mâna stângă sunt tocmai aşa ca cei din dreapta, atunci eşti cu aceea gând la gând şi, prin aceasta, se arată dragostea. Bobul sositor din corn, din mâna dreaptă jos, e împlinirea gândului; de sunt mai mulţi bobi în corn, arată întârziere. Bobii ce rămân afară câte 4 se cheamă "mese", dacă sunt mesele cu soţ, e de bine.

    I am not kidding : if "scientific" means "confirmation" over "large datasets", nothing a coupla dozen "labs" managed over a few grosse silly gooses could possibly compare to the literal millennia of practice here available. Datul in bobi has way the fuck more "data behind it" than anything contemporary niggers could ever hope to achieve -- and the exact same sort of data, too.

  1. [...] consumers in revolt of the mass adoption variety, often utilize pseudoscience to advance their agendas. Voices have formulated pseudoarguments in such quantity it has become a [...]

  2. [...] spewed by the "make money while sleeping" crowd, and the incentives are stacked such that the out of WoT pseudoscience is produced far faster than it can be read. Forget years, lifetimes could be spent in an onastery simply reading pseudoscience without [...]

  3. [...] and forging records for carrying out their jobs with all the intensity that can be expected out of government charges sitting in undemanding sinecures. Albeit these particular sinecures happen to exist in an environment labeled "high [...]

  4. [...] your infantile expectationsiii to the contrary, which explains why it's so easy and so common for pseudoscience to deliver it instead. In point of fact, whenever science is relied on to produce truth, the only [...]

  5. [...] proposition seriously is that academic papers are like things then by that token the entire thing can simply be ignored, and should be so ignored. A stylish and smooth-talking self-promoter with a philosophical take on [...]

  6. [...] obviously, is far reaching. It dovetails neatly into the earlier discussion about the proper treatment of pseudoscience : One should simply ignore the whole matter wholesale, and then allow the proponents to either [...]

  7. [...] treat women for womanity and men for menity. This is the direction one particular tentacle of the Organised American Pseudosciencexv is currently heading, sure, but fashion doth not a science make. Divergence in the human [...]

  8. [...] [↩]Hopefuly behind seven proxies. NOTEPAD PROXIES! [↩]This is good enough for a C in "social studies", I guess. Thank you for your leadersheep! [↩]Clearly. [↩]That is exactly what it is. [...]

  9. [...] is the fundamental reason why I proposed the "ignore it" avenue to deal with the pseudoscience they spew, that dubious decoction of solipsism and "correlation therefore causation". They no longer have any [...]

  10. [...] off the table. Zero is off the table. The sum is necessarily negative, and the whole charade can be readily ignored. [↩]Who's "zmanian" ? Zaki Manian. What's keybase.io ? A wanna-be WoT implementation, the [...]

  11. [...] and easily-defeated nature of this type of society was approached from multiple angles (1, 2, 3 etc), it is perhaps of some limited interest to understand how the ending works in [...]

  12. [...] generally speaking, the more crap you opt out of, the more resources you have available to use towards a purpose you actually care about. This is no [...]

  13. [...] that. ———There's some discussion of how this boomerang cracked our skull in How to deal with pseudoscience ? [↩]On this point, Ballas controls. [↩] Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte Comments feed : [...]

  14. [...] instead of learning useful things, such as math and sciences, they all went into pseudoscience, social "sciences" and assorted "studies" in nonsense, all aiming to find in the abstract how to [...]

  15. [...] Pseudoscience is not exactly an unfamiliar concern here on Trilema - even when the term is not explicitly mentioned, most of this blog, from its origins to the seven years later present day chiefly deals in imposture, no small part of which being intellectual.i [...]

  16. [...] to access" as they are "sift through the crap you've accessed" ; so much so that reasonable people simply opt out altogether. [↩]Http is a stateless protocol. "Logins" presume to introduce a stateful [...]

  17. [...] into believing that "there must be something there they're disagreeing about", man precisely says "a plague on all your houses" and then walks away. [↩]This sort of nonsense often comes out of the uneducated. No, "such [...]

  18. [...] one way it can blossom into one thing even as exercised the other way it could blossom into quite another thing. [↩]Doesn't that sound great ? "Iffy affair" ? Mwahahaha. [↩]To understand each other : [...]

  19. [...] readily reduced to its pretentious idleness : we just each retreat into our respective castles of "I don't care what you say" only to in very short order discover that my plot of downtown makes a way the fuck better castle [...]

  20. [...] and manner of other problems, so intricate and far reaching as to make their complete avoidance a much cheaper solution, normatively [...]

  21. [...] as good as division by zero, anything you come up with on its poisonous basis is sheer rot, to be discarded out of hand before it discards your brain out of your head for [...]

  22. [...] this concept ? There's no further content in there besides this projection of will, which is why their silencing is preferable. [↩]This is exactly the wrong example ; but then again the author wants some [...]

  23. [...] not the case. There's piles of maculature clogging the empire, utter waste of time that have absolutely no utility. [↩]This is historically one way to play go. Nevertheless, the game of go is not idempotent [...]

  24. [...] one we already have for dealing with USG.bureaucrat "lawyers" and the other one, for dealing with USG.bureaucrat "scientists" : never take any SWAG-drugs. If "everyone" is taking Lipitor, you don't take it, because "everyone" [...]

  25. [...] People are not equal. Knowledge and cognitive ability varies greatly from person to person. A good strategy for learning is to pick the smartest person in the room and listen to what they say. Maybe others will occasionally offer something intelligent, but it is expensive to evaluate useless babble. Ain't nobody got time for digging through piles and piles of pseudoscience to find little nuggets of information. [...]

  26. [...] otherwise, in any sort of grounded retelling, the intellectual value of this sad wank is exactly the same nil. As you do not know but could at great expense find out, there were very intricate discussions on [...]

  27. [...] before. All other nonsense purporting to misrepresent itself as "judgement" is by that very fact invalid. [↩]The postmodern comicity of this nonsense. Trinity said it best, you know ? Epic. [...]

  28. [...] Now, supposing there's two sets, one consisting of a million natural numbers from one to one million, and the other consisting of the numbers 8, 75, 119`500 and 996`000 -- what does the utterance "That 996`000 is a good example of a million" say about the numeral 996`000 ? Nothing at all. At issue is not the value, but its context, what's said's entirely that "the largest value in your set is not so far off from the largest value in my canonical set". That's all ; and the exact same statement could be applied to any other two sets, with whatever other numbers -- it'd still not be about the god damned numbers. I say "it's a good example" because in my moral system goodness of examples is closeness, and my ethical approach readily resolves 996`000 as close enough to 1`000`000 in that context ; no more is involved whatsoever. There's nothing good about the number, there's nothing good about the example. Because I had pre-decided that in the case of examples closeness is what counts for goodness, therefore I said "it's a good example". It's not the number that "earned" it, it's my divine grace that granted it. Sola gratia et gratia sola ; the assignment does not flow the other way, there's nothing in that example that characterizes or qualifies goodness whatsoever. Should all eternity hence be spent assigning "good" to examples involving odd numbers, the "empirical observation" that "there's something about Mary odd numbers" will be and perpetually remain absolutely spurious. Unless and until I declare oddity good, oddity's entirely irrelevant, and stays irrelevant irrespective of "social sciences". [...]

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