Boomerworld, Architecture, Schizo Brigade & More

Short Notes V

A selection of musings from my Notes Stream on Substack.

See my previous Short Notes I, Short Notes II, Short Notes III and Short Notes IV for more.

---

A thought: you could show works of art to millions of people and have them rate them according to how beautiful they find those works. Then you feed that data to an AI. As a result, the algorithm will be able to look at some new work of art and predict its “beauty” very accurately. But we still wouldn’t know anything about the nature of beauty—about what’s actually beautiful.

Perhaps this should tell us something about the limits of scientific theories: we tend to vastly overestimate what we can infer from a theory’s predictive power.

---

Syllogism of the schizo brigade:

1. Every public figure p is either a savior (A) or a psyop (B) [A ⊻ B)]

2. There are no mortal saviors [∀p : ¬A]

3. Every public figure is a psyop [∀p :B]

---

Boomers pretty much created our current reality, including the mind space we are all operating in. And they are hated for it by many--justifiably so in many ways.

Just look at the world, the stupidity and anti-reality of much of the postwar consensus, with all its unconscious, unquestioned, often idiotic sacred presuppositions.

However, history teaches us that nothing good ever comes from mindlessly turning upside down the world of our parents or grandparents. Ironically, that's what so many boomers were all about back in the days, too. They maniacally saw everything through the Nazi/resistance lens, and lost all nuance and sense of proportion in the process, laying the foundation for our current clown world while opening themselves up to being used and subverted by pathological actors and the very establishment they supposedly were fighting. Don't repeat that mistake.

Like it or not, boomerspace is our world; it is deeply entrenched in all of us. It is also our bridge, our connection to the past, to our history: directly and indirectly.

It doesn't follow from this that we all should embrace boomerism, or even that we should find some middle ground between boomerism and overthrowing boomerism.

Rather, it means we need to be capable of keeping both worlds in mind simultaneously: boomerworld and anti-boomerworld. Because they are both part of reality, of history, and therefore of our minds and our language.

We need to navigate it, use it intelligently, adopt it where appropriate and reject it where appropriate. This takes a certain level of detachment now and then, a willingness to look beyond the surface, to recognize deeper currents than words, hot takes, orthodoxy or anti-orthodoxy. It requires us to keep nimble, to keep moving, to keep looking, to keep thinking.

Otherwise, it's all too easy to become the thing you think you are fighting against; to be used by forces you don't understand; to perpetuate the dialectical cycle that always leads to new forms of tyranny, ideological blindness, anti-humanness and ugly evil.

---

This is all the more remarkable since the usual argument by the descendants of the Freudo-Marxists is that “these people are just brainwashed by far-right populists who prey on their irrational fears”. Except that, of course, all the propaganda goes in the opposite direction, praising multiculturalism and immigration 24/7.

When you’re throwing a party, and some guests bring a weird stranger or two with them, in small amounts this can be intriguing, adding to the party’s flair, even if a few glasses get broken and a mobile stolen by someone nobody seemed to know where he came from. But if those weirdos get too strong in numbers, the party is ruined (or worse), at which point everybody just wants them kicked out.

(In reply to this post:)

---

Truth is out there, but the ways to access it, the intellectual-moral frameworks from which to get at it, vary wildly over time and place.

We are stuck with the access keys our age provides: we can and should strain them, but if we go too far too fast, we risk losing the little we have, ending up in schizoland; if we don't strain them enough, we will end up with outdated keys that don't unlock shit anymore, fading away in an echochamber stuck in the past.

What a fine line to walk, and what a furiously fascinating quest.

---

Been thinking about ChatGPT and why it is so crappy, and it occurred to me that perhaps the very approach of LLMs is just the wrong way to go about it.

It is in fact a way to create an impressive simulation of intelligence, but at the cost of genuine usefulness. In other words, LLMs are trying to fast-track a development that in a sane world would have taken longer, using different approaches.

The effect of ChatGPT and cohorts is that it tempts people to get lazy and cheat, accept sub-par prose and "research" lacking depth and detail, while creating short-term incentives to pour huge piles of garbage on the internet to make some quick bucks (for a while at least, until everything has turned to crap), with some useful applications thrown in (quick research as a starting point, some applications for coders and so on).

So here's a different scenario that could have been: Remember how great Google was at its peak, some years back? Granted, there have been political guard rails around certain topics in place for a long time now, but nobody will doubt Google used to be an AMAZING research tool, and to some degree still is.

Now imagine you take google at its peak, but refine text recognition further while giving you plain-text output, with access to most books ever written. Like they started doing with Google books already, but better. It wouldn't be an LLM, but "just" an intelligently designed research tool.

You could type in for example "give me all references to cometary impacts mentioned in the literature in chronological order with the corresponding sources and short text extracts where they are mentioned". Or “give me the passage in Kant’s work about the thing-as-such that has been most cited in English”. Things like that.

Basically Google but smarter, less cluttered, which unlike ChatGPT and gang doesn't make things up to create illusions with ugly prose, but honors what actual humans have written, and incentivizes people to produce good text and research which will then show up in its output verbatim and sourced.

It would be less impressive as a toy and a simulation of intelligence, but it would be so much more useful, without all the negative consequences of the LLMs. And who knows where this development would have led over time.

Instead, Google is increasingly ruined and unusable, and we are stuck with these LLM toys which simulate an impressive development that in reality keeps people on the surface of things, running in circles on a non-human plane, instead of helping us better connect to the human collective mind.

---

It amazes me how many on the “real left”, who otherwise see clearly that our democracy is a joke and that we’re ruled by war-profiteering oligarchs, still can’t get out of the “Trump is an evil fascist” talking point, incapable of looking any further, even of just trying on a different angle for a change.

Equally startling is the “everything is a psyop” gang, who live in a world (or rather up their arse) in which all is “staged” and scripted: the mirror-image of leftist subjectivism & schizo-level relativism where nothing really exists except what’s floating in their own heads (the unappetizing float-in-itself).

There are many ways to make people believe 2+2=5.

---

The Olympic opening ceremony is a good example of how Sophists (and lawyers) hijack the left hemisphere to gaslight us.

To everyone stepping even half an inch back, it’s blatantly obvious that the ceremony mocked the Last Supper, which of course is entirely in line with today’s artsy sentiments, and therefore not even unexpected.

“But no,” they tell us, “it really was about a different painting, and the Greeks, so you are wrong!” Which is technically and analytically correct, and yet obviously nonsense.

It’s the same trick they use when they tell us “it says female on the passport, so we put him in the female category, what else can we do”, or “he’s an Englishman because he has an English passport” and so on.

In Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist describes an experiment we should all keep in mind when dealing with analytical sophists:

Candidates were asked to look at the following syllogisms (logical arguments) and decide whether they are sound or not:

1. All monkeys climb trees; [OK]

2. The porcupine is a monkey; [obviously wrong]

3. The porcupine climbs trees. [obvious nonsense]

And:

1. Winter is cold in tropical countries; [obviously wrong]

2. Ecuador is a tropical country; [OK]

3. Question: Is it cold in winter in Ecuador, or not?

Now, in the experiment, the right or left hemisphere had been artificially inhibited.

Result: those with predominantly right-hemisphere (“bigger picture”) thinking tended to see through the nonsense at once; those who thought with their left hemisphere tended to accept the conclusion because the logic is formally correct, even though it clearly was nonsense.

One respondent who accepted the nonsense answer, when asked why she thought so, answered that “it said so on the card!”

Indeed, the Olympic ceremony had nothing to do with Christianity: it said so on the card.

---

Having rewatched a couple of things from the 2000s it occurred to me that a lot of it was glorifying what would later be called toxic masculinity: psychopathic gangbangers with a "good heart", guys who would torture and kill people, yet they are somehow cool (cause ya know, can't judge ‘em because they had a difficult childhood), glorification of underclass Sodom and Gomorrah, bad conservative system that you need to destroy by becoming a beast, etc.

What was lacking: real heroes, real role models, such as strong ”aristocrats” fighting for the good, the true and the beautiful based on a higher moral compass and loads of wisdom and education, that sort of thing. Instead, it was always lowlife-thugs good, random violence good, psychopathy just misunderstood oppressed folks, and so on.

Then the woke switcheroo happened, which worked partly because it was a reaction to that previous programming. You always need to mix in some truth for these things to take hold. Also, telling everyone one thing for 20 years and then telling them nah that's all evil seriously messes with people's brains, which weakens them and makes them susceptible to new programs.

Plus, guys who were socialized entirely in the woke era might be tempted to worship the previous programming, glorifying psychopathic male behavior as sort of psychological venting. Parts (not all) of the vitalist crowd falls into that category, IMO. It's a fine line to balance, which is difficult if you are emotionally charged by living through woke clown world.

These sorts of dialectics playing out over longer time spans are how we can be controlled and manipulated. We need to be aware of them.

---

Talk about the analytical-artsy mind’s ability to destroy any and all claims it doesn’t like; even if they are so obvious to common sense & intuition.

Hint: the people who made that meme aren’t analyzing architectural history or waxing about formal styles. They are expressing a sentiment in their own way, and a perfectly reasonable one at that: namely that we experience so much of architecture as soul-degrading. This is why such memes are so popular.

These “revolutionary” buildings are used as SYMBOLS for the misery that is modern architecture (no, we don’t need to define what that is, because we know it), which includes ALL the hideous nonsense being built these days, and for many decades, including the 5-over-one atrocities, steel and glass monstrosities, and the rest.

Now, what the answer to that should be is a different matter; I for one am opposed to any attempt to simply reconstruct past styles, even if it were possible. But I share the sentiment, as do so many others.

Roger Scruton applies.

(In reply to:)