Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

Obviously scientists don’t want to work any more and eat avocado toast too much.

Have they tried getting a college degree to increase their job prospects?

And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

… because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.

In case people forgot:

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/active-listening-marketers-smartphones-ad-targeting-cox-media-group-1235841007/

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

They (basically any large online retailer or advertiser) are, in fact, listening to everything you say near your phone, near your alexa, your echo, your smart device.

Linking heard words and phrases with your known shopping activity + a gigantic dataset + statistical analysis = they can predict all kinds of things about you, with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.

You know how archaeologists and detectives can make a decent profile of a person or group’s daily lifestyle by analyzing your garbage?

Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia version of that.

Please, please, sue the World Bank Mr. Musk. I am so sure that will go well, and totally won’t result in anything bad for all of your massively debt financed businesses.

Apparently the longest ever recorded glide is 45 seconds.

Fish don’t have lungs, so the analogy is kind of busted, but some humans can hold their breath for 30 seconds, some 2 minutes, some 5 minutes, but overall it doesn’t take long for brain damage/death to occur.

I’d guesstimate that a flying fish would be probably irrevivably dead after 3 to 5 minutes out of water.

I tried to look up more specifics on flying fish respiratory systems vs other fish back when I posted this, to see if they have measurably better ability to remain alive out of water for longer than other fish, but I couldn’t find much.

And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.

There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.

What Heidegger is saying in your excerpt is that in ancient times, it seems that people widely believed in a kind of unseen, parallel world of spirits, which Plato was using as a basis for his ideas, as opposed to wholly inventing his philosophy entirely on his own, without any precedent.

He is pointing out that Plato’s metaphysics can be seen as inspired by, developed off of the foundation of earlier metaphysics, as opposed to Plato just wholly inventing them out of nothing.

When Heidegger gave that lecture, Europeans had very recently actually discovered or deciphered/translated actual empirical, physical evidence for the worldview or metaphysics of many peoples and cultures outside of Europe/The Mediterranean Coast or within that region going back further than Socrates.

They were fairly early into discovering and beginning to translate and understand much of what we, nearly 100 years later, now have widespread access to. Archaeology was still a young field at this time.

The lecture you are quoting was given in 1935 in German, and not even translated into English until 1959!

Heidegger was trying to connect what were at his time, newly discovered dots, toward tracing out the development of various forms of human metaphysics.

Heidegger is not saying that our modern concept of metaphysics is identical to those of shamans thousands of years ago.

He is instead tracing… the history… of widely varying, changing and differing metaphysical theories and ideas, either provably held or postulated to be held by many different groups of people over large time scales.

The entire point is that metaphysical theories change over time.

‘Metaphysics’ is not a single theory, any more than ‘Biology’ or ‘Astronomy’ is a single theory.

Those are all container terms which describe bodies of knowledge and thought within specific parameters, and they’ve all developed over time and place.

Plato has his metaphysical theories, as does Aristotle, and Kant, Leibniz, Hume, and these Perennial Shamans are proposed to as well. They are not all the same ideas and they are often in conflict with one another.

Anyway…

If John Woo Woo shows up in shamanic garb and you find this more convincing that him not being in shamanic garb, I would take the post modernist approach and just tell you that you find this more convincing because you have been conditioned by modern media to associate ancient shamans with purity, innocence, righteousness, spirituality and wisdom.

Also thats basically the most textbook, case-closed instance of cultural appropriation I’ve ever heard: John Woo Woo is dressing up in another culture’s dress and adopting their mannerisms despite not being from or substantially connected to that culture, and he is doing so purely as a marketing technique to sell you useless bullshit within his own internalized capitalist paradigm.

If the commercial on TV has an actor wearing a doctor’s outfit, does this imply the untested supplement you are being sold has any actual medically beneficial effects whatsoever?

Or did you just fall for a marketing gimmick?

In closing: There’s science, and psuedo-science, ie, charlatans adopting some of the garb or mannerisms or vocabulary of science, but which does not actually follow the core concepts of empirical testing, falsifiability, often directly contradicts actual known science, and generally acts as a wolf in sheeps clothing, for personal profit.

To close this with what I was originally going to open this with:

It is not that healing crystals might work because the LHC has yet to discover how they work.

It is that many, many empirical, scientific studies, published and peer reviewed, have repeatedly and unequivocally found that they do not work, that they have no effect beyond placebo.

Maybe a more decent definition of a metaphysical theory would be:

The rules which give rise to a world which we can describe in more detail with other, more specific rules.

Or from another angle:

The rules which are followed by all of the rules of physics.

‘What organizes all physical matter’ is just a definition of physics, without the meta.

…

I think you have not had much exposure to more successful woo woo peddlers, and you’re missing still the key point I am making of conflating meanings of a word.

Its more than just using the word in a vacuous or spurious sense, as with your ‘metaphysically’ example.

It doesn’t really add any meaning whatsoever to just throw ‘metaphysically’ in front of the rest of that sentence (with your definition of metaphysically), beyond ‘whoah, fancy word.’

You can just throw on fancy sounding words to a sentence or concept, but I am talking about a different and more insidious manipulation tactic.

…

Repetitive conflation of words with multiple meanings breaks down an ignorant audiences ability to understand that they are being lied to by making it unclear that different definitions are in fact different.

Its using a word with meaning A, in a sentence, then in sentence 3 you use meaning B, then in sentence 4 you use meaning A, so on and so on, such that an uniformed or ignorant person who has only heard this word a few times or didn’t pay attention in school is functionally now being educated by woo woo peddler such that they now think the word has a kind of nebulous melding of meaning A and meaning B, and that this is the singular undifferentiated meaning, when in fact this is not the case, there are two distinct, context and domain specific meanings represented by the same word.

You could conceivably do that with the word ‘nuclear’, by switching between the phrase ‘nuclear family’ and ‘nuclear energy’ to the point that, in a long monologue, you might be able confuse some people into thinking that there is a literal subatomic nuclear strong force holding together families, or that quarks and electrons literally have feelings toward other quarks and electrons in their family/atomic unit.

…

Its basically the kind of phenomenon where you can tell that someone does not actually know what a word means, that they never looked up its definition and instead just read or heard it, assumed its meaning based on context, and just carried on using this word, usually wildly incorrectly, because they do not actually know what it means.

It creates an unconscious cognitive dissonance that collapses painfully if one tries to actually suss out what the word actually means, which heavily biases the woo afflicted person toward not attempting to do that.

Woo woo peddlers are successful when they can basically brainwash a person into believing an entire alternate worldview, and basically always this worldview is incoherent, contradictory, that ultimately relies on any cognitive dissonance being reconciled by the woo woo peddler.

The point is to basically brainwash ignorant or desperate people into a whole lifestyle of mystical nonsense where the ultimate authority, source of comfort, who you become dependent on, answerer of questions, arbitrator of disputes, is the woo woo peddler.

Thanks!

… You are not understanding me. It seems you stopped reading at the part you quoted and disregarded the rest of what I wrote. Let me expand:

In one context, in one kind of usage, ‘metaphysical’ is an adjective referring to a very technical outline or system of logical reasoning.

In another context, in another kind of usage, it is a vague catch all term for fantastic things that seem to defy logic and reason.

Because these two valid but nearly opposite meanings of the word can be switched out, or conflated, woo woo peddlers love to use this term, as it easily convinces those who do not understand that is what they are doing, and sounds grand, wise or profound.

Its the same with ‘energy’ and ‘frequency’. Both of these terms have valid definitions that are highly specific and empirical in a scientific context, but also have commonly used, colloquial meanings which basically indicate a vague notion of pleasantness or unpleasantness, or maybe enlightened vs unenlightened.

Woo woo peddlers also love to use these words and conflate their two different meanings.

Most people think that the phrase ‘good/bad vibes’ means that you feel good or bad about a person or situation’s attributes, qualities or what not.

But a person who has been listening to too much woo woo peddlers will believe that there is some kind of actual, literally real, energy or frequency surrounding or exuding from a person or situation they find pleasant or unpleasant, because they are so used to the empirical/scientific concept being totally equated to the whimsical concept that they do not understand that there even are two distinct meanings.

The point I am making is not that metaphysical is a woo woo word that means nothing.

The point I am making is that there are many terms with nearly contradictory meanings, where one is associated with objective, ordered, rational, logical, complex concepts that can be studied and meaningfully argued over, and another meaning that is fantastical, defies empiricism or logic, and is highly subjective.

These terms are woo woo terms not because they mean nothing, but because they are often used by woo woo peddlers who jump back and forth between these different meanings to confuse people.

Quantum is another one. So is ‘AI’, at this point.

Just think of the Cambrian as Life being roughly a multiplayer Spore-like game doing an open alpha test or an early access release.

I mean, you probably should throw it like a paper airplane (with form, and not stupendously forcefully), or at least put it back in the water. It is a fish, it will asphyxiate if you just keep holding it.

Metaphysical is a fun woo woo word, because one definition of it is basically as you have said, a synonym for supernatural (ie, physically impossible), whereas the other definition of it relates to metaphysics, the philosophical approaches to understand the rules that govern or give rise to the rules/laws of physics.

So you have one contextual usage that means ‘weird unexplained spooky impossible nonsense’, and another that means, ‘logical structures that seek to explain the nature of reality as understood empirically, often by academics.’

Thus its a perfect word for mystical woo people who love to conflate different contextual meanings of words and pretend they are not doing that.

Make it a Starship exploding with dogecoins flying out of it.

I am still hopeful the Twitter HQ will become a homeless shelter one way or another: Looks like Musky boy just hasn’t been paying rent, so, fingers crossed.

I am remembering a lot of AAA games in the past two years that have launched and basically been unplayable for a day to two weeks due to some kind of combination of not enough servers, garbage netcode, or other game breaking bugs.

Elon just went to a different clown college.

A mandatory class at both AAA game dev flavored clown college and blood diamond mines flavored clown college seems to be the art of talking up a whole lot of cool innovative features and then going hugely over budget and development time and then cutting most of those features for a late delivery date.

(And no, I don’t care if the devs are good at their jobs but management fucked them! is the defense for AAA games. Sure, maybe that’s correct on an internal level. Doesn’t really matter for a consumable product. Would be nice if the idiot asshats got laughed out of the industry instead of new car collections, golden parachutes, but thats a whole 'nother discussion)

Its probably fairly straightforward:

Their new format and infrastructure for video hosting was not properly tested, and they did not expect the amount of bandwidth needed to support viewership demand.

Basically, same thing as a modern AAA live service game launch.

It probably isn’t a DDOS. Its probably just… a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

Kirby is like an eldritch god, but kawaii.