“Flat Earth” more popular than MRA, MGTOW and PUA combined, Google Trends suggests

@Vanir85:

Who cares? Six Oscars for Fury Road! The MRAs can cry us a sweet, sweet river! 😀

And Spotlight gets Best Picture, with the producer using his speech to issue a challenge to the pope! Who could have seen that happening, just a few years ago?

@Imaginary Petal:
What’s your name on there, so I can mention you?

@EJ

Same name as here, but without the blank space.

@Catalpa
I think that comic is close to a truth with respect to how I think cognitive enhancements work in autism. There has been an observation that the children of scientists and engineers tend to have a greater incidence of autism. But this has been tricky for me when it comes to bias because my own Tourette’s Syndrome shares many features with autism (like savant syndrome associated sensory hypersensitivity), but are like a “mirror image” of one another in other respects (like the difference between ADD/ADHD or introversion/extroversion). So trying to describe “what autism is” has its limits but I have some ideas I’ve been poking at for years.

The best I can do for an objective hypothesis is that autism comes with advantages in the more objective sensory processes associated with “exteroception”, basically the senses that feed in outside information . An interesting observation related to this is that people with autism are less subject to change blindness (the gorilla on the basketball court experiment).

In my case I think that TS comes with advantages in the more subjective sensory processes associated with “interoception”, basically a “body sense” that also has to do with feelings of “personal/physical status” in a sense that has to do with what we think of as emotional states in a casual use of the term. I think it gives me something of an advantage in objectifying the emotional states of myself and others and in being introceptive (I know why I do what I do).

But that way of looking at it is bullshit at the casual social level because both exteroception and interoception are parts of emotional responses. Research into what emotion is suggests that emotion is like a program being run and feelings of emotion are sensations of the program being run. Emotion has three parts” “primordial emotions” (from a primordial self), “core emotions” (from a core self) and “autobiographical emotions” (from an autobiographical self) (see Antonio Damasio’s “Self Comes to Mind”). I think that TS hypersensitivity is related to primordial emotions, and that autism hypersensitivity is related to core emotions.

This makes the idea of “emotional arguments” or “feelings-based arguments” crap because it’s what the emotions are attached to that is important and gas-lighting is understandable in this context as it’s a means of avoiding what the emotions are attached to by any means necessary.

@ Scented Fucking Hard Chairs, reimalebario
I see the obsession with the Jews as one part cultural meme and one part group/dominance/aggression psychology + projection. At one level the Jews were treated in really shitty ways throughout history and have been a convenient social scapegoat. Keep in mind that you can see the same things I outline below associated with other minority groups, and you can identify similar versions in child bullies in schools. These are general human behaviors that have versions at the individual and group level.
The social meme comes in where every major element in human psychology seems to have individual and group level standard for what “normal” or “example number 1 of X” is. So every country seems to have a family that they socially obsess over as “alpha family”* (royal family in England and other countries, rotating families like the Kardashians in the US…) and I have a feeling that US is probably like a big drama that the rest of the world likes to watch, because you watch the ones on top. The Jews for better or worse are an international scapegoat to blame a nations/peoples troubles on (and in-group social emotions prevent many from looking up the truth).

The projection** comes in where a group that has been aggressively dominant and scans for threats to that dominance imagines others will do what they have done, and “tit for tat morality” suggests to them that the Jews will get treated as they have been treated. So “da joos are everywhere eleventy!1!1” is a reflection of the fact that the dominant social group (whites/Europeans/Arabs in other countries) will imagine that the Jews are up to what they are up to in a competition sense.

The projection has an added benefit in that it tosses a distraction at the general population in that the general population has it’s perception and filters for these behaviors directed away from the dominant social group, and towards a minority group. So the ones doing it are more protected, and the victims of it get attention wrongly (there are definitely versions of this at the childhood bully level) Multiple “benefits” are probably inherent in how evolution maintains things that are bullshit in the long run.

*I don’t think that it’s hard-wired into our psychology (at least not completely), I think that it’s something valuable that society actively tries to preserve.
**I’m not using the term exactly like it is used in psychology, but the operation is functionally similar. I have to admit that my own possession of this social software is what lets me and others see it, and being a white aggressive male gives even more benefits in this area. When you see what you have been a part of it gets pretty stark and you have some choices to make. There are also probably lots of defense mechanisms that lead to others to try to deny the reality.

Those flights between Australia and South America are real but not actually direct. They stop in Antarctica for the plane changes of people who travel to the inside of the Hollow Earth.

Wait a moment . . . how can the Earth be flat and hollow? There’s a conspiracy here, I just know it!

@Alan Robertshaw
I have a copy of that article. I try to collect as many examples as I can of these things and eventually I would like to get into advocacy in these areas. I used to be in Cell and Molecular Biology but the last 6 years have been, complicated. I think that I would have been a better politician or other social organizer and I tried to be a scientist.

ADHD has it’s own benefits but they are more associated with emotionally dynamic situations, “pattern breaking” or “out of the box thinking” and leadership skills (good in a crisis or things involving emotional intensity). Depression has been linked to better judgement of negative qualities that can go out of control in a modern context (society needs to be focusing on bad things that happen more in addition to medicating it, people are depressed for reasons), even schizophrenia patents are immune to some kinds of reasoning bias (it would be good for a population with reasoning bullshit to have people more resistant to it, schizophrenia benefits may be more group-level things).

As for the inheritance aspects, I think that inherited epigenetic predispositions based on ancestor experiences or “mode of life” are a good thing to look at. I can find connections to epigenetics in all of these conditions and there are lots of other things in the DSM-V that I have not looked at.

These are fascinating times. It will be interesting seeing how society deals with having to reinterpret the past based on what we really are.

Flat Earth (and basically any conspiracy theory) does have quite a bit in common with the manosphere, at least as far as ideation goes. They all rely heavily on producing “just so” explanations to fit their predetermined conclusions, and use some sort of poorly defined controlling group as a scapegoat to make those explanations impossible to actually disprove. The controlling group is always just powerful enough to manipulate any evidence presented by “their side” (e.g. feminism controls academia, thus academic studies are biased) yet never powerful enough to silence those that know the “truth.”

I think one way that they somewhat diverge, and unintuitively what may be the reason for the manosphere’s lack of staying power, is that the manosphere is actually closer to reality. MRAs and the like rely heavily on misusing information; out-of-context quotes, badly interpreted statistics, appropriated terminology, etc. Whereas something like Flat Earth is largely made out of whole cloth; they literally need to dispute basic science and easily observable phenomena. MRAs use poor arguments and will literally never concede a single point, but Flat Earth basically precludes argument entirely. And I feel like this half-a-pinkie-toe in reality gives just enough ground for people with at least an ounce of critical thinking skills to either avoid or eventually eject themselves from the manosphere.

@Alan Robertshaw
I can believe it. The research that I use to guide what I read about shows that some advantages only appear in combination with other diagnoses. Enhanced “antisaccade abilities” seem to require TS+ADHD+OCD, while TS alone seems to give advantages to time processing.

None of which relates to adults with these conditions and the advantages associated with struggling with them over one’s whole life. I get the impression that we have to struggle to gain skills and that what look like childhood weaknesses may predict adult strengths.

Additionally each of these conditions also seem to come with various “flavors” of OCD more often than others. TS has aggression/violence/sex/social rule OCDs, ADHD often has a perfectionism OCD…I’m not sure about autism. That is one I have meant to go back to.

I’ve always wondered: if you’re some kind of super-powerful Illuminati, or Jew, or Jewish Illuminati, and you control the media, the police, the government, all that stuff (and these are some really powerful people!) how comes your incredible network can a) be discovered by some dude in his underwear from his home with his 56k modem and b) all your horses and all your men cannot shut down his spinning-illuminati-disc, lensflare, black-background infowars site?

The best comment I’ve ever heard about this sort of thing (I think it was from the Skeptic’s Dictionary but can’t find it right now) and one that fits perfectly with the rest of the discussion on this site:

Do you know why we know about the original Bavarian Illuminati, and why they got shut down within about fifteen years of their founding?

Because rank-and-file members were using their membership in a Secret Society planning on bringing down the Church and its supported leaders… as pick-up lines to show how important they were.

(For that matter, one of the reasons Weisshaupt formed the Illuminati was because he was too cheap to pay the fees for the Freemasons.)

@Jenora Feuer:
That’s amazing. Thank you for that, it made my day.

@Alan;

Anecdotally, my reply to that is no. Certainly no more so than other fields I’ve been a part of ( currently working semiconductors ). The nuclear field does not have a large portion of that in it. I spent 12 years in the nuclear industry, serving in R&D, Operations, and finally Instruction. Part of it civilian, part military.

The nuclear field, operations especially, tends to be populated by ‘alpha’ type personalities. In the military it is predominantly populated by smart people but they’re undertrained ( in every sense of that word ), uninterested, and overutilised. A lot of military nukes aren’t there because of interest in the nuclear field, many are pulled into it as a result of test scoring and quotas. It lends itself to a great number of suicides as people break under the unrealistic strains of pressures they create for themselves. Even more die doing stupid shit during their off time. The nuclear community is “old”, has difficulty maintaining new talent, and is one of the “old guard” concerns in science fields.

The only part I would imagine that has more of that spectrum is R&D, which I haven’t been a part of since 2004ish. But when I did R&D – and I’m biased because I was happier and more naive back then – but when I did R&D, the people I worked with were more open and passive in tone and willingness to work with new ideas but still aggressively territorial with their projects. People in R&D were far more… colourful? I’m not really sure how to explain it, so lemme tell you about a guy named Squirrel. I don’t even remember his real name, we all called him Squirrel. Brilliant quantum theorist doctoral student, way above my intellect level for sure. But; he would drop on all fours and chase squirrels if he saw one. It was a latent action, and at first funny but rather quickly horribly embarrassing. How do you even explain that? It’s still hard to believe and I actually experienced it.

The nuclear community is a rather strange place. It is one of the few places where anyone can speak up with less fear of reprisal ( it is not odd to get a challenge to a notion or brief from someone of low rank or stature – which I personally don’t have an issue with, I think this should happen more broadly in terms of how society works but I think the way we do it sometimes isn’t helpful ), but in the operations side this tends to devolve to figurative power matches and who is more right. R&D tends to be more speculative in nature but no less confrontational.

People tend to think of science as a more ‘rational’ field, but humans will human. We are very protective of our ideals and ideas, and as I like to personally say “While humans claim to reach for the unknown, we breed our contempt in the familiarity of our traditions.” The nuclear community is a great example of this in action. And I can say that reflectively; even now, no longer in the community for several years I still flinch / become aggressive at the mention of ‘cold fusion’ even though I know I can’t really do reactor kinetics problems anymore and realistic advances and developments have been made. I’m personally in the “for nuclear waste, for SMR design, for proliferation of GenV breeder modules” camp with a strong nuclear future but I also think that humans aren’t mature enough to actually handle it. Our accidents prove that we refuse to learn from our mistakes and continue to operate research enterprises as capitalist businesses with clear and dangerous results.

IMHO we have a lot of growing up to do, but of course my experiences and opinions are my own and I’m going off on a tangent.