Mark K

According to Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation (discussed during Covid), roughly 30% of the population does not fall under the spell or "hypnotized" state of mass hysteria. Sounds tidy, right? But since Covid, the "dissident" community from the Covid era has fractured into opposing camps as new mass hysterias have infected society. If some people are naturally more resistant to mass hysteria, it would always be the same people who manage to steer clear. All the same dissidents would reappear, time and time again, as new mass hysterias emerge. And all the same people who got caught up in it last time would get caught up in the next one. But clearly that has not been the case. Immunity to one bout of mass hysteria is no guarantee that you will have immunity to the next. So, resistance to mass hysteria obviously does not come from some genetic predisposition, nor is there some kind of lifetime psychological immunity. It changes from issue to issue. Most likely, personal circumstances play the biggest role. In some cases, being away from the crowd gives people time to reflect. Or personal familiarity with an issue or the people involved might create the disconnect needed to recognize the mass hysteria. Or the luck of seeing some comment or post that makes you think about something differently than what the crowd is discussing. Or how many in your close tribe fall prey and sweep you along. And some people simply have a habit of verifying original sources and thus are in the habit of testing and retesting their own ideas -- it's not that they are immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories and mass hysteria, but rather that their habits provide a mechanism to lead them back out. But, considering how the Covid dissident community has fractured since then, this category of people seems to be vanishingly small indeed. It's also worth noting that mass hysteria can arise from different places (i.e. government propaganda vs crowd-sourced), which also either sets you up to be more or less likely to fall prey depending on your psychological state. For example, if, due to a prior experience, you have completely lost your trust in government institutions or legacy media, that would make you more resistant to official propaganda. But if you have high trust in those institutions because you've never had a transformative run-in with how flawed they are, you're likely more easily misled by govt propaganda. By contrast, the inverse is also true. If you don't trust govt institutions, that might actually make you more susceptible to falling into some crowd-sourced conspiracy theory because you extend trust to "dissident voices" that provide alternate explanations for how the world works -- after all, if you don't trust the govt and the media, you're probably already out there looking for alternate explanations to make sense of the world. Whereas those who have a high degree of trust in government and media institutions are likely relatively immune to crowd-sourced conspiracy theories because they're not out there looking for alternate ways of making sense of the world and aren't likely to extend their trust to someone who isn't some media-approved institutional expert. Furthermore, if someone you trusted as a reliable source of information during the last mass hysteria falls for the next one, your trust in them might easily lead you down the same rabbit hole. In short, while there may be some validity to Desmet's idea that 30% are immune, it's a little more complicated than that. Clearly it's not the same 30% every time. Not even close. If anything, if you're busy congratulating yourself that you managed to avoid getting caught up in the mass hypnosis the last time, you may actually be overconfident in your ability to resist the next one and thus not have enough self-doubt to question your most strongly held opinions, which might just turn out to be wrong this time. That's why, no matter how confident you are in what you believe, the only safeguard to prevent you from deceiving yourself is the habit of continually putting all your beliefs to the test, verifying original sources, and giving consideration to what those you don't agree with are saying. As Richard Feynman so famously said: 👇

~How about that weird protagonist in Gravity's Rainbow who had these compulsive sexual urges conditioned in him as an infant by a Pavlovian scientist, enmeshed in lifelong surveillance, nefarious geopolitical plots, drawn to underage girls, who in the end mysteriously disappears?

According to Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation (discussed during Covid), roughly 30% of the population does not fall under the spell or "hypnotized" state of mass hysteria. Sounds tidy, right? But since Covid, the "dissident" community from the Covid era has fractured into opposing camps as new mass hysterias have infected society. If some people are naturally more resistant to mass hysteria, it would always be the same people who manage to steer clear. All the same dissidents would reappear, time and time again, as new mass hysterias emerge. And all the same people who got caught up in it last time would get caught up in the next one. But clearly that has not been the case. Immunity to one bout of mass hysteria is no guarantee that you will have immunity to the next. So, resistance to mass hysteria obviously does not come from some genetic predisposition, nor is there some kind of lifetime psychological immunity. It changes from issue to issue. Most likely, personal circumstances play the biggest role. In some cases, being away from the crowd gives people time to reflect. Or personal familiarity with an issue or the people involved might create the disconnect needed to recognize the mass hysteria. Or the luck of seeing some comment or post that makes you think about something differently than what the crowd is discussing. Or how many in your close tribe fall prey and sweep you along. And some people simply have a habit of verifying original sources and thus are in the habit of testing and retesting their own ideas -- it's not that they are immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories and mass hysteria, but rather that their habits provide a mechanism to lead them back out. But, considering how the Covid dissident community has fractured since then, this category of people seems to be vanishingly small indeed. It's also worth noting that mass hysteria can arise from different places (i.e. government propaganda vs crowd-sourced), which also either sets you up to be more or less likely to fall prey depending on your psychological state. For example, if, due to a prior experience, you have completely lost your trust in government institutions or legacy media, that would make you more resistant to official propaganda. But if you have high trust in those institutions because you've never had a transformative run-in with how flawed they are, you're likely more easily misled by govt propaganda. By contrast, the inverse is also true. If you don't trust govt institutions, that might actually make you more susceptible to falling into some crowd-sourced conspiracy theory because you extend trust to "dissident voices" that provide alternate explanations for how the world works -- after all, if you don't trust the govt and the media, you're probably already out there looking for alternate explanations to make sense of the world. Whereas those who have a high degree of trust in government and media institutions are likely relatively immune to crowd-sourced conspiracy theories because they're not out there looking for alternate ways of making sense of the world and aren't likely to extend their trust to someone who isn't some media-approved institutional expert. Furthermore, if someone you trusted as a reliable source of information during the last mass hysteria falls for the next one, your trust in them might easily lead you down the same rabbit hole. In short, while there may be some validity to Desmet's idea that 30% are immune, it's a little more complicated than that. Clearly it's not the same 30% every time. Not even close. If anything, if you're busy congratulating yourself that you managed to avoid getting caught up in the mass hypnosis the last time, you may actually be overconfident in your ability to resist the next one and thus not have enough self-doubt to question your most strongly held opinions, which might just turn out to be wrong this time. That's why, no matter how confident you are in what you believe, the only safeguard to prevent you from deceiving yourself is the habit of continually putting all your beliefs to the test, verifying original sources, and giving consideration to what those you don't agree with are saying. As Richard Feynman so famously said: 👇

JUST IN: New Epstein document drop reveals that Jeffrey Epstein thought of org*sms like he thought of eating: 3 times a day. According to Epstein victim Johanna Sjoberg, Epstein needed to have 3 org*sms a day. "He explained to me that, in his opinion, he needed to have three org*sms a day. It was biological, like eating."

The unpredictability of the double pendulum.

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT. What they found should concern every single person reading this. ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months. Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months. The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time. Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there. It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed. Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch. The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own. MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back. The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

🚨 ANTHROPIC CEO WARNS: THE COMPANY IS NO LONGER SURE CLAUDE ISN’T CONSCIOUS.

"Whether we want to face it or not, life, with all of its beauty, joy, and majesty, also has a tragic element to it. The question is, Can we directly encounter this tragic quality of life on its own terms?" Adyashanti🧵

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE USING CHATGPT TO WRITE THEIR APPLICATIONS; HR IS USING AI TO READ THEM; NO ONE IS GETTING HIRED PER ATLANTIC