The Hugh Manatee Challenge

[slomo]

Hello HMW/all

What is the relevance of KWH theory in respect to the precognitive/foreknowing aspects of the scenarios depicted in the 1980s "Illuminati" Card Game?

No relevance/high relevance, depending on how you look at it.

If the phenomenon is real (not due to chance or confirmation bias) and the mechanism is strictly causal (i.e. all information flows take place strictly within the confines of the restricted Lorentz group that describes all space-time symmetries that obey unidirectional time-flow), then we are obliged to conclude that the events are organized by some agency, likely human, and keywords are seeded beforehand in a manner not unlike that which Hugh describes. However, as Sepka points out in the founding post of this thread, this would require such human agency to be able to predict and control events a decade or more in advance with a high degree of precision. If this is the case, then it should, in principle, be possible to predict future occurrences by examining current cultural phenomena and trends. However, even if this can be demonstrated, it still leaves open the question of motivation. Why would such seeding be necessary? Is it designed to be obstructive? If so, how and why? By what mechanism do Kirby comic books, Laugh-In episodes, and obscure card games obstruct the full comprehension and contextual evaluation of the Gulf Wars? Especially when a much easier means of controlling public reaction is to censor these events from the news entirely, or at least distort them beyond recognition. Is it designed to manufacture consent? If so, by what behaviorist mechanism do these very minor cultural curiosities have a demonstrable large-scale effect on public opinion? It may be that the phenomenon is causal but directed by powerful non-human agencies, but some of the same questions come up, with the unattractive feature of adding more complexity to the model, i.e. a noticeable woo component.

On the other hand, if we accept acausal mechanisms (information flows that lie outside the restricted Lorentz group, perhaps belonging to some more general group of symmetries that allow "time rotations", but are more easily understood in terms of accesible"woo-woo" theories), then it is possible that major events such as the Gulf Wars have an information wave that travels back in time, or that there is a feedback mechanism between events separated in time. Or, that both the Gulf Wars and the cultural phenomena that occur beforehand and appear to predict aspects of these wars are part of larger multidimensional structures that may or may not possess their own forms of intelligence. I admit that these models have a high degree of complexity to them that may be unattractive from a scientific perspective, but they do help to answer some of the questions that arise in causal interpretations of these phenomena. Because these models are so exotic, they are harder to analyze, but for that reason I find them particularly compelling, and actually fun to entertain.

[Nordic]

Well, by this same standard, Arnold Schwarzenegger is DESTINED to become President, since there was so much noise about that a few years ago. And jokes. And even a group called "Amend for Arnold" so that he could run.

So. He WILL be President before he dies. According to the "theory".


and I will marry Morgan Fairchild.

[slomo]

This thread (and a few others), by the way, is evidence that there is strong interest in discussing these issues at RI, regardless of Hugh's presence or participation.

Yes.

I disagree with Hugh's theories (not "violently" though) because they have no well-developed mechanism. However, I do believe that he sometimes locks into real phenomena (e.g. as reported by others in the above comments) and that the phenomena deserve to be studied and modeled.

[Nordic]

Then look no further than scholarly film criticism, which treats a film as a product of the unconscious mind of a culture.

HMW ignores this of course.

But much of what he points out is nothing more than this, something that smarter people than he have been dealing with for decades now.

You can look at almost any product of a culture this way including the advertising or whatever.

Again, why is he so special that we all are expected to bend over backwards here. I feel like we're all looking for the bones of the dinosaur Jesus rode.

[slomo]

Then look no further than scholarly film criticism, which treats a film as a product of the unconscious mind of a culture.

HMW ignores this of course.

But much of what he points out is nothing more than this, something that smarter people than he have been dealing with for decades now.

You can look at almost any product of a culture this way including the advertising or whatever.

Again, why is he so special that we all are expected to bend over backwards here. I feel like we're all looking for the bones of the dinosaur Jesus rode.

There's more to it than "product of the unconscious mind". I take it for granted that all regulars here are familiar with the basics of film theory and the workings of mass media, at least implicitly. The real issue (for me, anyway) is the time-separation between the collective registration of events of mass importance, sometimes with specific detail and with an apparent time-flow direction that evades simple explanation. A charitable interpretation of Hugh's theories is that (1) nothing in our universe violates unidirectional time-flow and (2) there are no intelligences of higher order than humans and their institutions, and therefore (3) the phenomenon is driven by human agency. Unfortunately, when asked to support this theory, Hugh falls back on the basics of media and mass communications that everybody here implicitly takes for granted, and hopes we won't notice that he's conflating a very specific theory with more generally accepted concepts.

[Searcher08]

There are several things I am not clear at all re KWH as posited by Hugh.

Social media
The very phrase Keyword hijacking is relating to an aspect of the net (search) which is arguably much less important than it was. The Arab Spring was not empowered by search, it was empowered by social media - Twitter (now at 500 million users) and Facebook (now at 800 million users).

Changes in SEO itself
SEO has also changed a lot in the last ten years. Doing SEO for a website built in Wordpress or Drupal is quite different from SEO for HTML, and the whole way of constructing websites is different too.

The lack of success of (the reductionist approach called) memetics

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution" among other things. As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[11]

Another criticism comes from semiotics, (e.g., Deacon,[12] Kull[13]) stating that the concept of meme is a primitivized concept of Sign. Meme is thus described in memetics as a sign without its triadic nature. In other words, meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

Mary Midgley criticises memetics for at least two reasons: One, culture is not best understood by examining its smallest parts, as culture is pattern-like, comparable to an ocean current. Many more factors, historical and others, should be taken into account than only whatever particle culture is built from. Two, if memes are not thoughts (and thus not cognitive phenomena), as Daniel C. Dennett insists in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", then their ontological status is open to question, and memeticists (who are also reductionists) may be challenged whether memes even exist. Questions can extend to whether the idea of "meme" is itself a meme, or is a true concept.

[DrVolin]

Especially when a much easier means of controlling public reaction is to censor these events from the news entirely, or at least distort them beyond recognition.

That, I have less trouble with. The major Allied innovation in propaganda during WWII (and since) was the movement away from controlling the information to which receptors are exposed, and toward control of how receptors react to the information. This is what Hugh would call priming, I think. Especially in the modern world, and increasingly since the 1940s, controlling what people are exposed to is a losing battle. It is perhaps relatively easy to make sure that people are exposed to something, but extremely difficult to keep them to being exposed to something entirely. The obvious solution is to control how they will react once exposed.

[slomo]

Especially when a much easier means of controlling public reaction is to censor these events from the news entirely, or at least distort them beyond recognition.

That, I have less trouble with. The major Allied innovation in propaganda during WWII (and since) was the movement away from controlling the information to which receptors are exposed, and toward control of how receptors react to the information. This is what Hugh would call priming, I think. Especially in the modern world, and increasingly since the 1940s, controlling what people are exposed to is a losing battle. It is perhaps relatively easy to make sure that people are exposed to something, but extremely difficult to keep them to being exposed to something entirely. The obvious solution is to control how they will react once exposed.

Fair criticism. Then "keywords" act as control rods for public reaction/opinion. How does this work, especially in light of Searcher08's most recent comment? I am open to the idea that culture can be analyzed reductively in terms of cultural atoms (whether you call them "memes" or "signs", appreciating the distinction although I am not deeply familiar with semiotics) in the same way that fluids and gasses can be partially understood in terms of the properties of their constituent molecules. However, a larger theoretical model (analogous to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics) is still needed. This is in fact my major objection to KWHJ: in any statistical sense, individual memes or signs cannot have much effect on the collective flow of consciousness, unless there is a high degree of nonlinearity involved, or some very odd probability calculus that does not obey the law of large numbers. The extent to which the effects are nonlinear is exactly the extent to which the laws of so-called "magick" are real and effective.

What I really want to know, before I accept KWHJ, is this larger theory analogous to statistical mechanics. I am not interested in seeing more cataloguing of different molecules. That is all Hugh seems to provide (when he's not simply regurgitating standard media analysis that most of us readily accept.)

[Searcher08]

To add a personal experience - back in the 1990s, I was very interested in how innovations spread. I had been teaching innovative thinking and noticed that often organisations would come up with great innovations that just would not take off.
I came to see that the process of transformation of organisations is often blocked by innovations not spreading - a guy called Everett Rogers wrote a wonderful book called the Diffusion of Innovation - it is not dry at all - and I think most RIers would LOVE it. It is where the terms like Early Adopters and Opinion Formers came from.

There is even an online game of it
https://www.indiana.edu/~simed/istdemo/

[DrVolin]

in any statistical sense, individual memes or signs cannot have much effect on the collective flow of consciousness

And that is exactly where Hugh's stuff breaks down, IMO. I would look for a few well timed, significant, high visibility interventions that are easily relatable to an obvious motivation. Not a few molecules bouncing around, but a sudden influx. If that gets anywhere, then more subtle possible cases can be investigated as potential low-level constant maintenance. The obvious example that I think I could document if I got down to it is the introduction of In Plane Sight.

Before In Plane Sight: 'I have some questions about the 9/11 official story'. 'Oh, what are they?'
After In Plane Sight: 'I have some questions about the 9/11 official story'. 'Yeah, next you'll tell me there was no plane at the Pentagon, get lost'.

A wonderful inoculation job. But that is clearly a reactive one. As far as pro-active priming, I would look for stuff leading up to the release of the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate, or perhaps the Church Committee. And I would look for something, like No Plane at the Pentagon, that gets at least brief national and international play and clearly associates an inconvenient interpretation of upcoming events with something silly or improbable. Another obvious candidate for pro-active priming would be the 2000 election.

[DrVolin]

And Searcher,

If you haven't already, check out Hagerstrand's Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process. Classic stuff.

[slomo]

in any statistical sense, individual memes or signs cannot have much effect on the collective flow of consciousness

And that is exactly where Hugh's stuff breaks down, IMO. I would look for a few well timed, significant, high visibility interventions that are easily relatable to an obvious motivation. Not a few molecules bouncing around, but a sudden influx. If that gets anywhere, then more subtle possible cases can be investigated as potential low-level constant maintenance. The obvious example that I think I could document if I got down to it is the introduction of In Plane Sight.

Before In Plane Sight: 'I have some questions about the 9/11 official story'. 'Oh, what are they?'
After In Plane Sight: 'I have some questions about the 9/11 official story'. 'Yeah, next you'll tell me there was no plane at the Pentagon, get lost'.

A wonderful inoculation job. But that is clearly a reactive one. As far as pro-active priming, I would look for stuff leading up to the release of the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate, or perhaps the Church Committee. And I would look for something, like No Plane at the Pentagon, that gets at least brief national and international play and clearly associates an inconvenient interpretation of upcoming events with something silly or improbable. Another obvious candidate for pro-active priming would be the 2000 election.

I think these are wonderful examples that operate a higher level of semiotic complexity than what I understand to be the mainstay of KWHJ. They totally make sense, and are part and parcel of COINTELPRO strategy. I have no objection to the proposition that these are real strategies that have been on-line for a few decades.

Your other suggestions are still, strictly speaking, retrospective. They suffer from some of the same issues that case-control studies suffer from, in that it's easy to find spurious patterns between past events and events even prior to those past events. Of course, case-control studies are still used, and the Kirby/Laugh-In/Illuminati-Card-Game examples are still compelling. However, it would be more convincing to issue a prediction in the here-and-now and see whether history unfolds as predicted. A tall order probably, but necessary if this is ever to be considered a "science", as Hugh claims.

[Plutonia]

So what about working from the other end?

We could compile incidents that fit the criteria for KWHjacking but that are so inconsequential - no important, people, dates, events, programs etc referenced, that there's no motivation for spook intervention.

Of course that may not be so easy to do...

But if we were to find it a ubiquitous phenomenon outside of sociopolitics, then that would presumable undermine the argument for human agency, no?

What made me think of it, is that I just came across this:



On Jan 17 there is a big Occupy Congress protest planned in Washington.
It's been talked about since early Dec as far as I've seen.

I really cannot believe that a spook operation would create and publish this poster (the band seems real enough) just to influence ... something?

Of course Jan 17 is a couple weeks away yet and maybe a million folks will be chanting "New Congress" under the obelisk in the National Mall, and then I'd have to eat my hat!






What do you think?

[barracuda]

According to what I'm able to scrape from the synopses on movie insider, I'm going to call for a CIA scandal to surface in late January or early February of this year (Safehouse, and This Means War), a bomb plot in New York during the same time period (The Divide), or a story (with a possible CIA bent) related to an arms dealing operation with possible ties to Ernst Werner Glatt (Goon) in February/March.

You can see a few problems here with the challenge as it is currently formulated:

- I need far more character names and details than are currently available to reverse-google seach in order to be able to actually make a decent guesses.

- The vagueness of my prognostication leaves entirely too much wiggle room. Isn't there a CIA scandal just about every day?

- I want a control group. You need to use the same information to make predictions involving an area or areas which have nothing to do with the intelligence community or politics - something like distinguished members of the American Opthamologists Association, bicycle racers, or astronomers. Maybe horse race outcomes based upon the horse names and the owner/stable details would be a good one. Some group that is wide enough to allow for depth of comparison, and has identifiable and recordable events of interest to compare against. Horse racing seems perfect. Let's see if we can make money on bets by harnessing the ineffable synchro-continuum.

[elfismiles]

meh