Don’t Trust The Science!

Setting up a review of Probability Zero, a paradigm-level extinction event

Jaroslaw Jasnikowski, Escape from the Arctic, 2023, giclée print

Haven’t written a new counterculture post in a while. I don’t even think I’ve used that as a theme name before. Need something to refer to those occasional looks into new cultural creation or preservation efforts. There are actually a few on deck.

I’ve posted on prestige book publisher Castalia Library as archetypal of new counterculture. Not lately, since start-up problems delayed production for a bit. Setting up the first classic bindery in who knows how long is what makes them a perfect example, but it’s also time consuming. Reversing a flight from traditional quality standards by reviving a mechanical art. Now those issues are straightened out and new books are arriving.

This stunning pair just showed up recently. A stock image, but the originals may be nicer. The Band wrote a big piece on Castalia’s cultural revival. This is a good opportunity to check back in and see how things are going.

The Covers of Byzantium

The two-volume Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire was probably going to be the next counterculture post.

Until an even more potent example of new counterculture happened…

How to introduce a review of a book I haven’t read yet. Sounds like something frantically pondered when unexpectedly called on in a college class. Why not wait a few days? There are two primary reasons. The first is that the argument is so significant that it demands immediate mention. What purports to be a mathematical disproof of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Then there’s the thematic relevance to this Substack’s themes. We define the new counterculture as organic opposition to the House of Lies and its myths. Can’t imagine a more direct attack than that. The sophisticated AI usage is a bleeding edge example of the collaborations the DeepSeek conversations call for. A preliminary post clears the contextuals so the review can have a post of its own.

C. W. Jeffries, The Pioneer, 1784 (cropped), around 1926, Government of Ontario Art Collection

Start with the concept of a new counterculture.

Consider how much time and energy has been spent on what to call a reality-facing opposition to the House of Lies. It is a valid question. It’s hard to build momentum without a reference term. It’s why left, right, liberal, conservative have hung around long past their sell-by dates. No real alternatives. It’s not a question that concerns me though. The point of naming is to fix an identity. Start the whole process of “leaders” and narrative associations for NPCs to feel. While reality-facing is an attitude, not an ideological program, a unified political movement, or claim to possess total truth. And I can’t express how little interest I have in movements.

It is amusing to imagine a cadre of self-righteous dorks prancing about the internet calling themselves “reality-facers”. They might even outcringe the Brights.

Might.

Seriously though, an attitude is more personal and circumstantial than an ideology. Perspectives on reality depend on context. Because all reality-facing means is behaving, thinking, etc. as if reality is objectively real. Logic and observation over will and feelz. It couldn’t be a movement. No one ideological program can cover all the eventualities reality presents. If reality-facing is a collective movement, it’s a bottom-up one. Movement in the basic sense of a number of individuals moving in a common direction. There’s no manifesto other than accepting reality. The only way to describe it is through patterns in collective personal reactions.

The York Daily, York, Pennsylvania, from Mon, July 11, 1898 page 2

I suppose it was immortalized…

At one time, the sympatico movement of individuals in a common context was just organic culture. Socio-cultural preconceptions playing out in local forms. The arrival of mass media could have been a great informer. Instead it became the scaffold for a centralized House of Lies. And if the mainstream is endemically fake, “reality-facing” will run afoul of it eventually.

Reality-facing becomes counterculture in the House of Lies.

New counterculture is a bit of reverse reversal, since the original was a weapon against reality facing.

Not saying ol’Schlinky’s a witch. But there’s a level of crazy eyes that’s hard to look at.

Some variation on “no truth” - anti-reality, basically - is a House of Lies narrative keystone. More lucid narrative huffers admit physical facts. But with some version of postmodernist [it’s all subjectively mediated so objectivity is an illusion]. The differences are surface noise because all → rejecting truth as a guide to behavior. Any claim can be recast as “opinion”. Except what we can call The Science! It is exempt from the supposed subjectivity of truth claims. Unless it’s politically problematic.

The Science! is made up of the various institutions, personnel, policies, and white lab coats that pass for “science” today. This is the broadest possible generalization that does not take away from the work of countless honest researchers. It’s a system-level generalization that is ironically unscientific, since can’t be empirically verified or falsified. The Band has written about the long slow decline. It’s how we wound up with beast media trumpeting a “scientific consensus” that untested poisons posed to long or short-term risks.

STEM Role Models Posters via Medium. Perhaps an art role model might be in order…

It is remarkable how The Science! maintained science’s reputation despite becoming the opposite. There is a process where gradual incremental change → full inversion and the pace keeps it below notice.

Science is an ancient term with different connotations at different times in history. We’re concerned with the modern form version based on the Scientific Revolution and its original Scientific Method. A very specific type of accurate knowledge production that has been applied far beyond any rational limit. Infocognitive toggling between abstract hypotheses and controlled empirical testing.

Replacing this process with The Science! may be the most important House of Lies cornerstone. Credentialed on-screen authority powers NPC acceptance of the most absurd lies. It’s a two-step hustle built to stifle dissent. First pretend a pre-existing fake narrative is “scientific consensus”. Then pretend the fake consensus was empirically verified the way NPCs assume all The Science! is.

To be fair, modern science is far from all nonsense on the individual level. But it all departs from false premises that have never been demonstrated but can never be questioned. Creation ex nihilo or material existence of unbounded infinities. Life spontaneously generating. The untestable random miracle is surprisingly common. The real reason is simple. The one unassailable premise is “no God”. Despite an epistemology of faith logically nullifying an enterprise based on reason and evidence.

It’s not really that complicated, considering the source site.

The Scientific Method obviously needs a sense of direction to guide an inquiry. But its purpose is to effectively determine the validity of the hypothesis. That’s diametrically opposite generating content to support a fake precondition.¹

A proposal that can’t be shown true is rejected. It can be tweaked or rethought for another try, but that failed version is not accepted as knowledge.

Popper might be most famous for introducing falsifiability as a criterion for scientific knowledge. That is a hypothesis can’t be tested in a way to include the possibility of failure, it’s not scientific. Consider how many foundational just so stories can’t be verified or falsified through observation or logic.

The infamous “peer review” started as a simple appeal to expert knowledge for assessing claims. But somehow it became assessing conformity to beast narrative.

The big picture is a classic representation-reality reversal. The institutions and ideology together - the discourse - stop existing to serve scientific knowledge production. And start becoming ends in themselves. Which is how we get an ever-bloating budgetary monstrosity while quality of life slides. Obviously the system is filled with intelligent STEM graduates working carefully and honestly.

The same base coding → modern society accepting The Science! as truth also → its white coated priests believe their own fake identity. Especially the personally honest ones. They’re most likely to take their attitude is a synecdoche of the whole field and dismiss systemic inversion as bad apples. When the whole field rests on a web of facile category errors and other epistemological impossibilities. “Future study” in thermodynamics isn’t figuring out how entropy just randomly reverses.

Tanya Verquin, Illusion of Comfort, 2022, watercolor on paper

On a personal level, this has meant ignoring most “science” reporting for things demonstrated to work or sound logic. It’s probably saved our lived and health. But it also means no real external influence. And none at all on the mainstream narrative. I’m fortunate to be able to share ideas with my readers. It’s infinitely better than what I could before. But that’s the limit of my impact.

The House of Lies couldn’t care less that another rando internet philosopher saw through the con. I’m far from the first and won’t be the last. It’s a House of Lies. It knows better than anyone it’s fake. It’s very existence depends on people accepting its endemic fakeness as real. This is where understanding FTS [the functionally two species model of human nature, see glossary] is important.

From The Band, Information Processing and Functional Speciation

If the majority is incapable of independent self-direction, reality-facing gadflies don’t matter. They can be hurp-durped, mocked, and ignored by screen-directed self-pwners. And nothing changes on the institutional level. They’re usually the ones doing/directing the self-pwning.²

The Science! is like all beast academe. A self-contained hermetic bubble universe that’s pretty much impenetrable to external overthrow. Too much infrastructure, funding, economic impact, etc. It floats along on miracle and money, pumping out mythology and shucking off challenges as superstitious, envious, stupid, ignorant, or some other projection.

Michael Pak, Escape into Reality (What Does a Painting Think?), 2007, cement, acrylic paint, wood

What Probability Zero does is very different. It fits the new counterculture by exposing a House of Lies tentpole. But it does so from the inside. The House resists external critique, no matter how absolute and devastating. This deconstructs the one of the central myths - the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection - in the truest sense, by demonstrating the impossibility of its own necessary preconceptions.

Long before all the postmodernist nonsense, deconstruction was a critical method that exposed internal logical contradictions in a text. It was so devastating because it removes critical bias or other subjective externals for the text’s own positions. The only counters are find a flaw in the critical reading or emotionally project feelings about why the text really is great despite the incoherence.

Wait for the reading for the specifics, but I do know Probability Zero carefully examines the evidence and traces the mathematical logic. The advantage math has over other sign systems is its absolute accuracy and manipulability. Precise truth value within its frame of reference. It’s this property that The Science! uses to claim perfect accuracy despite not actually doing it. The last initial in the STEM acronym creates a mathematical association with anyone privileged to don the white.

Unfortunately for them, that absolute precision within a frame of reference is true. And TENS is a fixed, quantifiable frame of reference.

TENS isn’t generally thought of like an advanced math problem, but it proposes a model with constant repeating parts. Its hypotheses depend on population statistics. The whole thing can be expressed in mathematical models. This means hard factual benchmarks that have to be met for any real world applicability. Which is the difference between engineering and science fiction as outcomes.

In this frame of reference, the math doesn’t work. Not by a mere factor of two or three either. Orders of magnitude. To the point of impossibility. It’s impossible to overstate how central this is to facing reality. And cutting edge collaborative applications of AIs as critics and stress testers epitomizes what I advocate in the DeepSeek chats at the highest level I’ve seen yet.

The subversive power of the reality-facing attitude is ironic. It weaponizes a system's own demand for precision - mathematical or logical - to deconstruct the foundational myths the system was built to protect. The break down and review next.

1. It’s also that major epistemological difference between human and AI neural nets that keeps coming up in the DeepSeek chats. We are intention driven. It’s why when we collaboratively guide AI, the productivity multiple is incredible. Among other things, Probability Zero is a cutting edge demonstration of that potential. I would be interested in it regardless of topic just for that aspect alone.

2. This was something that came up during The Band’s Langan posts. The preliminary reading made it clear that he was quite bitter about being neglected by academia. Surely someone as smart as him who spins models like plates should be feted. But that’s the point. Issues with the CTMU aside, it’s the sort of radical repositioning of the entire discourse that the House can’t accept. Because it calls the whole fake ontology into question that the beast system rests on. The Band is no different there. There’s a reason this sort of thing could never appear in a House philosophy department.