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Skinty McEdger posted:Pythagoras was completely loving insane so he's not really helping your case. Didn't he have one of his students murdered out of jealousy because he thought he was getting too clever for his own good?
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Jul 11, 2016 15:55
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e_angst posted:Given how weed had have a really aggravating effect on schizophrenia, I am slightly worried about what is going to happen when it's legalized in more places and becomes more available. I think we'll end up seeing more people who were borderline cases end up fully crazy and not immediately recognize why. Eh, the thing is that it's not like those people were going to be mentally well forever, and in fact if they go full speed into "outright crazy sounding to everyone around them" rather then slowly edge into it over years and decades, they might actually have a better chance of getting the sort of help they need. People around them would be slowly adjusting otherwise, and not really notice, you see. So it's probably going to be more useful than harmful.
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Jul 11, 2016 15:57
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Quift posted:My point is exactly that! This latest argument seems to boil down to "Makes you think, though...  " which is not a very persuasive argument imo. It's basically saying "this is interesting because it contains concepts that are of interest"You've moved the goalposts from the impossible to the tautological, as far as I can tell SatansOnion fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jul 11, 2016 |
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Jul 11, 2016 16:02
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MikeCrotch posted:Didn't he have one of his students murdered out of jealousy because he thought he was getting too clever for his own good? Yes he also founded his own religion around numbers. Hipassus the student he murdered was a follower of that religion but he turned to heresy by converting the sides of a pentagram into numbers. He couldn't do it using the X/Y axis and so had to be put to death. Well that's the legend anyway, the bit about him founding a religion out of numbers and x/Y axis is definitely real though.
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Jul 11, 2016 16:02
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Baka-nin posted:Yes we learn that they were numerologists and couldn't validate their conclusions, that's it, unless one of them finally cracked the magic code to nirvana we don't gain anything but a list of people who wasted their time. I make that argument of the back of the fact that they were numerologists. Hence the group I wish to understand better. Separate authors, separate texts. (I can see how this was unclear). Within the population of Numerologists we find the sub-population of early modern "Alchemists". That group is know to have used "numerology" AKA Cypher to avoid the Vatican. So if there is a cypher these texts have a "hidden meaning". Using "numerology" to find "Hidden secrets" within alchemical texts was meant to be a tongue in cheeks description of trying to use different known cyphers onto texts to see if they contain any "hidden secrets" that the original author didn't wish the Vatican so see. This is historical research rooted in "numerology" and fun stuff! The claim I'm making here is that plenty of early modern manuscripts written by types the church frowned upon use cyphers to protect some of their contents. That meaning might have been both magical/protestant/political etc. To learn about these meanings might not give your own life meaning, but it WILL increase your understanding of mystics 
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Jul 11, 2016 16:13
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SatansOnion posted:This latest argument seems to boil down to "Makes you think, though... Well yeah.. I just wanted to point out that the study of Numerology can have some actual merit. Like many things it's quite miscontrued by contemporary practitioners. .
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Jul 11, 2016 16:15
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Quift posted:To claim that he was insane with such certainty is an obvious sign of delusion. No healthy mind would ever assume so much on the back of so little. No he was completely bonkers. He believed that humans could be grown from beans if they were placed in the soil of a tomb, and thus forbade his acolytes from eating beans. He claimed to have used the secrets of numerology to cast a storm upon the ship of someone who was trying to steal the secret of imperfect numbers. He believed that life force was lost every time someone farted. On the other hand he did do completely awesome things like become a literal vizier, send all of his political enemies as ambassadors to other countries and have his own declare war on them thus leading to his enemies being murdered. MikeCrotch posted:Didn't he have one of his students murdered out of jealousy because he thought he was getting too clever for his own good? He did this multiple times. His students were required to not speak and listen to his teachings, but any discovery they did make he would claim as his own. Whenever one of them appeared to be matching him for intelligence or tried to spread their discoveries outside of his commune he had them murdered. Skinty McEdger fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Jul 11, 2016 |
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Jul 11, 2016 16:21
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Quift posted:I make that argument of the back of the fact that they were numerologists. Hence the group I wish to understand better. Separate authors, separate texts. (I can see how this was unclear). It was unclear because you are only now bringing this up, I'm sorry but this is not what you have been saying earlier, you were quite explicit in talking about things that predate the Vatican by thousands of years. So I just don't get why your changing it now. It also doesn't actually change anything of substance, because it requires numerology to be correct, and you or someone else to be able to crack them otherwise you wont be able to learn anything from these workds. To go back to that video you linked, the man didn't actually learn anything even though he clearly thought he did because his methods were wrong. You also appear to have switched from numerology to code breaking, if someone hid a message in a message that's a code not numerology. Numerology is about the deeper meanings of numbers (the video you linked) not using number sequences to hide from the man. You know this is the case so I don't see why your trying to shift things now.
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Jul 11, 2016 16:30
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The thing to remember is that if any variant of numerology for some reason turned out to be correct, it would require that all the other variants of numerology were incorrect. They're almost entirely mutually exclusive systems.
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Jul 11, 2016 16:41
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A cool numerology thing is the traditional Chinese calendar. During the Shang Dynasty the five seasons were linked to the five phases and oracle bone divination. So they developed their calendar and the Yijing together, at the same time (more or less). So what happens when the Shang Dynasty falls? The Calendar and Yijing get rejiggered. This is part political propaganda and part necessity, as the older Shang Calendar kinda sucks. But an important precedent has been set. When the Zhou Dynasty declines during the Spring and Autumn period and then falls during the Warring States period there is an incredibly fecund philosophical milieu in China. So we have records of scholars trying to use the traditional, divination based numeromancy to understand the world. They did make some discoveries in number theory. But mostly they just missed the point super hard all the time. Which is similar to Pythagoras and others. Math is an incredibly powerful tool and does follow regular rules. You can see how people would mistake that for a touch of the divine. They were also working in a matrix where they didn't know much. Numerology is interesting as an evolutionary dead end in the history of science or in conjunction with ancient politics (for example, both sides of the Avignon Papacy "proved" their legitimacy/the others illegitimacy using numerology). But that's really all it is.
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Jul 11, 2016 17:20
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Baka-nin posted:It was unclear because you are only now bringing this up, I'm sorry but this is not what you have been saying earlier, you were quite explicit in talking about things that predate the Vatican by thousands of years. So I just don't get why your changing it now. It also doesn't actually change anything of substance, because it requires numerology to be correct, and you or someone else to be able to crack them otherwise you wont be able to learn anything from these workds. To go back to that video you linked, the man didn't actually learn anything even though he clearly thought he did because his methods were wrong. So if a code is embedded somewhere and it takes numerology to be deciphered, for instance if an influential mystery school or secretive society gave out codenames to its agents corresponding to numerology, so that in the future initiates could, through participating in the bonkers numerological belief system, gain insider's clues to what otherwise would become mysteries or fuddled historical accounts -- that would not prove the validity of numerology as a subject, because you'd class that sort of thing as code-breaking and there'd be too many false positives which could be drawn to make it actually useful, and so on. Is that fair? Reveiled" posted:My mistake, it should've been the shared age 69, not birth year 1947. Still, that's three consecutive years (1945, 46 and 47) and three consecutive months (December, January and February) in their birthdates. I guess 6 and 9 are consecutive multiples of 3 too. I'm joking, I dont really take it seriously, but it's a little interesting to see what coincidences can be made, and how significant they can be made to appear. Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jul 11, 2016 |
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Jul 11, 2016 17:57
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Deep Thought posted:So if a code is embedded somewhere and it takes numerology to be deciphered, for instance if an influential mystery school or secretive society gave out codenames to its agents corresponding to numerology, so that in the future initiates could, through participating in the bonkers numerological belief system, gain insider's clues to what otherwise would become mysteries or fuddled historical accounts -- that would not prove the validity of numerology as a subject, because you'd class that sort of thing as code-breaking and there'd be too many false positives which could be drawn to make it actually useful, and so on. Is that fair? Correct, that would not prove "numerology" as a subject because "numerology" covers literally tens of thousands of mutually exclusive systems purported to encode completely different meaning from the same numerical input. It's much like how astrology can never be true as a whole, because there are so many systems of astrology that have completely different results for the same inputs.
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Jul 11, 2016 18:08
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Deep Thought posted:It's a little interesting to see what coincidences can be made, and how significant they can be made to appear.
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Jul 11, 2016 18:38
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fishmech posted:Correct, that would not prove "numerology" as a subject because "numerology" covers literally tens of thousands of mutually exclusive systems purported to encode completely different meaning from the same numerical input. That calls for a splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology. Higher numerology; the mathematical conception of existence, may be unworkable and unprovable, but lower numerology, concerning the significance of numbers in myth, like in Quift's idea of a hidden meaning of the bible, would be compatible with the variety of recorded systems and may prove to be an insightful subject. What else would it be called if not numerology? Joshmo posted:...you have to remember that between any two people (or three, or five) you could find a number of things that are seemingly linked, but an entire galaxy of things that are completely different in every way. See also: "Great musicians seem to die tragically at 27". I agree, and there are probably weirder coincidences that happen on earth without any numbers involved. Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jul 11, 2016 |
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Jul 11, 2016 18:39
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Deep Thought posted:That calls for a splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology. Higher numerology; the mathematical conception of existence, may be unworkable and unprovable, but lower numerology, concerning the significance of numbers in myth, like in Quift's idea of a hidden meaning of the bible, would be compatible with the variety of recorded systems and may prove to be an insightful subject. What else would it be called if not numerology? I'd call it Arbitrary. Running a random letter generator and interpreting the phrases that come out of it does not bear significant meaning The problem with the "hidden meaning" motif is that it's 100% guesswork. There's no solid basis on which to start from, some guys just believe that there's a secret meaning so they try random ideas until something seems to work and then they declare that clearly this discovery has significance. It's a great example of confirmation bias in action and why an understanding of statistics is so important to real scientific discovery.
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Jul 11, 2016 19:16
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Discovering the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider took years and years of countless particle collisions before there was enough statistical evidence to declare a discovery, and even then many scientists displayed skepticism (because it could always be a different particle interacting through similar, but not identical, mechanisms). If Numerologists ran the Large Hadron Collider then they would have looked for just one collision with a Higgs-like signature and then declared the long search over. "We found it! Here's the collision where it happened!" Numerologists don't know the meaning of "false positive"
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Jul 11, 2016 19:19
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It's always sort of depressing when actually mentally ill people come into this thread to try to defend their own delusions 
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Jul 11, 2016 19:21
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isn't it just because a world of hidden codez is cooler than a world where u have to read about literally anyone say something about stats in your spare time
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Jul 11, 2016 20:02
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Baronjutter posted:It's always sort of depressing when actually mentally ill people come into this thread to try to defend their own delusions Recurring feelings like that may be part of an underlying mental illness. You might want to up the dose of your prefered bouncy bubble beveridge. QuarkJets posted:If Numerologists ran the Large Hadron Collider then they would have looked for just one collision with a Higgs-like signature and then declared the long search over. "We found it! Here's the collision where it happened!" If numerologists were given trillions of funding to find proof, they might invest in a megaplex of supercomputers and come up with nothing. If they wanted to prove themselves to the scientific community, they'd cut one out of cardboard and use the funds directly.
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Jul 11, 2016 20:54
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Quift posted:My belief structure is not part of the discussion. The personal "beliefs" that I have expressed boil down to "weird subjects are interesting". So it's a game for when you're bored, not a real thing. Why don't you make an A/T thread about it instead.
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Jul 11, 2016 21:30
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Baronjutter posted:It's always sort of depressing when actually mentally ill people come into this thread to try to defend their own delusions I've long since given up on trying to figure out when people are gimmick posting or are just unironically  as hell.
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Jul 12, 2016 00:56
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Deep Thought posted:If numerologists were given trillions of funding to find proof, they might invest in a megaplex of supercomputers and come up with nothing. If they wanted to prove themselves to the scientific community, they'd cut one out of cardboard and use the funds directly. Numerologists don't even understand what "proof" entails, see my comments on false positives
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Jul 12, 2016 01:00
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"proof" contains 5 letters. 1 of the letters has a dangly bit, and one of them sticks up, this is mathematical symmetry, it's like poetry. Really math is a lot like poetry because god creates beauty. 5 letters in proof, 5 senses, we prove things with our senses. 5 fingers on each hand, which we use to do simple math, which is the ultimate source of proof. 5 points on an ancient pyramid, made with the most advanced math now lost to us. The number 5 continues to come up in relation to knowledge, science, and proof. numerology has 10 letters, which is divisible by 5. Corinthian 10:5 says "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." This its self has 100 letters, once again divisible by 5, giving us 20, which when divided by the 4 elements gives us, unsurprisingly, the proof number, 5. This could not be any clearer, numerology is in its self proof of numerology, god, and that aliens did the pyramids.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:14
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Speaking of cargo cult math, the Fibonacci spiral! Proof that select photographs, at select angles, and often with select editing, can reveal the perfect orderly nature of the universe.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:23
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^ The Golden ratio is a thing in nature, though, and can be seen in biology with spirals. I like the painting/photo ones though, sometimes they are bad or jokes, though.moller posted:Basically John Nash. That mind/spirit has this enormous presence in the western mind - and he only recently disincarnated on the New Jersey Turnpike. Numerology is just games and nothing of real value in my opinion. The implications of statistics are much more substantial. There's the story that Alan Greenspan wasn't sure he really existed until he got into Randian thought.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:25
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Deep Thought posted:That calls for a splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology. Higher numerology; the mathematical conception of existence, may be unworkable and unprovable, but lower numerology, concerning the significance of numbers in myth, like in Quift's idea of a hidden meaning of the bible, would be compatible with the variety of recorded systems and may prove to be an insightful subject. What else would it be called if not numerology? No, it doesn't call for "splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology". You're just wording at us. When things are intentionally encoded into a corpus, that's simply cryptology. If things are unintentionally encoded, then that's pretty much just coincidence, or rarely a case of someone betraying something unknowingly in their writing style and choice of words - which isn't really numerology either, but rather would fall under psychology. You also need to keep in mind that anything that was intentionally recorded in the books of the bible has likely been irretrievably damaged or lost entirely by now. True steganographic techniques that were intended by the original author of any given book would rely on the exact wording and spelling (and possibly even page/scroll layout!) in the original language, which may have been quite transformed by the time we get to the earliest known copies in the original language - and any translations could only preserve it if the translators themselves knew of the hidden message and devised a way to encode it in the new language! As such anything that appears consistently in the versions of the bilbical books we have now would pretty much have to be not intended - because the intended message would be at least partially garbled by the processes used to pass down the writings over millennia. Let me show an example of how easily hidden information can be destroyed by unknowing lossy copying:  This is the original image.  This is the image with a message encoded into it using a web service for hiding messages in images It can be decoded with other software, and would put out this block of text: "While the basic idea of what it is is simple, the inner workings of it are rather complicated and very, very powerful. You can for instance setup filters that filter the data being read from a CD to two or more separate partitions that are stored in RAM or sent directly to an add-on board(such as the MPEG card). You can also filter the output of the add-on board directly to the VDP2 and SCSP or access the data via CD block registers. This is especially handy with the MPEG card since you can set it up to decompress data and automatically send the decompressed picture to the VDP2 and the decompressed audio to the SCSP. "  Here is the output file after it passes through a common means of change by say, an image host site. If you try to decode the hidden message, you'll find it's completely gone, and the systems attempting to find it can only find garbage data Visually, the picture doesn't seem to have really changed at all - but the middle has added a sizable block of hidden meaning, and then the last one has lost it again just as easily. That's how fragile hiding information unbeknowst to others in text and images can be!
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Jul 12, 2016 03:11
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Animal-Mother posted:Speaking of cargo cult math, the Fibonacci spiral! Proof that select photographs, at select angles, and often with select editing, can reveal the perfect orderly nature of the universe. It can frequently be bullshit in that sense but those drat spirals show up all over the drat place in nature. Interestingly enough there are also mathematical patterns to aesthetics; humans generally find Fibonacci spirals visually appealing. There could be a poo poo load of reasons for it but it turns out that even human brains tend to behave in somewhat predictable patterns. Certain shapes are viewed as more stable or more pleasing; artists have been using this to their advantage for like...ever. The ancient Greeks also used this sort of thing to design buildings that looked nice.
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Jul 12, 2016 04:47
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Let's just talk about the great movie Pi and how (((wall street))) uses numerology.
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Jul 12, 2016 05:09
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It can frequently be bullshit in that sense but those drat spirals show up all over the drat place in nature. Interestingly enough there are also mathematical patterns to aesthetics; humans generally find Fibonacci spirals visually appealing. There could be a poo poo load of reasons for it but it turns out that even human brains tend to behave in somewhat predictable patterns. Certain shapes are viewed as more stable or more pleasing; artists have been using this to their advantage for like...ever. The ancient Greeks also used this sort of thing to design buildings that looked nice. Considering the original example used to explain the Fibonacci sequence was an idealized version of rabbit breading it really shouldn't be a surprise that it shows up all the time in nature. Consider one of the more famous examples of a Fibonacci spiral in nature, the nautilus. As a nautilus grows in needs a larger shell, however it can't just discard its old one so it has to grow in such a way that enlarging its shell doesn't change its shape and leave room for future growth. These constraints force the nautilus and other molluscs to grow their shells in a Fibonacci spiral as its the only pattern that allows them to grow their shells without changing their shape. It not a coincidence or evidence of some grand design but a result of the way organic life grows. Its like how so many physics equations have Pi in them, its not a coincidence, its a result of many physical forces expanding uniformly in all directions thus scaling with the surface area of sphere as you move away from their source.
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Jul 12, 2016 06:06
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Baronjutter posted:It's always sort of depressing when actually mentally ill people come into this thread to try to defend their own delusions
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Jul 12, 2016 08:19
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fishmech posted:No, it doesn't call for "splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology". You're just wording at us. When things are intentionally encoded into a corpus, that's simply cryptology. If things are unintentionally encoded, then that's pretty much just coincidence, or rarely a case of someone betraying something unknowingly in their writing style and choice of words - which isn't really numerology either, but rather would fall under psychology. So the subject of numerology is baseless, but 'numerology' as a discipline within cryptology is not baseless, though you think it almost useless? OK then. Certain things in the bible might stay fixed, like 'five kings of the Amorites', so and so's 'seven sons and seven daughters', the 'three wise men' and so on. The choice of numbers, like the example of five kings can seem odd, because if it were being read literally you'd expect to hear 'the king', not 5. Not really my interest though. Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 12, 2016 |
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Jul 12, 2016 16:37
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Yeah but a lot of those weird numbers are also memorization aids and meter keepers from oral traditions. That and archetypes/cultural signifiers. Why would people talk about the Gang of Four, hold up 5 fingers and really only mean one person? A future junior anthropologist would be confused as gently caress by that and assume there is some deeper meaning.
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Jul 12, 2016 16:46
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Deep Thought posted:So the subject of numerology is baseless, but 'numerology' as a discipline within cryptology is not baseless, though you think it almost useless? OK then. No, dude, numerology isn't a thing within cryptology. Those numbers aren't encoding anything important on their own though, and if you're looking for a greater message, it's quite likely that one or more of them has changed by accident or simply later revisors thinking a different number sounds better. This would immediately garble or completely destroy an intended message encoded by the numbering!
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Jul 12, 2016 16:49
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Deep Thought posted:So the subject of numerology is baseless, but 'numerology' as a discipline within cryptology is not baseless, though you think it almost useless? OK then. Sometimes the numbers were also metaphors or placeholders. 40 basically just meant "like a lot" Most of the time, if memory serves. Like Moses didn't literally wander for 40 years. He wandered for a long, nonspecific period of time. This is problematic for numerological and biblical literalists for obvious reasons. Still....a year can't go by without somebody claiming to find some secret buried in the numbers of the bible. I've seen people claim that certain investments will explode in value soon because the bible says so.
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Jul 12, 2016 18:23
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There's one episode in the gospels where Jesus lectures the disciples about the number of loaves and the size of crowd and the amount of broken pieces. I tried to puzzle it out and was stumped, I feel if George Price hadn't killed himself and done some work in economics it might have come to something.
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Jul 12, 2016 18:35
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Deep Thought posted:So the subject of numerology is baseless, but 'numerology' as a discipline within cryptology is not baseless, though you think it almost useless? OK then. Numerology is not a discipline within cryptography. The two fields are completely unrelated, and I hesitate to call numerology a field because it's really just a belief system. Like fortune telling and other forms of divination, numerology is only accurate if you cherry-pick your data.
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Jul 12, 2016 19:50
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At any rate wouldn't studying "numerology" as a means of analyzing a text really be philology or maybe cultural anthropology anyway? You're not studying these texts to divine some mystic meaning, you're trying to find out what the number patterns signified to the people who wrote the texts you're talking about.
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Jul 12, 2016 19:58
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Octatonic posted:At any rate wouldn't studying "numerology" as a means of analyzing a text really be philology or maybe cultural anthropology anyway? You're not studying these texts to divine some mystic meaning, you're trying to find out what the number patterns signified to the people who wrote the texts you're talking about. But to do so involves studying and observing the numerology system, which is 2/3rds of what the numerologists do, the missing 3rd of that being the belief that numbers have some kind of transcendental meaning. QuarkJets posted:Numerology is not a discipline within cryptography. The two fields are completely unrelated, and I hesitate to call numerology a field because it's really just a belief system. Like fortune telling and other forms of divination, numerology is only accurate if you cherry-pick your data. I get that they're distinct, but fishmech said when numerology has a use in codebreaking, like in the event a numerological system is needed to decode markers within a text, that use needn't be classed as numerology. I thought dividing numerology into mystical and non-mystical parts would sanitise it as a thing of inquiry, but I guess it doesn't really matter. Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jul 12, 2016 |
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Jul 12, 2016 21:21
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Animal-Mother posted:Speaking of cargo cult math  It isn't just the unwashed masses waiting for the cargo either.
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Jul 12, 2016 22:01
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Ron Jeremy posted:
I haven't read it, and according to Wikipedia it just appears to be a fluff piece about how 'simple programs are more likely to recur' and how 'complex programs can be made of simpler parts so a lot of stuff can be broken down that way'.  What's the problem here?
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Jul 12, 2016 22:13
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