Oddbean

there is a saying "history rhymes" and this is easy to see for anyone who has a small grasp on a few thousand years of recorded history why do patterns of mass movement repeat like this? many hipster nihilist materialist Science fanatics like to claim that there is no higher order to the universe and whatever happens, happens, there is no rhythm to it, entropy rules if that were the case, then how come the soft-science of history suggests otherwise? it should be obvious the universe is a clockwork machine, of unimaginable complexity as an scholar of cryptography and coding systems, it is astounding to me just how big the numbers get in these fields, and yet the combinatoric complexity of just a single human being, let alone 8 billion of them multiplying that number further, on top of the even more astoundingly enormous combinations of possibilities of even just our solar system, let alone our galaxy, let alone the entire fucking universe some like to worship their god of entropy as though their skepticism is teh ultimate shield against the shame of having an original idea, but the number of data points i can muster in favour of the idea that the universe is a mess of wheels within wheels, of simple rules that elaborate to more simple rules that apply on simple things in such massive numbers that our little pattern matching devices between our ears notice this, and yet so many are enamoured of the idiotic idea that it's completely without predictability or rhythm, the universe is a decadent mess, so we should all go push poo and cut our tits off and brag about how much of a victim we are seriously there is a 20 year cycle of conjunctions between jupiter and saturn... thus the ever touted "generational" identity politics of millennials, boomers, x, whatever the fuck else this cycle has a 400 year arc marked by a close conjunction called the Bethlehem Star our spot in the second-from-outer arm of the galaxy rotates around the centre of this galaxy at a rate of approximately 25000 years, and the phases of this cycle are marked by catastrophes that can be seen amply in dozens of archeaological and geological markers that have been found it is only chaos if you refuse to see what is patently right in front of us back in the 60s and 70s it was cool to follow astrology, and then in the 80s to now, all the hipsters are saying that stuff is mumbo jumbo and yet it is an undeniable fact that the several cycles i just described have a determining impact on phenomena with excruciating complexity, but Entropy Rules, Ok? i expect to be a Cassandra about this but whatever... some people get it and they are interesting people simulation theory sucks if you pretend there is nobody behind the elaborate system we are inside, and if you don't deny there might be a designer, if you deny that He has a sense of humor and a heart for those who insist on holding to this dead, meaningless version of a model of reality, go fuck yourself reality is much more interesting, hopeful, happy, strange, and full of love and great arcs of epochs that we can actually understand, and even death itself is not the end for our little threads

shield against the shame of having an original idea - I love this line. Yeah, the complexity is mind blowing, and the order that emerges from the complexity without losing or hiding from complexity...

I love this message! it's optimistic, and full of love. That's interesting about the Bethlehem star. A pivotal moment for me in the last two years was seeing a manger scene in my neighbors yard. it was just a simple outline of christmas lights in the shape of a star, a shed, Mary, Joseph, and the Baby Jesus. it lit up a dark corner of their yard, and I found myself crying in front of it, it made me so ridiculously happy. it didn't look like this, but i can't actually find the one that I saw. https://image.nostr.build/74bbe17a00aa041b70f8ec18c5f7519c9ee54556d70c9fc4b4373c6220d644d0.jpg

i use the 20 year generational divides to understand a lot of things, but I didn't know it had an actual planetary background. lots of babies are born on the full moon. so i know the moon cycles do have some very obvious effects on humans. the astrology stuff is a little less predictable but i have noticed personally that I tend to date anyone born in late August/early September timeframe, and close friendships with people in late February/early march. I don't know if I just imagine similarities between characters and birthdays to help me understand people and I ignore all the exceptions, or if there really are similarities. fun to think about.

yeah, not saying it's deterministic, just that on quite large time scales the patterns are still happening, and probabilities work probably the meaning imputed by much of the various versions of astrology are quite incomplete and inaccurate though

yeah, i think the most important things are the big patterns like the motions of jupiter and saturn and our position in the galactic spiral arms relative to our yearly cycle, etc and definitely lunar cycles directly affect us, shielding or drawing energy from the sun towards us and deflecting it but yes, way too complex to be able to boil it down to better than fuzzy probabilities

For all I know, the universe is the strum of a guitar string, and we're still only in the first few moments of the note 🤷‍♂️ I'm not here to know the electron orbits on the guitar string. I'm not even here for the oscillation of the strings note. What I'm really here for, and what I know is out there, is the music.