Expert "How To" Videos

I've been watching youtube videos about cornering a mountain bike for a couple of weeks. I think the general category of expert "how to" videos is quite interesting and they show why the sci-fi nonsense sales pitch on "AI" is so dumb.

Many of the MTB cornering videos follow a "break down" approach, that is, they present cornering as a multi-phase, multi-step sequence. Step 1--look into the turn, step 2, lean the bike, step 3, position your body, etc... The concept is through repetition of the steps, a rider will become proficient at cornering.

That's not what happens at all though. What really happens is the riders brain and nervous system eventually encompass the bike so they can "feel" the tires on the ground and feel the orientation of their mass distribution on the bike. Once a person is an expert, they can ex post facto explain what their body is doing when they're cornering, or doing a hand stand, or whatever. To the novice, the word salad really isn't helpful. If anything it's kind of counterproductive.

I realize I don't have good feel for the bike's wheels. It's frustrating for me as a long time cyclist to throw away so much precious speed in a hundred corners by even feathering the brakes when I should be able to just rip through the corners. That said, I really do not want to crash and break the bike or my bones.

Anyway, it's obvious I will not learn anything from the videos; in fact there's really an obvious course toward improvement. Go to a free form loose ground area, like a big gravel parking lot, ideally with a slope, setup some "corners" by drawing them with a stick, then turn over and over and over and maybe take a video. The advantage of a parking lot is it's easier to repeat--more tries per unit time, plus a missed corner = rolling over a line instead of crashing into a tree.

The thing I'm really trying to do here is extend my nervous system to the contact patch of the tires and the ground. Currently, there's a big void there. Learning to ice skate or rollerblade is actually a very similar process. Prior to developing "feel" people are generally all "hands, head, and feet". If you watch a novice on rollerblades, they flail their arms around as their head and feet rotate around their center-of mass. They're generally oblivious to their center of mass, which is quite interesting.

Developing feel is a nonverbal process. Really words provide very little useful information for developing these skills. This is the severe limitation of so called "AI" because this concept of "feel" is pervasive in human endeavors.

In fact, it's possible to sort of flip this concept around entirely and see the effect of the dullard verbal mind model on the world. In general people dislike an irregular and even mildly challenging world where even the smallest obstacle is intolerable. They do not want to learn anything, ever. They don't want to condition their body for balance or strength or mobility. They don't even want to pay attention when they do something insipidly simple, like drive a car. It'd be good to understand what they really want. Like what's the goal of the average person when they're doing all the nonsense stuff they do?

The Willforce Delusion

It's quite common for people to imagine their "will force" somehow affects real world events. One example of that is focusing attention on a sporting event. People imagine they are "urging" a player to score a touchdown in a football game, for example, when they intently watch. This happens in all sorts of relationship scenarios as well, from the mundane work relationship to an intense romantic relationship.

It's all entirely, equally imaginary. There's no "will force", however, almost anybody reading this will understand what I'm writing about here. The fictional concept of "telekinesis" is the same thing. That is, in fiction, some character will be able to move an object with his or her "mind". It's often depicted as severe mental "exertion" to the point of causing a nose bleed, which is supposed to be blood leaking from the taxed brain,  I guess.

This is an interesting case of something that doesn't exist at all, that is "will force", turning into an idea that multitudes of people have. So where does the concept even come from?

All through life people "want" things. I can remember being a kid and fervently wanting some dumb toy or whatever, or as a young adult getting into messy romantic relationships and wanting some girl or young woman fervently or being wanted the same way by different women. The "want" existed as a sort of pressure. That pressure is almost certainly physical and hormonal and about procreation in the sex scenario. There are many examples of that same type of behavior among animals.

It seems plausible that the mental machinery of "want", which is actually an internal compulsion could lead to the idea that "wanting hard enough" will cause things to happen in the real world or even move. For some people this "willforce" delusion manifests as a desire for obsessive overall control and the idea that everything can and should be managed (by them).

A Fancy Pants House is Stupid

I got in the habit of watching youtube bodycam videos a few months ago. I'd like to know who the OG bodycam video content makers are because it was an ingenious idea. The footage is public record, so there's and endless supply of often compelling, funny and dramatic real-world content available to serve up to the public.

There's some minimal dose of bodycam videos that will lead the most blue-haired progressive lesbian democrat "them" to the conclusion that loads of black people are dysfunctional and stupid. For example, there's a bodycam video of a shooting and inexplicably nonsense chaotic aftermath where a crowd of maybe 50 black people swarm around the fallen guy to: 1.) rob him and 2.) freak out hysterically. While they scream out for someone to help, they simultaneously prevent the police from rendering first aid and even assault the cops who are trying to help. Nothing in the video "makes sense".

The problem with this criticism of the black people isn't that it's "racist", it's that it is implicitly based on the notion that whitey "has it all figured out" and that the white people society and methods of organization are rational and therefore optimal because the white people individually are rational. This is obviously not true.

One example of irrational behavior that applies to almost everyone in the US, but maybe especially the "upper class" white people is the pursuit of luxury, and luxury housing in particular. This topic is apparent to me because I think about what my family "should do" with our house and property on a regular basis.

We have an ideal parcel of land in an ideal location, but the house is kind of dumpy and tired out. It turns out, though, that the dumpy house works in our favor because it keeps our property taxes, one of our only housing related "fixed" expenses, as low as possible. In fact, it would make sense to reduce those as much as possible by minimizing the market value of the home, while at the same time maximizing the property's real productive capacity, e.g. farming or the like. That is you can add "real utility" to a property without the county auditor giving you a higher tax bill. Now that I understand this strategy, I see other people doing the same thing here and there in my neighborhood.

This is what everyone should be doing in my area if they were practical/pragmatic people, but typically they do the opposite, that is, they maximize the nominal and imaginary value of their property so they pay maximally high property taxes. For example, there are several couples living in $800,000 McMansion homes in the immediate area. The maintenance and taxes on their property is probably 5x ours, but there's nothing that comes from that extra expense. Typically they do nothing productive with their property, like running a farm. It's just all expense and lots of extra maintained space for a couple of people. It's actually stupid and counterproductive and keeps people running on the work treadmill for extra years of their life because all they really care about is totally imaginary status.

In many cases the people who live the imaginary status luxury life are really in dire financial straights to appear wealthy. They live on loans and can't even really afford to maintain their McMansion, and certainly can't afford to burn $30,000 on new car cost every few years, but they do that also.

Anyway, as per usual, when the mass of people does something it's almost by definition "wrong".

 

Serious vs Play

I had two types of study-halls in High School. One was modeled on prison life and was like punishment by pure boredom and was no different than "detention". The students sat on one side of tables in a big room and were only allowed to do some quiet thing, like read, do homework, or doodle or just sit and stare. The other type was free-form and students could do whatever they want, like playing games, or laughing and joking around. I have no idea why some study halls were fun and the others were like prison, I guess it must have been up to the teacher running it.

In retrospect, it's obvious a big component of primary education is training students to be obedient "workers". For example, there are a lot of jobs where people believe they must surrender their human freedom when they're on the clock, so if there's nothing to do, they'll just sit around and stare at a computer screen or sweep an already clean floor or whatever until the clock magically frees them.

Those people have internalized a "serious" life, maybe from things like study halls. It's often instructive to lookup the etymology of a label like "serious". The day-to-day meaning of it comes from a feeling; everyone knows the feeling of being serious. Appropriately, scholars think the word comes from an ancient root word for "heavy". Being serious is the equivalent of telekinetically trying to move a heavy weight. People do that all the time. They imagine exerting their internal will-force has a real-world effect, when it has zero real world effect. That particular delusion is fascinating.

The opposite of a serious life is a frivolous or play life... not surprisingly the origin of that word is "light" as in "a light weight". Sometimes in the "fun study hall" my friends and I would get in trouble for having too much fun. For example, in one of those, we invented a game that involved a baseball made of taped up paper. I don't recall exactly how it worked, but someone would pitch, and someone would bat. The group of kids probably got too loud so we were chided for "playing". The collective idea in the school was the study hall should be in that punishment/serious mindset, I suppose.

Play and creativity go together, while "seriousness" generally inhibits creativity. My first "real" job was at a tree farm when I was 16 and it epitomized that "serious" mindset. The overall concept of that tree farm was "work is serious" in the sense that it should be simple and sort of stupid and kind of a workout and strength training exercise. 

One of the tree farm tasks for the kids was to go pickup the newly cut rounds of fallen trees and process them into firewood. We'd load them on a trailer, then put them one-by-one onto a hydraulic log splitter in wood barn and break them into firewood. The firewood was piled up in the barn where it dried. People would buy the wood by the pickup truck bed, which is obviously a totally arbitrary unit, and we'd toss it into the back. When I was just 16, I could see the workflow could be more efficient, even with just the primitive tools the farm had, but the point wasn't to improve things, it was to "work hard", that is, stupidly. I only worked there for a couple weekends.

The "play/creative" mindset won out massively over my Gen-X life and the "serious mindset" people ate it on the societal and individual level. Being "serious" is a sort of self-imposed punishment. Let's return to the tree farm example for a very obvious case of creativity winning out. Over the decades since I was un-ergonomically loading rounds into a hydraulic log splitter, people build log processor equipment that automated that whole process. One guy can generate a mountain of firewood in a couple hours by loading a tree trunk onto a machine with another machine like a tractor or skidsteer.

That "serious" mindset still managed to partially infect me in spite of seeing it for what it is. It's difficult to fully embrace philosophical absurdism and be freed from all the years of training by dullards. The training should be about an ability to focus and concentrate when needed as a tool rather than merely appearing to do so, or worse yet by "obeying" some dumb ass teacher in a school setting.

 

What is Anxiety?

I ride the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail multiple times a week. I eek out a little more speed almost every session. Since I just started riding there last fall, the steps of my progression are fairly obvious to me. I'm about 50% faster than I was when I started, mainly due to improved technique and skill rather than improved aerobic capacity.

One that stands out is I had an issue with hand numbness for the first few months I was riding, which is now all but gone. The reason is apparent, too, I used to forcefully grip the bars, now I barely squeeze them. That happened "by itself". The mountain bike teachers have a maxim "heavy feet/light hands" to teach this concept, but for me it mostly happened because I was trying to be relaxed and not waste energy by "fighting the bike", which happens on the road as well.

"Fighting the bike" means you're wasting precious watts by exerting nonsense forces on the bike. It can happen from exhaustion, ironically, or a condition that's similar to daily life "anxiety". The anxiety case is pretty interesting because it has broad daily life application.

There are a couple of sections of the Big Creek trail that took several months of attempts for me to even finish successfully, that is, ride without getting off the bike. One is a steep twisty uphill section which is crowned by a large beech tree root. The root looks like a stair step at the top of a steep, dusty 10-20 foot climb. When you're a novice mountain biker, it seems implausible a person could ride up such an obstacle, but it's actually pretty "easy" for me now.

For the novice many things are "unknowns", like what happens if you can't ride up that hill and fall off awkwardly? It's an "oh shit" moment when you ride around a corner and see such a thing for the first time. That's where anxiety kicks in, when it's actually least useful and is totally counterproductive. When you "fight the bike" with mind and body, you're all but certain to fail riding over any obstacle. Situational awareness flies out the window, and the body goes ridgid into a sort of fighting mode, which is completely counter productive.

I think that type of anxiety is really an evolutionary "brace for impact" adaptation. One common version of that is the "sympathetic grunt" when you see another person fall awkwardly. The person who is falling will often make a sort of grunt or groan even before they hit the ground, and if there's a person or crowd watching, even on video, they'll involuntarily make a similar noise, which I think is essentially stiffening the ribs with positive air pressure... it's basically like a human air bag deployment. That type of anxiety is an involuntary response. It goes away with experience in the mountain bike obstacle scenario.

The daily life cousin of that type of anxiety is the phantasmagorical imagining of some bad scenario, which is also counterproductive and maladaptive. It's also a "brace for impact" scenario, but it can play out indefinitely just in the mind. Ironically, the source of this form of anxiety is the notion that a person is "in control" through planning and intention, which is also ultimately where the mountain bike obstacle angst comes from.

On the MTB, the trail goes over the obstacle, so the rider must navigate it or jump off the bike before it turns into a crash and maybe injury or a broken bike even though the trail and the situation is completely contrived. The anxiety arises from a faux "goal".

The day to day life anxieties are really similar. A contrived, typically accidental scenario induces angst: "If I don't do XYZ, I might lose my job!" or some romantic scenario might completely occupy the mind or money trouble might plague a person's thoughts.

The MTB obstacles are basically the point of riding the mountain bike. The first time I cleared that hill, I was completely thrilled. Really, every time I do it now, I get a little rush. The Big Creek trail is loaded with 1000 similar obstacles.

People have wildly more anxiety about life situations that are extremly boring and not dangerous at all and are mostly phantasms. They think their neighbors and friends are laughing at them if they don't have the right car or if their grass is too long or their hair isn't blond enough or they're too fat or too thin or their teeth aren't white enough or whatever. A great example of how insane such people can get is offered by "Asian Plastic Surgery" youtube channels

The Ancient Seed Monopoly

There's kid lore in Chardon, Ohio that was passed down for generations. The lore is there is a tunnel network from Rocky Cellar, which is sandstone bedrock outcropping off Basquin Drive, up to the county courthouse about a mile away, and perhaps there is a tunnel network through all the sandstone to various places.

I think that story is a great example of how folk stories, in that case a kid folk story, encode actual information: the original detailed information is boiled off and jumbled up with generic archetypes. In that story case, a historical event, was replaced with a generic "secret tunnel" narrative. The historical event was a town official hid court records in Rocky Cellar during the war of 1812. The story also encodes the prevalent underlying sandstone bedrock in Chardon. The boring details of that original historical event got replaced with something interesting.

In some cases, historical events that are interesting in and of themselves retain their original narrative form. A good example of that is "Brady's Leap" in Kent, Ohio and the associated frontier adventure story. Since the event was cool and kick ass, the man's name and the details of the event is in the lore.

The vampire character blends together many real world concepts into a mythological character. One that I think is particularly intriguing the the element of the Hades/Persephone story that involves pomegranate seeds. Hades basically gets to keep Persephone because she ate the pomegranate arils. I read/heard many attempts to explain this element of the story.

Persephone being married to Hades is a seasonal myth. Hades is the king of the underworld, which is often equated with winter, that is the dead time of the year. To a modern person it doesn't make any sense that the king of the underworld and especially winter world would also be associated with wealth, which is the lean time of the year. Hades association with wealth spills over into the vampire myth: Dracula is even a "Count" and he lives in a castle.

The Arils component of the story involves "a deal" that Persephone broke, or was tricked into, depending on the version of the story. Why would that element of the story hang around for thousands of years?

I think that story is really about an ancient "seed monopoly" from the dawn of agriculture. I think that's also where the concept of interest comes from. This is also why "Hades" is associated with wealth, not the common interpretation that the concept was all wealth came from the underworld... which also makes no sense, unless you're talking about a mine, like a silver mine, which was another thing which was frequently monopolized.

Death and blood are at the core of the Hades/Vampire story for fairly obvious reasons... how is a monopoly built and maintained? murder and destruction.

The Book of Enoch and "The Jews"

In a previous post about the "cultural significance" of Star Wars versus the near insignificance of the movie Avatar I pointed out two narratives that permeate pop culture movies and TV shows and also the bible, which is really Star Wars + Avatar. There are basically three core narratives to discuss here:

• The Osiris Cycle, or the Demeter/Persephone Cycle (crops and winter);
• Moonman/woman and Sunman versus winterman;
• Rich people form a slave colony (Book of Enoch and Avatar, and 10,000 BC).

The Osiris cycle is "the sun" comes to Earth and is embodied in the crops like wheat or grapes, dies, and mutilated, and is reborn. In the Osiris story (there are some different versions), Osiris gets put into a tight fitting casket (wheat storage) and floated down a river (shipped). He's eventually reborn via artificial means (planted). In the grape crop based versions of the stories the plant-embodied-sun gets castrated (grapes cut off), and then torn to pieces by mad women in one case, stomped and mashed and made into wine. Jesus is wheat cult + wine cult. The violence in these stories should be regarded as looney tunes or Final Destination style cartoon violence where the character of Osiris, Jesus, or Dionysus is the personification of wheat (which used to be literally flailed by workers) or grapes.

The Demeter/Persephone/Hades version of this story is Persephone is "kidnapped" and kept in the underworld by Hades who is the wealthy king of the dead, and she is released in spring. One of the reasons Persephone is kept by Hades is she ingests Pomegranate seeds. Hades morphed into a vampire in modern times. He represents the never ending seed monopoly/finance scheme still used today.

The adventures of Moonman/woman and Sunman (the first released Star Wars movies Han/Leia and Luke) are another seasonal cycle story and the Osiris cycle provides the background. One example of that is Luke ends up hanging upside down in the ice cave on Hoth (winter planet, Luke/Sun in the south, i.e. upside down).

The "rich people form a slave colony" story is the Book of Enoch and Avatar, and maybe more interestingly Stargate and 10,000 BC. The TV series "The 100" is another example of this core narrative. The "rich people" slave colony story of the book of Enoch ends up in the bible in the Cain character and his city founding. This thread is also present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's a "nephilim" as described in the book of Enoch.

The Stargate and 10,000 BC movies depict the bible jews. I think the current concept of "jews" is a mangled, nonsense concept. The depiction of spece jews in the Stargate and 10,000 BC movies makes sense with respect to the Enoch narrative.

In Stargate the jews are the people who are contacted by people from Earth, that is, the advanced civilization. The character Skaara takes on the Enoch role. The name "Enoch" means "to train" or "initiated". In Stargate the Americans find these space jews ensalved to the Egyptians/Goauld snake people. In 10,000 BC, the white people find the first civilization people enslaved by the Atlanteans... and in that scenario the "slaves" are a rando assortment of people who are "the jews". Jews are the bamboozled slaves of an "advanced" slaver civilization rather than an ethnicity. Today an American is enmeshed in the slaver civilization system, but "American" is not an ethnicity.