Being "Wrong"/Bad Mind Models

I had an "earth science" class in 8th grade. It was an unusual class and maybe was some kind of educational experiment in our school district. It had two teachers and it culminated in a multi-day field trip to Kelly's Island in Lake Erie. We visited the glacial grooves there. I maintained an on again/off again interest in local geology ever since.

The glacial grooves at Kelly's Island are pretty impressive. It's obvious they were formed by an immense force scraping rocks and boulders along the exposed limestone. The force was provided by the slow motion flow of the laurentide ice sheet. For many years after the class, I had an opinion that the glacier ice was "miles thick" and uniformly deep. I thought it looked something like this painting at the boundary, but this concept was a "scientific" version of folklore.

In my hometown area where there is exposed bedrock there are no glacial grooves. Also there's significant accumulation of glacial till here; it's tens to hundreds of feet thick (in old river valleys). The mental model of miles-thick ice scouring the bedrock here doesn't jibe with that.

Images of the present day Greenland ice sheet shows it tapers down significantly at the edges, so maybe it's ~20 feet thick, plus it's all dirty and gray and it rides on a layer of rocks and ground up rock powder. Also it's shape and thickness seems to be significantly affected by underlying bedrock and land elevation.

This photo, below, from Greenland of the Isunnguata Sermia glacier is probably a good approximation for what the glacial times were like here in my neighborhood, which is on a terminal moraine from 14,000 years ago. Maybe there was more vegetation here at the time, like hemlock forests and grasslands since we're much farther south than Greenland.

So if I were living 14,000 years ago, the view from my current property would have been something like that. Maybe tens of feet of ice off to the north stretching on for endless miles into Canada. The southern side of the glacier was probably filled with streams and holes and lakes in the summer season.

A bunch of glacial till would be stacked up all over the place with new grass, weeds, and trees quickly taking over, and there would be lakes and rivers everywhere supplied by melt water. In fact, there was a lake just to the north of my property which eventually emptied out via what's currently Big Creek.

Anyway, I think most of the mind-models people have are low fidelity like my 8th grade glacier model. The folklore mind model of Ohio ice age geology is a pretty interesting one to think about. It shares some common traits with kid lore I learned in the late 1970s/early 1980s in Chardon, Ohio.

There's an "official"/technical and highly detailed version of Ohio ice age geology which is constantly updated by PhD students and geology researchers, plus a slow, steady stream of information comes from water well drilling companies into ODNR databases. This technical/detailed information ends up in maps, reports, whitepapers, etc... Some geology professors in Ohio will understand and have a significant amount of that info at their fingertips.

A popularized, shortened version ends up in text books. Middle school teachers will grasp some subsection of facts, and jumble and mix up other concepts as they convey that info to students. It turns into a narrative that borrows core elements from fictional stories, and get exaggerated and peppered with interesting concepts like "miles thick ice", which is way more interesting than a pile of dirty snow that ebbs and flows like a super slow motion waves on the beach.

Converged Dystopia

The "dystopian" sci-fi genre was pretty popular in the 1970s-90s. Movies like Robocop or Demolition Man and Idiocracy were entertaining plus their authors spent some brain cells trying to imagine what the future was going to be like based on the "trends" of the prior decades. Unfortunately, they were correct, and the present day is like a dystopia movie gumbo. It's mostly Idiocracy with chunks of Robocop, Demolition Man, and They Live mixed in, especially when the aliens in "They Live" represent jewish mobsters.

A great example of this was provided by the first episode of an HBO show called Euphoria which made me nauseous because it's so bleak and disgusting. It's more or less the 90210 for the dystopian world. 90210 was a multi-year after school special. This Euphoria show seems like depraved propaganda meant to mind-poison gen Z dummies, or put another way, it's entertainment for a completely mind poisoned generation.

The main character is a mixed-race mentally ill girl who is a crackhead, which I guess is supposed to be normal now. She's having a sad mope life because she lives in the suburbs instead of the city so she is a junkie and in rehab at age 16 or whatever. The hot white girl character immediately shows her boobs, then has sex with a black kid. The white high school jock kid is a rapist sociopath. There's an obligatory trannie high schooler who goes and has butt sex with a middle aged psycho white man. The show is dripping with black/urban trash "culture" which is all a hollywood invention anyway. The "normal" kids are dunks and drug users and sit around drinking and smoking vapes like they live in a giant crack house world.

I think the "converged dystopia" is really just the "mouse utopia" and it happens over and over again throughout history, but is cycles within cycles. There are micro cycles, like generational financial scams ebbing and flowing, and larger cycles of actual capital and technology creation, war cycles, all nestled withing big climatic and geologic cycles which put hard limits on human population and activities.

It's not possible to "fix" the culture, just like it's not possible to fix dysfunctional people, and it's not possible to make the mouse utopia work. 

Natural Thinking

A couple weeks ago I went after a Strava road bike segment that goes from Rt 6 in Hambden, south along Kile Road. It's a little over 2 miles and has a 50 foot climb in the middle.

A while after I finished the ride it dawned on me that Kile Road passes over glacial landforms which were created about 14,000 years ago. The elevation chart for the segment is more or less a cross section of the "Defiance Moraine", which spans Ohio from east to west and is named for the city of Defiance. It's a terminal moraine which is the debris that's piled up at the end of a glacier as shown in the following picture of a glacier in Greenland.

By NASA / Michael Studinger

Kile Road is an open air glacial surface feature museum. The moraine landform is subtle, but noticeable especially on a bicycle. It's even visible on google streetview. It's noticeable because Kile Road otherwise follows the east branch of the Cuyahoga River Valley which is about 1.5-2 miles wide there. At the center of the valley the elevation is around 1180 feet and it's about 1300 feet on either side. The valley runs north-south, but the moraine on Kile is running east-west. Also, there's a large flat and open area which was a lake in glacial times. There are several farms there, plus Pioneer Waterland water park whose central feature is a remnant of that glacial lake.

The following map is from the ODNR Ohio Geology Interactive Map. It shows the Strava segment (the red line) and the portion of the moraine which forms the hill on the segment, which is the dark green mass that is in the middle of the segment.

Both the moraine and ancient glacial lake weren't all that "obvious" to me even after studying local geology for many years by riding my bike around and looking at rock formations and also reading about the subject and studying maps for years. The geologists who put the story of Earth together in the 19th and 20th century managed to deduce a complex narrative from very subtle clues. I think they represent a very good example of following the evidence to get to the "truth" no matter where it leads.

The "truth" revealed by geology is the operation of the earth and climate system, which runs, obviously, without human intervention and with no regard for humans at all. It shows humanity isn't uniquely important and will come and go like many other species before us. The evidence for that is everywhere. For example, my house and property is right on top of the Defiance Moraine, so about 14,000 years ago, it looked like the photo above and a huge field of ice rolled off into the north. Millions of years before that, this land was under an ocean, etc...

People (including me) struggle and strain and fight over piles of imaginary nonsense. The masses allow the most horrible trashbucket element of humanity like politicians and priests goad them on into wreaking all sorts of havoc and murder based on magical thinking nonsense.

Worry Mode of Consciousness

I've been riding the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail on a regular basis since fall of 2025. Even though I'm in pretty decent shape for my age and am actually fairly fast on a road bike, I suck on the mountain bike. For example, I'm in the top 10, or sometimes the "king of the mountain" out of hundreds or even multiple thousand people on certain Strava segments on the road bike, but I'm in the bottom half or worse on the Big Creek Park segments, which probably means I'm the slowest of the "fast people" who are the ones that bother having a Strava account in the first place. I find this annoying, so I work to improve my speed.

Going fast on the MTB is at least as dependent on technique as aerobic conditioning. The technique seems to be about training the mind and body with a much more complicated center-of-mass/bike position model than is required for road biking. Of course that model is all based on "feel" and experience rather than a conscious physics model. The conscious mind model is too slow to pilot the bike effectively and efficiently.

On the mountain bike, efficiency is key, and efficiency means not braking too much for a corner or difficult section. Braking for every corner is one of the things that really drains all the speed/kinetic energy from the mountain bike/rider system, and then of course requires the rider to replace that energy from their legs, so it's also quite tiring. The inefficiency drags the average speed way down.

However, it's quite "scary" to try to maintain speed through corners, especially on steep downhill sections. The fear is really a manifestation of the lack of a good mind/body model for the mountain bike. The temptation to grab the brakes is almost impossible to overcome, for very good reason. The conscious mind "knows" there's a big gap in training and there's no mind/body mountain bike model to rely on.

Unfortunately, building up that model involves crashes. I just crashed yesterday while trying to "flow" through a "fast", but relatively flat section of the trail, but it has turn after turn after turn, plus little bumps and dips. I resisted the temptation to get on the brakes and tried maneuvering through each turn. Eventually the front wheel washed out on some soil that was loose and slippery compared to the rest of the corners and down I went.

A few minutes later, I realized my mistake "consciously", that I was off balance on the bike in that corner. My weight was too far back and probably shifted to the wrong side of the bike, that is, on the inside of the turn. Anyway, the whole of the mind/body model for the MTB seems to be about keeping the center-of-mass of the bike body system optimal over the wheels all the time, then developing a feel for the limits of the wheels for given soil conditions. When the center-of-mass is well positioned, it's possible to safely bail out of a bad situation, or to slide through a turn even when the wheels lose group.

The inability of the conscious mind, that is the "self" or the "ego" to wrangle with 3D reality is very common. One variant of this problem manifests as "worry" which is fairly similar to the "scary" feeling on a mountain bike. Worry is low level nagging stress that some situation is "out of control", that is, "unknown".

On the MTB, the "scare" feeling is the conscious realization that training is inadequate to handle a given speed through a turn. The "scare" feeling is transient--it lasts the duration of a turn which might be 2 seconds. Since the only way to get better is to train the turns there's no point mentally obsessing on it.

Worry is the consciousness trying to play out many different scenarios in an obsessive manner. It's generally worthless compared to the mountain bike training and learning process. People worry about work. They worry about love, family, finances, etc... Some people are worried their entire life. The "worry" scenario is all imagined, but it leads to adverse physical consequences, like higher cortisol levels which are the "bad" and "heavy" feeling.

A corresponding mode of consciousness to worrying is "enduring". The person who decides to "endure" their worry and heavy feeling has a model that they'll "get to the other side" eventually. That is, by struggling, they will eventually "make it" or succeed and their burden (the cortisol dose) will eventually go away. There are various sayings and folk-wisdom phrases associated with this mode of consciousness, e.g. "it's darkest before the dawn".

The enduring mode of consciousness is foolish to indulge because the "worry" is all imaginary. Old Obi-Wan's advice to "let go" is really good. The "go with the flow" model is really all that can be done anyway. The recognition of the reality of given circumstances is the best antidote.

Psychosis is Normal

A person having a "psychotic break" can't distinguish between their inner world imaginings and the 3D external reality world. If you witness a friend or relative struggle with psychosis, it's frightening, especially when that person might have been competent and balanced previously. That reveals the mind-model of reality is as contingent as physical health. "You" have potentially as little control over your mind model as you do on getting a cold or breaking your leg.

The concept of a "normal" mode of consciousness and a "psychotic" mode of consciousness implies that this state is "rare", especially if you ever witnessed someone lose it that way. However, once you start considering all the nonsense and bullshit that compels peoples' lives all over the world, the "psychotic" condition seems to be the norm.

"Lawn care" is a good example of a completely imaginary, groomed compulsion. Through the summer millions of people in the US are ruled by an image of uniform green squares. When their grass departs from that image, they must mow. People will spend $10,000 on a lawn mower machine. People who can't DIY anything will spend $1000 for a mechanic to change their oil and do other minor service on their mower. Some people pay thousands of dollars per year to landscapers to maintain that image, and never even go out of their house and walk on the grass, or even look at their flower beds. It's all very strange.

Political parties are another great example. Dolts imagine they are on a "team" with a scumbag like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and the only thing preventing a utopia is the bad guys on the other team. That stultifying mental model dominates some people's entire lives. All the contrary evidence and day-to-day experience of actual reality doesn't change their mental model one iota. They'll argue with the other team until they're blue in the face about random issues they have zero first hand knowledge of.

There's endless examples. As I wrote in the previous post, much of this psychosis is cultivated by "the ruling class", many of whom earnestly believe it. In that scenario, they more or less project their own reality model onto their cult members and the shared delusion forms a herd. People scoff at a group like Heaven's Gate, but actually live that Heaven's Gate life. Their own personal Marshal Applewhite could be a boss, or a political figure, or some talking head who's preaching about COVID, global warming or any number of other topics.

One of the interesting reactions to this cult grooming is people who reject all facts or any model of reality that doesn't seem authentic to them. For example, the flat earther people glom onto a "theory" they consider the opposite of the authoritative teaching of "globe earth". The flat earthers are scorned, but they're actually more enlightened than a lot of people who simply regurgitate an authority's statements without any actual knoweledge.

The realization that one is going to die and that nobody knows anything is a good antidote to these forms of psychosis. Another useful realization is quite a lot of the human world is composed of inanimate objects that actually feed on human energy and attention, aka the world of the dead. The lawn care industry is a great example of that. People feed a giant grass beast and kill all kinds of other creatures to maintain their green square image. In some jurisdictions, it's even written into the laws that the plants in a yard can only be so long.

Rule by Common Sense

When I was in middle school and high school from the mid to late 1980s the predominant insult label you would throw at someone was "poseur". "Fag" was another one, which basically meant the same thing, that is the person was weak, incompetent, and a fraud.

The poseur term came from Punk Rock, which was a big thing at the time. In that world, "poseur" was a band who pretended to be a "punk" but was really just a commercial scammer. For example, the band "Blondie" reportedly disliked their big hit song "Heart of Glass" which was a disco tune, because they were a punk band, and didn't want to be revealed as greedy corporate money whores instead of authentic punk rockers.

There was a corresponding attempt to be "good at things" among my friends and peers at school. I don't think that 100% came from the concept of fear of being labeled a poseur. In fact, it was probably the opposite. That is, people who put an emphasis on competency would gravitate to use an insult like "poseur".

That emphasis on competency makes sense in the context of the US economy of the time. In the 1970s and 80s, the US still made stuff, so a widespread culture of competency sort of makes sense. However, at the same time, the US started to turn into the financialized, scam based shit show it is today. This was heralded by things like the "Savings and Loan" crime wave of the 80s.

The departure from "common sense" and the beliefs I grew up with goes hand in hand with the "elite overproduction" concept from Peter Turchin. There's an inverse statistical relationship between the "elites" and the "people", which is an age old story. We're in a period of peak parasite, and maximum social stress now. It's probably the maximum deviation from "common sense" as well.

The deviation from common sense is easy to understand. Government and corporations make novel claims to create new organizations and opportunities for wealth extraction. Trannies and pronouns are great current day examples. The "ruling class" can find fault with "common sense" and ordinary people and undertake social engineering quests. In the late 1800s it was the temperance movement. Today it's basically the opposite of things that happened then. Like in the 1800s around that time there was a "eugenics" movement. Today there's basically an opposite concept of racism and opposition to "white people" as a category. Both concepts are arbitrary inventions of the "ruling class" of the times.

The madness basically comes about through the financial system which extracts wealth from the population en masse and diverts it to the various causes of the ruling class people. It seems pretty likely the break between the ruling class and the common sense people will form around the financial system and associated institutions like the insurance industry or banks or the legal system, which is also a participant in the madness.

Power Law and Financial Fraudsters

Supposedly the debt money scheme came about when bankers realized people rarely asked for their deposits, so the bankers could loan out the vast majority of deposits, or in some cases, even more than the total deposits when the precious metals were just represented as digits. Their business model is fraud.

That's another example of a power law at work, i.e. only about 10% of deposit accounts might be closed over a given time period. The average person assumes a "flat" distribution, that is 100% of deposits must be available all the time.

The bankers know the situation with deposit accounts, but the average person has no clue. The average person's model of banking is it's like a more "secure" example of a cash jar you might keep in a cupboard and banks are just a money custodian service. This is another example of the genetic disparity in the definition of "common sense".

The average person's assumption of a flat distribution in deposit availability is based on a belief in fairness, and antagonism for cheaters such as the bankers who are financial fraudsters.

The banker and financial parasite class, which extends into entities like insurance companies and many corporations, assume the pretense of being "managers" or stewards of collective wealth even though all their systems fail repeatedly throughout history.