Had the same thought about this really being a story to explain scientology! I've been sending it to friends under that premise, so I think you got at least part way there.
In the 1930s and 40s, Hubbard, Heinlein, and some other science fiction writers in the LA area were involved in various degrees with Jack Parson's Agape Lodge, an offshoot of Aleister Crowley's Thelema. Besides being an occultist, Parsons was a rocket scientist who played an important role in US rocket development.
Among other odd stories about Parsons, he attempted to create a "perfect woman" through a magical ritual known as "The Babalon Working" to create an elemental, or divine feminine entity, that would serve as a vessel for the Thelemic goddess Babalon. Parsons performed various rituals that involved sex magic (that included, by one third-hand account, a ritualized bukkake ) while L. Ron Hubbard acted as a scribe during these ceremonies.
As a side note, the members of the Agape Lodge practiced "free love". While the official story is that Heinlein was discharged from the U.S. Navy because he suffered from tuberculosis and wasn't fit for active duty, the oft-repeated rumor is that Heinlein's involvement with Agape and his free-love lifestyle came to the notice of his superiors. They offered him a medical discharge with a small pension to cover up the scandal.
Later on, I think it was Asimov who recounted that Hubbard had joked about science fiction not paying enough and that founding a religion would be more profitable.
Check Wikiquote about L. Ron Hubbard. He seems to have said things like that frequently in the 1940s. Although I get the sense a lot of people at the time were noticing that religion could be profitable.
The Babalon Working reminds me of the concept of the 80s movie (and 90s TV series) Weird Science, where a couple of nerdy high school students decide to perform a ritual to create an ideal woman, which sort-of succeeds.
You're missing the most outrageous fact. After Parsons died, his mother killed herself and while looking through her things, the police found videotapes of him having sex with his mother and their dog.
That's not in his Wikipedia bio (but that doesn't prove anything). Back in the 40s and 50s, it would have been film and not videotape. Interesting that incest themes also ran through Heinlein's fiction — that whole geniuses-are-above-regular-morals thing.
Part of it is that Dianetics is a (poorly written) therapy book, and at the time it was mainly competing with Freudian psychoanalysis. Even with Hubbard's grifting, Dianetics was still less expensive and just as effective. The religion angle came later, mainly as a way to avoid taxes, although people did remember past lives in Dianetic therapy relatively early on.
>The religion angle came later, mainly as a way to avoid taxes
Hubbard also tried and failed to promote Dianetics as a respectable therapy. Apparently he didn't meet the psychiatric establishment's famously rigorous standards.
Dianetics is basically a cartoon version of psychoanalysis:
Unpleasant experiences create stains on your mind. A doctor can purify the stain by making you remember the unpleasant experience, using an electric device. When all stains on your mind are purified, you become a perfect human being.
I wasn't sure for a while if this was a story or a non-fiction essay, so I wondered if the letter writers' names spelled out conspiratorial phantasmagoria in Atlantean, which struck me as likely in a story by Scott. I should feed them into ChatGPT and find out.
If a swipe at people who endorse baseless election conspiracy theories counts as a "swipe at the right" generally, then yes, absolutely. If that's the world we live in, that's the world we live in. If sensible right wingers don't like being associated with wingnuts, they should do less complaining about it and more cleaning their own house.
What about the countless notable people who endorsed the baseless election conspiracy theory often called Russiagate? Don't they deserve the occasional swipe at the left.
Why do you say “baseless”? The government investigation found no evidence that Trump himself was intentionally working for Russian agents, but they did find very clear evidence that some of his appointees were collaborating with some Russian agents, and that Russian intervention in the election included some support of Trump and no support of Clinton (even if it also included support for all fringes of the political environment).
"The government investigation found no evidence that Trump himself was intentionally working for Russian agents"
Also "the government investigation found no evidence" is a much weaker-than-usual statement in this case, because said investigation mostly wasn't even able to *look* for the evidence. Executive privilege and all that.
I'm pretty sure the Left elites knew from the first moment that the Russia stuff is fake but they still run with it for years. That's not self correcting.
It's not about election theories, it's specifically about the whole "children are abducted by ghoulish DC/Hollywood elites and forced into basements" theory.
Which, like most good myths has elements of truth. But the part about basements is acquired from other myths, in reality it's usually just a ranch in Santa Barbara or something.
Yes, "stop the steal" is about a baseless, corrosive, utterly irresponsible conspiracy theory pushed *by the president* which led to a violent attack on the U.S. Capital which the president both encouraged at the time of and excused (to the point of pardoning those involved) after the fact. None of this should be news.
Again, if the U.S. right doesn't want people taking digs at them for that very real, very mainstream and utterly irresponsible thing that their per-eminent party has been either supporting or tolerating for the past four years, they should *be better.* Complaining about it is very "how dare you mention embarrassing truths about them" energy.
(And yes, before anyone starts in with more whataboutism, yes, the Democrats are trash in a lot of ways too. But they're much, much less trash in *this* way. Conspiracy theories are far, *far* more popular among Republicans right now than Democrats. The closest analog to anything like "stop the steal" among the left was the people who insist that Bernie Sanders was cheated out of winning the 2016 primary. But of course those people are almost definitionally not mainstream Democrats: most are probably not Democrats at all.)
I think you may be lost--the comment you want to direct this to is one comment above. In the future, I'd kindly request you read and understand the points under discussion before cluttering up the thread with such noise.
No, I meant to reply to yours: you imply that "right wingers" are more likely to "endorse baseless election conspiracy theories," and I assert that impression you might have (if you genuinely DO believe that, which is not certain) is a result of the media's asymmetric reporting on when "left wingers" do analogous things.
And I say once again, please read the actual thread before you go throwing around accusations. What does the top-level comment say? What are the implications of that, regarding the conspiracy theory referenced? What word does my reply start with?
This is really, really basic reading comprehension. When and if you manage to figure this out, if you have something meaningful and original to contribute, please do.
Even speaking as a liberal, I think your criticism is legit. Much better to say "WWG1WGA bumper sticker" but those aren't very common and I'm not surprised that Scott overlooked making that improvement.
In regard to "Russiagate" and "Stop the Steal", my meta-analysis is the final sentence of this tale:
"I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a copy of the original manuscript [of
William Manchester's "The Death of a President"], so I was forced to
write "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book" myself, imitating
Manchester's style.
"It began with a true news item. [...] Next came made-up anecdotes
that reeked of verisimilitude, all leading up to a few paragraphs that
plunged [my magazine] The Realist into the depths of its notoriety:
""During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the
assassination, Jackie inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was
standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. [...]
""'I'm telling you this for the historical record,' [Jackie] said, 'so
that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go
through... That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer
chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At
first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite
he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I
realized--there is only one way to say this--he was literally fucking
my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his
throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I
remember, he was being sworn in as the new president.' [...]"
"I never labeled an article as satire, so as not to deprive readers of
the pleasure of discerning for themselves whether something was the
truth or a satirical extension of the truth. The most significant
thing about "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book" was its
widespread acceptance as truth--if only for a fleeting moment--by
intelligent, literate people, from an ACLU official to a Peabody
Award-winning journalist to members of the intelligence community.
"Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the
Pentagon Papers in 1971, said, "Maybe it was because I wanted to
believe it so badly.""
But the difference between the two is that while "Russiagate" is "false but truth-adjacent" -- certainly Putin did want to help Trump get elected, but Trump was wise enough to know that he didn't have to *conspire* with Putin to get Putin to extend his fullest efforts -- the idea that the results of the 2020 election were fraudulent is entirely delusional.
To be fair, he has been wading more often into taboo territory recently, so a reminder of continued allegiance to the less wrong side of history could have been in order...
Scott's Asterisk article categorized the readers who wrote in the fan mail this science fiction magazine published into four broad groups: (1) the mentally unwell, (2) the collaborative world-builders, (3) the self-promoters, and (4) the gullible. Going into this extensive fan-mail analysis, Scott likely already had some rough category-ideas based on patterns he's observed in the comments section of his own blog.
Meanwhile only 12% of the UK, 8% of Germany, and 23% of France describe themselves as atheists. So if religiosity is your bar, America doesn't particularly stand out.
Makes sense. Whatever psychological features made belief in spirits attractive a thousand years ago are surely still present today. To the extent that traditional religions have lost ground they mostly just ceded it to more vigorous competition.
My own pet theory for alien abductions is memory fragments of midnight diaper changes as a baby. You've got the bright lights, figures looming over you, strange happenings in the nether regions, perhaps you're even strapped down to the changing table.
I had a college professor who - though I didn’t know this at the time, he didn’t advertise it - had once been a member of the SF sci-fi scene and wrote some pulp novels of his own.
I believe the class, big enough for a small auditorium, was some sort of anthropology survey. For some reason I attended it very little and I think also he cancelled some, being fairly old. So my only memory is of him gleefully trotting out on the first day the line he must have used every year, about how some number of us were born with tails. Then he was further gleeful about his telling us, since he thought I guess our Sunday schooling was at war with our belief in evolution. In truth, we knew little of either Bible or of evolution.
(The internet hasn’t been a total negative in this regard, at least for those of us who well pre-date it.)
He said this was kept secret from our mothers insofar as possible.
Not really sure what this had to do with anthropology and he was no great lecturer after all, but then maybe we were not very interesting to lecture to. He was yet something of a celebrity prof on campus.
Years later, coincidentally, I happened to be trespassing on his place; deserted by then. It contained what must have been one of the last homesteads inside the city loop.
It had the most marvelous oak tree, and a sense of isolation from the suburbia all around.
When I learned it was his, I suddenly liked him because I liked his property, and wished he’d had a party there for students, so he could have told me about it. (I am super-local.) Maybe he did and I was absent the day of the invite.
I'm not sure. Dwarfism seems to develop in the fringe conditions (environments perpetually low on nutrients) and while our species as a whole likely did have contact with the hobbits of Flores and the like, I think it would usually be the groups that in turn got pushed out if not outright exterminated. The memes could plausibly survive, the mechanisms making us susceptible seem unlikely to have had the time and range to develop and less likely to survive and become near-universal.
BTW, if you've never read "I Remember Lemuria!" https://sacred-texts.com/ufo/irl/index.htm , it's a surprisingly good pulp SF read (considering the circumstances). There is a lot of tiincbniac, but it's mostly just a fast-paced action-adventure of a naive painter who travels to the center of the earth, acquires a deer-girl furry med-student waifu, discovers the capital has been subverted by a hidden conspiracy (who have been driven insane by poisonous radioactive dust from the Sun, which is the cause of all aging & disease), flees to the stars, recruits allies like giant Amazonesses, and is part of a stealth invasion counter-coup and victorious war against the evil-doers, after which they emigrate to a sun-free planet, and he lives happily ever after with his deer (dear?!) wife.
The S&M and furry elements are also rather amusing. tfw you'll never be crushed by a giant 6-armed Sybil woman, or strangled by your 30-foot long lamia gf straight out of _Monster Musume_; you'll never fall in love with "lovely, smiling, brave Arl of the cloven hoofs and defiantly flirting tail!", she who "wagged her tail in friendly encouragement" ("With that tail, no language, no thought-transference was needed!"), to whom you'll swear marriage "So it shall be, always, oh maiden of the clicking hooves and swift hands, of the beautiful tail, of the clean will and strong desire!", who is as hot as she is sharp ("This exquisite young thing, so full of gen force, so powerfully attractive, was smart too."), or have your brain wiped by the sheer lifeforce and eroticism of 100-foot elder goddesses who have grown for centuries.
EDIT: I've expanded out my review quite a bit: https://gwern.net/review/lemuria On reflection, I think the BDSM/furry elements may be the important part of _Lemuria_, and not the UFO or sleep paralysis bits Scott argues for.
I had no idea what ttincbniac was, so I tried searching for it and came up with nothing. I then asked Claude what it might mean, and whatever it is, it apparently causes Claude to completely choke because it's been blinking the icon with the message "A bit longer, thanks for your patience..." for several minutes now.
So
A) would you mind explaining the term/acronym and
B) well done for completely borking at least one LLM?
This is not a coincidence, because nothing ever is a coincidence. Not too long ago I've been thinking that abbreviation are just... bad and should be avoided as much as possible. You know all the reasons not to use fancy, hard to understand terms? Abbreviations are all of that, but also often un-googlable in addition.
The first time I realized how bad abbreviations are, was when my boss mentioned OPs at work, and I had to message colleagues asking what on Earth that is. ("Oil products", but the boss meant "fuel".) Why, good grief, just why would you call them OPs, why can't you just say "fuel", for goodness sake? And there's a dozen of other stupid abbreviations like that, forming some pointless and annoying secret language, that saves a little typing time and causes ten times more headache.
Ok, so....this is super embarrassing for me. It was not until the third person replied to my comment, that I finally realized you were all answering my question. Your comment, I thought you were referencing the tag line because you had (not-coincidentally, because nothing is ever a coincidence) recently been thinking about abbreviations (and it's pretty common/normal to use that line in this community). The second person, who were quoting the line with ">", I thought had mistakenly replied to me when they meant to reply to you. It was not until the third person that it finally clicked for me that all three of you were answering my question.
This is one of the bigger facepalm/whoosh moments of my recent life.
So belated thank you for answering the question!
Also, shouldn't it have been TINACBNIEAC? That one comes up with the right answer in my first search result, so I'm going to go ahead and blame a typo for me not originally figuring it out, rather than failing to recognize a reference to perhaps Scott's single most recognizable sentence.
I was trying to be a little cute by working the answer into what I wanted to say, I'm sorry for confusing you for cutenesses sake.
Yes, technically maybe it should have been TINACBNIEAC, but to think that gwern made a typo would be mistaken: all apparent typos in gwern's comments actually form an encrypted message trying to strike a bargain with future superintelligences. It is known.
While we're wildly speculating, when did hell get hot?
The Greek Hades was cold. I don't know much about the other proto-hells mentioned by Scott -- Sheol, Gehanna and Duzakh but quick googling doesn't give any indication that they're associated with heat. But modern hell is hot. And the actual centre of the Earth is hot, so that's an example of myths becoming more scientifically accurate over time. But when and how?
Intuitively it makes sense that underground should be cold, and if you go out of the Mediterranean sunshine into a deep cave you'll find it gets colder, so the deep underground must be really cold. But if you keep digging, you'll eventually find it gets warmer again. The Romans dug at least 137 metres deep, which ought to correspond to a couple of degrees of warmth. At what point did people realise that it just keeps getting warmer as you dig?
The other indication that something hot might be going on down there is lava. The Greeks and Romans both lived near active volcanoes and would have noticed that incredibly hot stuff comes out of the deep underground sometimes, while the Jews and Babylonians perhaps would not have. Was hot hell inferred from volcanic activity?
Most likely from Jesus, who in Mark 9:43 says "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to Gehenna, into the fire that shall never be quenched—"
Then in the book of Revelation you have a "lake of fire" which is mentioned several times as the final resting place of the Beast, the False Prophet, the Devil, Death, Hades, and "the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death."
Gehenna was a real place, a valley which was significant in the Old Testament as the site of fiery sacrifices to Moloch.
The turn to a place of eternal punishment may come from Isaiah, which suggests that one of Israel's enemies will burn on their own pyre there, "the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it". (A "stream of brimstone" certainly sounds like an allusion to volcanic activity, but not underground.)
Then in the final verse of Isaiah, there's a description of the fate of "the men that have transgressed against me" in the world to come: "for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh."
(Note: I was taught that the Valley of Genhenna was at some point a dump where rubbish was burned, but apparently that seems to be the invention of a random medieval Rabbi.)
I can recommend Graham Hancock's book on alien abductions, particularly for the cherry picking part.
His theory is it's not sleep paralysis, but that some people are born with a natural way to enter altered states of consciousness - sometimes without their consent. This we derive from depictions in prehistoric cave paintings.
Of course we also get a comparison of ancient Irish fairies/changeling legends and modern UFO abductee claims.
There's a whole section on shrooms and claims they definitely were involved. There's even a debunking of a claim by someone called Bahn that it couldn't be shrooms because psilocybe is "not native to Europe".
Most of the book is speculation on the level you'd expect from a "what if the pyramids were from an ancient lost civilisation" guy, but it does seem that there are ethnographic studies from present-day "shamanic" societies supporting the spontaneous/natural/involuntary ASC phenomenon. Someone should perhaps check if epilepsy could be involved.
>Am I doing the thing where I cherry-pick a bunch of myths from unrelated cultures, squint at them really hard until they all look the same, and declare myself to have discovered something fundamental about the depths of the collective unconscious?
Yes. I do the same thing every time I smoke pot. Here's last night's version:
"Civilization has been collapsing since the industrial revolution. Every generation has been twice as wealthy as their parents for 200 years. It's too fast. Too much cultural wisdom gets lost. It's like spaghettification in a black hole: we tear apart as we approach the singularity of infinite economic growth. Culture just isn't in equilibrium with this level of civilizational wealth and too many people still have commune-optimized empathy instincts. This largely explains the left-right political divide. Complex societies exist in a predator-prey dynamic between Ubermensch-style wealth creation and empathic slave-morality redistribution. Those two forces were in equilibrium in Europe for centuries, but after being seeded by highly-selected empathy-immune Puritans (hard work! no free riders!) the US has been in an unstable equilibrium for the past 200 years. That initially caused a period of explosive growth, but the bad-faith actors have finally evolved good-faith camouflage and we're in the evolutionary phase transition of predatory free-riders (e.g. the welfare state collapse)."
I wake up to Google docs with shit like this all the time. Usually it's even dumber than that.
That doesn't seem like shit to me. It's more that you had this one idea about how too-rapid changes in wealth destabilizing us all, and then you just fell in love with it and started making the case that it explained everything. That's a typical weed thing, right? You fall in love with a model. I"m sure you're right about too many changes in wealth destabilizing us, especially in the development of 2 groups with very different propensity for empathy and help-thy-neighbor.
Want to hear some weed dumb? I one wrote a long thing about orders of infinity, and how the natural numbers did not live comfortably with having a lower order of infinity than the reals, and how their seething jealousy, non-conscious yet vast, sort of a geological force rather than an emotion, drove the development of imaginary numbers, sort of like bubbles forming in liquid that's almost hot enough to boil.
Another time a thing about seahorses and meta-seahorses in the Mandelbrot set.
My dad grew up in Northern California, in a little town near Mt. Shasta. He told me that the town of Shasta was filled with people who believed lizard people called "Lemurians" lived under the mountain, and that every time the mountain erupted in the past it was actually the Lemurians launching spaceships into orbit. So after reading your article I thought maybe that's where those kooks came from.
I did some digging, and it turns out the kooks predate the 1940s by several decades! The name comes from a defunct 19th century theory that there used to be a continent in the Indian Ocean that has since sunk beneath the waves. The name comes from the zoologist Philip Sclater who proposed the idea in 1864 to explain why there were Lemurs in Madagascar and Lemur fossils in India, but no Lemur fossils in Africa. Clearly there used to be a land connecting India and Madagascar that no longer exists! After the idea plate tectonics and continental drift came around the Lemuria theory was dropped since it was no longer necessary.
However, Lemuria lived on because it was picked up by the Theosophists who claimed it was the cradle of mankind and the source of all kinds of esoteric knowledge that was scattered across the East: basically, it's Atlantis for Asians!
Then in 1894 Frederick Spencer Oliver published the book "A Dweller on Two Planets" which claimed that Lemurians survived the sinking of their continent (now located in the Pacific instead of the Indian Ocean) and currently lived in a subterrain city named Telos under Mt. Shasta. Then in 1931 a Rosicrucian named Harvey Spencer Lewis (lotta Spencers in this story) wrote "Lemuria: the Lost Continent of the Pacific" which further spread the idea that Lemurians were living large under Mt. Shasta.
Then a mining engineer-turned-cult-leader, Guy Ballard, claimed that while walking on Mt. Shasta in the 1930s he was visited by the ghost of Count St. Germain, a pseudonymous alchemist from the 18th century, who provided him with the "Ascended Master Teachings". Ballard started a cult called "The 'I AM' Activity" which, among other things, taught that Telos was totally real and chock full of Lemurians. Apparently they claimed to have had over a million followers in 1938, and the cult still exists today. It has an active chapter in the town of Shasta, and every year since 1950 they hold a pageant at the mountain, which features a "life-size LED Jesus" that rises into the sky on a pulley.
I live near Shasta and can confirm that the Lemurians thing is still a big deal there, along with every other form of woo that you can imagine. The cult also maintains a church-like building right in the middle of Ladd’s Addition in Portland.
> Other writers started getting in on the shared universe, keeping kayfabe via various stratagems. (Not all were particularly subtle: One story was just called “I Have Been in the Caves.”)
> The ur-abduction comes specifically from colonoscopies. These are generally performed under midazolam, a weak anesthetic that keeps patients confused and drowsy but not entirely unconscious.
This theory would also predict that abduction experiences would become less common as midazolam was replaced with propofol (1990s? 2000s?), which produces a much deeper anesthesia.
I love midazolam! I have had it for, I think, 3 colonoscopies. It seems
to neutralize all anxiety, and gives a very powerful sense of peace and wellbeing. It does not, though. make me confused. I remember parts of the procedure, and even some conversation I had with the staff. Once I said, “that hurts,”
and the doc said she was going around a tight corner. Once somebody told me they were almost done. And I remember feeling them plumbing my insides and thinking how weird it was that I didn’t feel pain or fear. There are definitely gaps in my memory, so those were periods when I was either totally knocked out or awake but not able to make memories. But no periods
of confusion. Have compared notes with a couple people and their experiences were similar. One calls the drug “liquid bliss.”
I was actually recently linked to a lengthy essay that kind of does the "history of L Ron Hubbard" thing as a digression from its main thrust, which is a damning overview of Neil Gaiman's overall career — given that Gaiman's parents were Scientology bigwigs.
Disclaimer that the author has, I believe, written an essay arguing against a completely other piece of Scott's very violently, and clearly doesn't like him. Not that I expect him to censor this on that basis or anything but it seems only fair when linking to it from his own comments.
And now off to read the Deros article itself I go.
Strikes me that as far as explaining the pre-modern origins of the myth, there is insufficient discussion of it stemming from people's literal experiences exploring literal caves. Any amateur speleologist can tell you that the absolute darkness and silence can play real tricks on you, up to and including hallucinations. And sometimes people who go down there suddenly drop dead for no apparent reason (poison gases). It's not hard for me to believe that a lot of primitive cultures, all the way to the fairy myths of the medieval Irish, came up with Underworlds, Hells, and troll kingdoms based partly on the the experiences of people who actually tried to go in and take a look, much as it's no great mystery why various cultures thought there were gods in the calderas of active volcanos.
Great point. I was once on a cave tour when the guide warned us that she would be turning off her flashlight so we could experience the pitch dark and that sometimes people fall over when this happens.
I recall reading that some antibiotics can damage the vestibulocochlear, a.k.a. auditory, nerve. Apparently, the sense of balance relies on a combination of proprioception, visual cues, and the vestibular system. If one of the three is damaged but the other two are OK, one can balance normally; but if two of the three are malfunctioning, balance goes.
As best I remember (it was a long time ago), the book or article in which I read it described something like "falling-into-the-bathroom-sink syndrome": if I've got a damaged eighth cranial nerve, so I don't have access to the vestibular system, and I then look closely in the mirror to shave, so I'm not visually monitoring my larger environment, then proprioception alone isn't enough to keep me upright. Maybe something similar happens to susceptible people when the cave guide shuts off the lights.
Is it early hominids? That human tales of orcs and trolls, elves and what not (and associated abductions) are remnants of ancestral interactions with other species of early hominid is a pretty popular meme theory, and makes a lot of intuitive sense. It is scientifically controversial though (although some scientists do propose it).
Re QAnon - my current theory is that the “left” has great epistemic hygiene but poor ability to effectively scan the search space of possible theories. Whereas the “right” is much more error prone but also likely to hit on something true in the left’s blind spots. (there’s probably a smart programming way to say this in terms of search algorithms.)
That’s how the right is able to form both intriguing, plausibly true hypotheses like “Epstein was a Mossad/CIA associated agent running a honeypot to gather compromising sexual info on high value targets for blackmail” as well as insane ones like “Hillary Clinton is a lizard person,” while the left produces many more wonkishly smart bloggers like Yglesias but is also stuck worrying about whether only putting two exclamation points after BLM!! makes you racist.
Could it be because the left's conspiracy theories have become mainstream truths?
Start writing a lot about how rich people conspire to oppress the poor, men conspire to oppress the women, or whites conspire to oppress the blacks... and instead of being recommended for a therapy, you might get a job in the academia.
Lol, yeah. The right wing equivalent of a University class on Intersectionality in Gender Studies is some dude posting on X about the combined forces of Soros/WEF/USAID sponsoring terrorism in West Africa to make money for BlackRock.
The leftist theories are a question of perspective. Most people agree on what particular things are happening to women, what percent of women are homemakers, how common rape is, etc - you might have studies that slightly distort rape statistics, but overall both sides nearly-agree on the facts and the main question is whether to call it "oppression" or not.
The rightist theories that Turtle are describing are things where everyone agrees they would be bad if they were happening, but the facts themselves are in question. If Hillary Clinton is a reptilian alien, obviously that sucks, but the whole question hinges on whether or not that fact is true.
Many leftist theories are like that, but not all of them.
For example, the belief in blank slate. I don't think that most people agree on whether there are or aren't statistical differences between races or sexes.
Do rape statistics measure how frequently men are raped by women? I have never seen such numbers published, although maybe I just wasn't looking carefully enough. It is not obvious whether omitting such data implies a positive statement ("that never happens") or a value statement ("maybe it happens, but that doesn't matter"), so I am not sure whether this counts as a counter-example.
Similarly, domestic violence. I think you would find a lot of factual disagreement about how often men are victims of domestic violence, and how much of the domestic violence is reciprocal.
Finally, trans-sexuality. Are people really born with female brains and male bodies? (And how does that fit the blank-slatist belief that there is no such thing as a "female brain"?) Or is it a mental disease, spread mostly by social contagion?
Also, practically everything the leftists wrote about Soviet Union before it fell apart was pure bullshit.
I think there are some attempted female-on-male rape statistics. They're not very good, but neither are the male-on-female ones! I think most of the problem here is defining rape and domestic violence, not doing simple surveys.
Same with trans stuff. Is depression because you are born with a "depressed brain", or is it "socially contagious"? We know it's something like 30% genetic and that it can be caused by certain weird cancers, but also that people with depressed friends are (I think causally) more likely to be depressed themselves. Most mental disorders straddle the borders between these two things, and understanding them better is as much a philosophical task as a statistics-collection one. I am almost sure there will turn out to be many different causes of transgender (aren't people with blatant hormone imbalances much more likely to be trans than others? but obviously this is only a small percent of the total), and they'll probably be a gradient rather than distinct categories. This is how lots of diseases work, including "physical" ones.
It seems to me that we have a pyramid of... not sure what is the right word here...
At the top of the pyramid, we have serious researchers who collect the data and study the territory scientifically. Those I have no objection against. Some of them probably don't even identify as left-wing, and may regret that the topic they chose to study is so politicized.
In the middle, there is e.g. the average Oppression Studies teacher, who might do their job and convey the wisdom of the researchers to the masses. Or they could go batshit insane, and preach things not very different from conspiracy theories. In both cases, they will keep their job. And of course, there is a spectrum between these two extremes, and people can be anywhere on it.
At the bottom, there is the leftist mob yelling at you on social networks, and if you are unlucky, also in real life. That part is pure insanity. Having such mob suddenly and completely undeservedly turn against you sometimes produces the so-called "red pill" moment. Unfortunately, this mob cannot be ignored, because they have the power to get you fired.
So in practice, even if you care about the leftist theories as presented by the researchers, you also need to make very sure you don't accidentally say something that might sic the mob on you. This makes debating those topics different from debating the science as usual, because merely proposing an alternative hypothesis could get you in deep trouble. So when you hear the parts you agree with, you nod, and when you find a part that seems dubious, you hold your tongue.
*
I can imagine a mirror-image version of the pyramid for the right wing. At top, you have serious researchers, often considering themselves apolitical, who try to do a god job researching some topics that by coincidence happen to be related to the favorite talking points of the right. For example, Charles Murray researches intelligence and its correlates, including race.
Etc., and at the bottom you have the usual batshit crazy rightists talking conspiracy theories.
I think it is useful to consider the perspective that the difference between these two pyramids is not that the left one is intrinsically more sane, but simply that the right one was "decapitated" -- the people at the top and middle were persecuted and mostly eliminated from the mainstream discourse -- which leaves us exposed mostly to its worst part.
In other words, there are serious researches and utter crackpots everywhere, and the academic research is a mechanism that separates the former from the latter, but the right wing ideas are strategically denied the possibility to use this mechanism. The researchers of the left wing topics are defended (mostly correctly) as different from the mob, while the researchers of the right wing topics are accused (mostly incorrectly) of association with the mob and cancelled. The researchers who want to keep their job are very careful about popularizing their research that contradicts the leftist dogma, and the safest way is to avoid researching things that might predictably get them in trouble.
BTW, let's not forget the big daddy of all subterranean theorists, John Symmes Jr.! In the early decades of the 19th Century, he became famous/infamous for advocating the idea that the Earth was composed of concentric hollow spheres with large openings at the poles. Symmes claimed these inner worlds were inhabited, and we could get down to them through the "Symmes' Holes," at the poles. I believe the researchers in Himmler's Ahnenerbe planned an expedition to investigate this theory, but WWII put the project on hold.
one of the explanations i heard is that most of us now don't have the same wild, raw experience with nature that people used to have. It seems silly to think someone can be abducted by fairies but if you are living in a quiet, rural world with no electric lights the forest is a much more oppressive and dynamic force and it feels much more likely.
we kind of exist different with a belief we control nature and that kills the wildness of it. Bill McKibben in the Age of Missing Information contrasted electronic media with nature and thought the former wanting.
for more modern, sf/f owes a lot to both New Thought Movement and Theosophy. Lemuria was never a mythical place like Atlantis, but a more modern creation. New Thought has a long tail, and sort of was a spawner of rational "religions" like scientology: religion and science/materialism a bit more fused than usual. Theosophy leads to Wicca and the lost past.
i think ufo stuff is a child of that. things like mesmerism is scientific religion, pseudoscience based on more materialistic forces that can be manipulated by the adept but not commands of deities. religion becoming parapsychology, ghosts as more discoverable forces in existence.
ufos are kind of christianity rendered into that form.
orson scott card pointed out something that always stuck with me: any sf book can be rewritten into fantasy with very little effort. the reverse happens as well: Star Trek is closer to The Voyage of Saint Brendan than you'd think. (Though Kirk is closer to Don Winslow of the Navy, in terms of "captains don't work that way.)i think the same goes for religion, we are getting the sf versions of it, lol. not a few serials of the 30s treated Radium like a magical thing.
I started reading this under the assumption that it was a metafictional fakeout story about events that never really happened and then finally googled Richard Shaver after reading the first section and was surprised to realize it was just straight history.
Now I want a handsome coffee-table book made up of the we're-in-on-the-joke collaborative world-building subset of Amazing Stories, interspersed with all of the awesome commissioned covers and illustrations.
Great read, but I was surprised you didn’t explore evolutionary explanations.
Many elements of the “Ur-abduction” — fear of being dragged underground, immobilized, tortured, or sexually violated — align strikingly with ancient survival threats: snake or spider bites, ambush by predators or rival tribes, or being trapped in caves. Some of these fears are deeply hardwired.
You also mention the masochistic aspect, but skip a fascinating question: why do so many women report abduction narratives with sexual or ritual overtones that echo dark fantasies? There's a rich literature on female arousal by power dynamics, and it seems highly relevant here.
And there’s a deeper layer: during massive prehistoric migrations, genetic and isotopic evidence shows that many women died far from where they grew up — likely taken by force. The idea of abduction, captivity, and violation may not just be a cultural meme, but an evolutionarily conserved trauma template.
Maybe these stories aren’t errors — they’re ancient truths in disguise.
On the question of why sleep paralysis hallucinations are often sexual: the eye muscles are the genitals aren’t paralysed during REM sleep. If the genitals are one of the few parts of the body you’re feeling sensation from, it’s not surprising that the hallucinations turn sexual.
Weird to give consideration to "The abduction stories are poorly processed memories of colonoscopy and/or other medical treatments" narrative, and not the one where they're poorly processed memories of rape.
Can't say I have any experience in raping people, but feels like it should be easier to do in some sort of an enclosed space (away from potential witnesses) and against someone in an altered state of consciousness (who is unlikely to put up as much resistance). Sadomasochism link and putting stuff up peoples' asses also work just as well, if not better, as they are in other interpretations. In addition, many if not most cultures make even thinking (let alone talking) about rape, esp. male-on-male rape, shameful for the victim. Guess having to deal with literally unthinkable experience can prompt all sorts of crazy stories.
Great article, thank you very much! But there's always place for some nitpicking, so: you're wrong about the etymology of the word "fairy" (and I seriously wonder what's your source, because it's a well-known, unproblematic one.) "fairy" was borrowed in the 12th century from old French faerie (today's French féérie), itself derived from latin fata "fates", "destinies", hence "the Fates" (fate goddesses). It has nothing to do with the germanic word "fair".
I have a simpler theory to offer. Back in our ancestors evolutionary past, it was relatively common to be kidnapped and tortured by strangers. Emotions that drove our ancestors to avoid this fate would have been heavily selected for. So there's a kind of "evil strangers who kidnap and torture people like me" hole in the mind somewhere in subconscious. What do humans do when we feel an emotional impulse like that? We tell stories about it .
We tell stories about strangers who want to kidnap and torture us for the same reason we watch horror movies and ride roller coasters. It satisfies an itch.
The “it’s sleep paralysis” answer doesn’t actually answer the question which was “why do people have these kinds of fantasies”. Ok so they had sleep paralysis, now why do people with sleep paralysis tend to come up with these specific fantasies about it, and not one of a thousand other ways to fantasize about it?
same is for the “space of human fantasies is limited” answer. well, why is it limited in precisely these ways?
both of these are examples of the way materialistic answers “explain-away” simple questions or change the subject instead of answering them.
I don't understand. Sleep paralysis is dark because you're in your bedroom. You feel like you're being tortured because you can't move and you're terrified. You feel like there are malignant figures because ... idk, for some people the figure is sitting on them and this is the brain's post hoc explanation for why they can't breathe, but in any case we know from lots of different reports that this is in fact a common pattern in sleep paralysis.
I've had sleep paralysis before, and for me at least the reason it seemed like there were malignant figures present was that I could see them--shadowy figures circling me while I fell endlessly. (If I hadn't already known about sleep paralysis when this happened, I remember thinking, I would have thought I was surrounded by demons and falling into Hell. I also remember thinking that someone could have the exact same sense data as me and think they were being levitated by aliens.)
I've always assumed that dreamlike hallucinations were part and parcel of sleep paralysis, and whether or not that's the case I'm probably not literally unique.
I think the reason why QAnon doesn't fit neatly with your model is that QAnon isn't Ur Abduction, it's a different trope. QAnon is Blood Libel, the thing pagans said of Christians, Christians said of pagans, and just about everyone else said of Jews.
"Those other guys, they're super-duper-evil! They do the most evil stuff imaginable! Like, uh, they sacrifice and eat children!"
BTW this probably also somewhat based in reality of a handful of actual psychopathic pedophiliac sadistic serial killers. We don't know for sure whether Gilles de Rais and Ezrebeth Bathory really did what they were accused of, but it stands to reason that in preindustrial times some serial killer types would be born aristocrats, and you can get away with a lot if you're rich, powerful, and the most sophisticated forensic technology available is "trial by combat".
Had the same thought about this really being a story to explain scientology! I've been sending it to friends under that premise, so I think you got at least part way there.
In the 1930s and 40s, Hubbard, Heinlein, and some other science fiction writers in the LA area were involved in various degrees with Jack Parson's Agape Lodge, an offshoot of Aleister Crowley's Thelema. Besides being an occultist, Parsons was a rocket scientist who played an important role in US rocket development.
Among other odd stories about Parsons, he attempted to create a "perfect woman" through a magical ritual known as "The Babalon Working" to create an elemental, or divine feminine entity, that would serve as a vessel for the Thelemic goddess Babalon. Parsons performed various rituals that involved sex magic (that included, by one third-hand account, a ritualized bukkake ) while L. Ron Hubbard acted as a scribe during these ceremonies.
As a side note, the members of the Agape Lodge practiced "free love". While the official story is that Heinlein was discharged from the U.S. Navy because he suffered from tuberculosis and wasn't fit for active duty, the oft-repeated rumor is that Heinlein's involvement with Agape and his free-love lifestyle came to the notice of his superiors. They offered him a medical discharge with a small pension to cover up the scandal.
Later on, I think it was Asimov who recounted that Hubbard had joked about science fiction not paying enough and that founding a religion would be more profitable.
Check Wikiquote about L. Ron Hubbard. He seems to have said things like that frequently in the 1940s. Although I get the sense a lot of people at the time were noticing that religion could be profitable.
Bukkakes are like snowflakes, every one is different.
The Babalon Working reminds me of the concept of the 80s movie (and 90s TV series) Weird Science, where a couple of nerdy high school students decide to perform a ritual to create an ideal woman, which sort-of succeeds.
My thoughts exactly. Obviously the movie was stealth Agape hermetic messaging. The initiates would get it.
You're missing the most outrageous fact. After Parsons died, his mother killed herself and while looking through her things, the police found videotapes of him having sex with his mother and their dog.
That's not in his Wikipedia bio (but that doesn't prove anything). Back in the 40s and 50s, it would have been film and not videotape. Interesting that incest themes also ran through Heinlein's fiction — that whole geniuses-are-above-regular-morals thing.
> locked in a Ypsilanti psychiatric hospital.
Ypsilanti is pronounced with the Y as a vowel… like “Ipsilanti” not “Yipsilanti.” So the article oughta be “an” not “a.”
(Usually wouldn’t be such a pedant, but I go to school in Ypsi and it’s always a weird thrill to see it mentioned…)
I also lived in Ypsi for a few years, so I can't figure out how I made this mistake.
spellcheck
Part of it is that Dianetics is a (poorly written) therapy book, and at the time it was mainly competing with Freudian psychoanalysis. Even with Hubbard's grifting, Dianetics was still less expensive and just as effective. The religion angle came later, mainly as a way to avoid taxes, although people did remember past lives in Dianetic therapy relatively early on.
>The religion angle came later, mainly as a way to avoid taxes
Hubbard also tried and failed to promote Dianetics as a respectable therapy. Apparently he didn't meet the psychiatric establishment's famously rigorous standards.
Dianetics is basically a cartoon version of psychoanalysis:
Unpleasant experiences create stains on your mind. A doctor can purify the stain by making you remember the unpleasant experience, using an electric device. When all stains on your mind are purified, you become a perfect human being.
Missed pun opportunity: "Cavefabe"
I wasn't sure for a while if this was a story or a non-fiction essay, so I wondered if the letter writers' names spelled out conspiratorial phantasmagoria in Atlantean, which struck me as likely in a story by Scott. I should feed them into ChatGPT and find out.
Did you really need to put in a swipe at the right?
If a swipe at people who endorse baseless election conspiracy theories counts as a "swipe at the right" generally, then yes, absolutely. If that's the world we live in, that's the world we live in. If sensible right wingers don't like being associated with wingnuts, they should do less complaining about it and more cleaning their own house.
What about the countless notable people who endorsed the baseless election conspiracy theory often called Russiagate? Don't they deserve the occasional swipe at the left.
If that were a fair characterization of actual things that had happened, then perhaps they would.
Why do you say “baseless”? The government investigation found no evidence that Trump himself was intentionally working for Russian agents, but they did find very clear evidence that some of his appointees were collaborating with some Russian agents, and that Russian intervention in the election included some support of Trump and no support of Clinton (even if it also included support for all fringes of the political environment).
To be fair to Scott, Russiagate doesn't have anything to do with abductions.
"The government investigation found no evidence that Trump himself was intentionally working for Russian agents"
Also "the government investigation found no evidence" is a much weaker-than-usual statement in this case, because said investigation mostly wasn't even able to *look* for the evidence. Executive privilege and all that.
What does Russiagate have to do with kidnappers and underground torture chambers?
Nearly every democrat I know, including myself, knows and admits that the Russia memo was fake. The Left self-corrects, unlike the Right.
I'm pretty sure the Left elites knew from the first moment that the Russia stuff is fake but they still run with it for years. That's not self correcting.
Are they still doing it?
It's not about election theories, it's specifically about the whole "children are abducted by ghoulish DC/Hollywood elites and forced into basements" theory.
Which, like most good myths has elements of truth. But the part about basements is acquired from other myths, in reality it's usually just a ranch in Santa Barbara or something.
Yes, "stop the steal" is about a baseless, corrosive, utterly irresponsible conspiracy theory pushed *by the president* which led to a violent attack on the U.S. Capital which the president both encouraged at the time of and excused (to the point of pardoning those involved) after the fact. None of this should be news.
Again, if the U.S. right doesn't want people taking digs at them for that very real, very mainstream and utterly irresponsible thing that their per-eminent party has been either supporting or tolerating for the past four years, they should *be better.* Complaining about it is very "how dare you mention embarrassing truths about them" energy.
(And yes, before anyone starts in with more whataboutism, yes, the Democrats are trash in a lot of ways too. But they're much, much less trash in *this* way. Conspiracy theories are far, *far* more popular among Republicans right now than Democrats. The closest analog to anything like "stop the steal" among the left was the people who insist that Bernie Sanders was cheated out of winning the 2016 primary. But of course those people are almost definitionally not mainstream Democrats: most are probably not Democrats at all.)
This is just the Chinese robbers thing: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/. You read a lot of reporting on one group doing something you think is bad and you come to believe that group is disproportionately prone to doing it when it isn't.
I think you may be lost--the comment you want to direct this to is one comment above. In the future, I'd kindly request you read and understand the points under discussion before cluttering up the thread with such noise.
No, I meant to reply to yours: you imply that "right wingers" are more likely to "endorse baseless election conspiracy theories," and I assert that impression you might have (if you genuinely DO believe that, which is not certain) is a result of the media's asymmetric reporting on when "left wingers" do analogous things.
And I say once again, please read the actual thread before you go throwing around accusations. What does the top-level comment say? What are the implications of that, regarding the conspiracy theory referenced? What word does my reply start with?
This is really, really basic reading comprehension. When and if you manage to figure this out, if you have something meaningful and original to contribute, please do.
Even speaking as a liberal, I think your criticism is legit. Much better to say "WWG1WGA bumper sticker" but those aren't very common and I'm not surprised that Scott overlooked making that improvement.
In regard to "Russiagate" and "Stop the Steal", my meta-analysis is the final sentence of this tale:
"I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a copy of the original manuscript [of
William Manchester's "The Death of a President"], so I was forced to
write "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book" myself, imitating
Manchester's style.
"It began with a true news item. [...] Next came made-up anecdotes
that reeked of verisimilitude, all leading up to a few paragraphs that
plunged [my magazine] The Realist into the depths of its notoriety:
""During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the
assassination, Jackie inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was
standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. [...]
""'I'm telling you this for the historical record,' [Jackie] said, 'so
that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go
through... That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer
chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At
first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite
he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I
realized--there is only one way to say this--he was literally fucking
my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his
throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I
remember, he was being sworn in as the new president.' [...]"
"I never labeled an article as satire, so as not to deprive readers of
the pleasure of discerning for themselves whether something was the
truth or a satirical extension of the truth. The most significant
thing about "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book" was its
widespread acceptance as truth--if only for a fleeting moment--by
intelligent, literate people, from an ACLU official to a Peabody
Award-winning journalist to members of the intelligence community.
"Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the
Pentagon Papers in 1971, said, "Maybe it was because I wanted to
believe it so badly.""
But the difference between the two is that while "Russiagate" is "false but truth-adjacent" -- certainly Putin did want to help Trump get elected, but Trump was wise enough to know that he didn't have to *conspire* with Putin to get Putin to extend his fullest efforts -- the idea that the results of the 2020 election were fraudulent is entirely delusional.
Yeah I think the thing Scott actually wrote was clearer at getting his point across, even if it's also inevitably going to annoy some people.
To be fair, he has been wading more often into taboo territory recently, so a reminder of continued allegiance to the less wrong side of history could have been in order...
I lost it at "morally neutral people take you sideways and do boring things". :-)
It got me thinking "That sounds like a writing challenge!"
I think the Mandela effect could be directed to evolve into this.
Very few die at all, most are taken.
When a man dies, he does not die at all, but the daoine maithe take him away.
No-one dies, but the daoine maithe take him away, and leave something else in his place.
Not one in twenty dies a true death, they all pass into another life.
•statements by C 20 (Irish) Gaelic speakers collected the Irish Folklore Commission. (Quoted in Dorena Allen in Medium Ævum, vol. XXXIII, #2, 1964).
The nightgaunts in the October Daye fantasies might be more tightly tied to Irish folklore than I realized.
Scott's Asterisk article categorized the readers who wrote in the fan mail this science fiction magazine published into four broad groups: (1) the mentally unwell, (2) the collaborative world-builders, (3) the self-promoters, and (4) the gullible. Going into this extensive fan-mail analysis, Scott likely already had some rough category-ideas based on patterns he's observed in the comments section of his own blog.
How much of the commentary do you think he's writing himself to keep the bubble going? :P
Here? None.
Wait, I'm Scott, aren't you?
Me too! Also, I was personally abducted by Hillary Clinton disguised as a deros
I am L. Ron Hubbard, here having one of my past lives.
I haven't seen enough 2) here
likely because of subject matter but it's a shame, that stuff is fun
> a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew.
*researches religiosity in America*
base rate of self-identifying ready marks: 70%.
While 29% of Americans describe themselves as having no religion, 92% of Americans believe in either souls, God, the afterlife, or spirits in general (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/pr_2025-02-26_religious-landscape-study_0-03/) and only 4% of Americans describe themselves as atheists: and even then 23% of them say they believe in a higher power of some kind (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/07/8-facts-about-atheists/).
Meanwhile only 12% of the UK, 8% of Germany, and 23% of France describe themselves as atheists. So if religiosity is your bar, America doesn't particularly stand out.
Makes sense. Whatever psychological features made belief in spirits attractive a thousand years ago are surely still present today. To the extent that traditional religions have lost ground they mostly just ceded it to more vigorous competition.
Or perhaps spirits were real a thousand years ago and they are still real today.
Well, the ability to perceive real spirit would also qualify.
My own pet theory for alien abductions is memory fragments of midnight diaper changes as a baby. You've got the bright lights, figures looming over you, strange happenings in the nether regions, perhaps you're even strapped down to the changing table.
I like this one. Mom and dad as the original aliens. Very Freudian.
I had a college professor who - though I didn’t know this at the time, he didn’t advertise it - had once been a member of the SF sci-fi scene and wrote some pulp novels of his own.
I believe the class, big enough for a small auditorium, was some sort of anthropology survey. For some reason I attended it very little and I think also he cancelled some, being fairly old. So my only memory is of him gleefully trotting out on the first day the line he must have used every year, about how some number of us were born with tails. Then he was further gleeful about his telling us, since he thought I guess our Sunday schooling was at war with our belief in evolution. In truth, we knew little of either Bible or of evolution.
(The internet hasn’t been a total negative in this regard, at least for those of us who well pre-date it.)
He said this was kept secret from our mothers insofar as possible.
Not really sure what this had to do with anthropology and he was no great lecturer after all, but then maybe we were not very interesting to lecture to. He was yet something of a celebrity prof on campus.
Years later, coincidentally, I happened to be trespassing on his place; deserted by then. It contained what must have been one of the last homesteads inside the city loop.
It had the most marvelous oak tree, and a sense of isolation from the suburbia all around.
When I learned it was his, I suddenly liked him because I liked his property, and wished he’d had a party there for students, so he could have told me about it. (I am super-local.) Maybe he did and I was absent the day of the invite.
I'll have to read the article and see if Scott can "write about his hallucinations convincingly"!
Wait, you weren't convinced by the Cactus person?
My favourite take on this trope is Patrick Stuart's, from Veins of the Earth.
You can see a sample of it here: https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2014/03/derro.html
Better explanation: There were once evil cave dwarves (cf. paleoanthropology).
I'm not sure. Dwarfism seems to develop in the fringe conditions (environments perpetually low on nutrients) and while our species as a whole likely did have contact with the hobbits of Flores and the like, I think it would usually be the groups that in turn got pushed out if not outright exterminated. The memes could plausibly survive, the mechanisms making us susceptible seem unlikely to have had the time and range to develop and less likely to survive and become near-universal.
BTW, if you've never read "I Remember Lemuria!" https://sacred-texts.com/ufo/irl/index.htm , it's a surprisingly good pulp SF read (considering the circumstances). There is a lot of tiincbniac, but it's mostly just a fast-paced action-adventure of a naive painter who travels to the center of the earth, acquires a deer-girl furry med-student waifu, discovers the capital has been subverted by a hidden conspiracy (who have been driven insane by poisonous radioactive dust from the Sun, which is the cause of all aging & disease), flees to the stars, recruits allies like giant Amazonesses, and is part of a stealth invasion counter-coup and victorious war against the evil-doers, after which they emigrate to a sun-free planet, and he lives happily ever after with his deer (dear?!) wife.
The S&M and furry elements are also rather amusing. tfw you'll never be crushed by a giant 6-armed Sybil woman, or strangled by your 30-foot long lamia gf straight out of _Monster Musume_; you'll never fall in love with "lovely, smiling, brave Arl of the cloven hoofs and defiantly flirting tail!", she who "wagged her tail in friendly encouragement" ("With that tail, no language, no thought-transference was needed!"), to whom you'll swear marriage "So it shall be, always, oh maiden of the clicking hooves and swift hands, of the beautiful tail, of the clean will and strong desire!", who is as hot as she is sharp ("This exquisite young thing, so full of gen force, so powerfully attractive, was smart too."), or have your brain wiped by the sheer lifeforce and eroticism of 100-foot elder goddesses who have grown for centuries.
EDIT: I've expanded out my review quite a bit: https://gwern.net/review/lemuria On reflection, I think the BDSM/furry elements may be the important part of _Lemuria_, and not the UFO or sleep paralysis bits Scott argues for.
I had no idea what ttincbniac was, so I tried searching for it and came up with nothing. I then asked Claude what it might mean, and whatever it is, it apparently causes Claude to completely choke because it's been blinking the icon with the message "A bit longer, thanks for your patience..." for several minutes now.
So
A) would you mind explaining the term/acronym and
B) well done for completely borking at least one LLM?
This is not a coincidence, because nothing ever is a coincidence. Not too long ago I've been thinking that abbreviation are just... bad and should be avoided as much as possible. You know all the reasons not to use fancy, hard to understand terms? Abbreviations are all of that, but also often un-googlable in addition.
The first time I realized how bad abbreviations are, was when my boss mentioned OPs at work, and I had to message colleagues asking what on Earth that is. ("Oil products", but the boss meant "fuel".) Why, good grief, just why would you call them OPs, why can't you just say "fuel", for goodness sake? And there's a dozen of other stupid abbreviations like that, forming some pointless and annoying secret language, that saves a little typing time and causes ten times more headache.
SWYM.
I think that it being an opaque inside joke is kind of part of the joke.
Ok, so....this is super embarrassing for me. It was not until the third person replied to my comment, that I finally realized you were all answering my question. Your comment, I thought you were referencing the tag line because you had (not-coincidentally, because nothing is ever a coincidence) recently been thinking about abbreviations (and it's pretty common/normal to use that line in this community). The second person, who were quoting the line with ">", I thought had mistakenly replied to me when they meant to reply to you. It was not until the third person that it finally clicked for me that all three of you were answering my question.
This is one of the bigger facepalm/whoosh moments of my recent life.
So belated thank you for answering the question!
Also, shouldn't it have been TINACBNIEAC? That one comes up with the right answer in my first search result, so I'm going to go ahead and blame a typo for me not originally figuring it out, rather than failing to recognize a reference to perhaps Scott's single most recognizable sentence.
I was trying to be a little cute by working the answer into what I wanted to say, I'm sorry for confusing you for cutenesses sake.
Yes, technically maybe it should have been TINACBNIEAC, but to think that gwern made a typo would be mistaken: all apparent typos in gwern's comments actually form an encrypted message trying to strike a bargain with future superintelligences. It is known.
> This is not a coincidence, because nothing ever is a coincidence.
Pretty much the tagline for one of Scott's other projects, unsongbook.com
There are ... kabbalistic? ... reasons why this might bork an LLM.
This Is Not A Coincidence Because Nothing Is Ever A Coincidence, a reference to Scott's Unsong https://unsongbook.com/
While we're wildly speculating, when did hell get hot?
The Greek Hades was cold. I don't know much about the other proto-hells mentioned by Scott -- Sheol, Gehanna and Duzakh but quick googling doesn't give any indication that they're associated with heat. But modern hell is hot. And the actual centre of the Earth is hot, so that's an example of myths becoming more scientifically accurate over time. But when and how?
Intuitively it makes sense that underground should be cold, and if you go out of the Mediterranean sunshine into a deep cave you'll find it gets colder, so the deep underground must be really cold. But if you keep digging, you'll eventually find it gets warmer again. The Romans dug at least 137 metres deep, which ought to correspond to a couple of degrees of warmth. At what point did people realise that it just keeps getting warmer as you dig?
The other indication that something hot might be going on down there is lava. The Greeks and Romans both lived near active volcanoes and would have noticed that incredibly hot stuff comes out of the deep underground sometimes, while the Jews and Babylonians perhaps would not have. Was hot hell inferred from volcanic activity?
None of these are universals:-
Afterlife=Underground.
Hell=underground
Heaven=sky.
Afterlife=heaven or hell, extreme reward or extreme.punishment, nothing much in-betweenm
Hell=cold (or hot).
Heaven=permanent state (or temporary resting place).
Extinction=worst thing or best thing.
Afterlife (good, bad or indifferent)=fully real (or dreamlike illusion).
Most likely from Jesus, who in Mark 9:43 says "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to Gehenna, into the fire that shall never be quenched—"
Then in the book of Revelation you have a "lake of fire" which is mentioned several times as the final resting place of the Beast, the False Prophet, the Devil, Death, Hades, and "the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death."
Interesting, so hell was definitely hot by New Testament times.
A lake of fire and sulfur definitely seems to indicate that it's inspired by volcanism.
Gehenna was a real place, a valley which was significant in the Old Testament as the site of fiery sacrifices to Moloch.
The turn to a place of eternal punishment may come from Isaiah, which suggests that one of Israel's enemies will burn on their own pyre there, "the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it". (A "stream of brimstone" certainly sounds like an allusion to volcanic activity, but not underground.)
Then in the final verse of Isaiah, there's a description of the fate of "the men that have transgressed against me" in the world to come: "for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh."
(Note: I was taught that the Valley of Genhenna was at some point a dump where rubbish was burned, but apparently that seems to be the invention of a random medieval Rabbi.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehenna
I can recommend Graham Hancock's book on alien abductions, particularly for the cherry picking part.
His theory is it's not sleep paralysis, but that some people are born with a natural way to enter altered states of consciousness - sometimes without their consent. This we derive from depictions in prehistoric cave paintings.
Of course we also get a comparison of ancient Irish fairies/changeling legends and modern UFO abductee claims.
How do the cave paintings tell you it's natural, not shrooms?
There's a whole section on shrooms and claims they definitely were involved. There's even a debunking of a claim by someone called Bahn that it couldn't be shrooms because psilocybe is "not native to Europe".
Most of the book is speculation on the level you'd expect from a "what if the pyramids were from an ancient lost civilisation" guy, but it does seem that there are ethnographic studies from present-day "shamanic" societies supporting the spontaneous/natural/involuntary ASC phenomenon. Someone should perhaps check if epilepsy could be involved.
>Am I doing the thing where I cherry-pick a bunch of myths from unrelated cultures, squint at them really hard until they all look the same, and declare myself to have discovered something fundamental about the depths of the collective unconscious?
Yes. I do the same thing every time I smoke pot. Here's last night's version:
"Civilization has been collapsing since the industrial revolution. Every generation has been twice as wealthy as their parents for 200 years. It's too fast. Too much cultural wisdom gets lost. It's like spaghettification in a black hole: we tear apart as we approach the singularity of infinite economic growth. Culture just isn't in equilibrium with this level of civilizational wealth and too many people still have commune-optimized empathy instincts. This largely explains the left-right political divide. Complex societies exist in a predator-prey dynamic between Ubermensch-style wealth creation and empathic slave-morality redistribution. Those two forces were in equilibrium in Europe for centuries, but after being seeded by highly-selected empathy-immune Puritans (hard work! no free riders!) the US has been in an unstable equilibrium for the past 200 years. That initially caused a period of explosive growth, but the bad-faith actors have finally evolved good-faith camouflage and we're in the evolutionary phase transition of predatory free-riders (e.g. the welfare state collapse)."
I wake up to Google docs with shit like this all the time. Usually it's even dumber than that.
That doesn't seem like shit to me. It's more that you had this one idea about how too-rapid changes in wealth destabilizing us all, and then you just fell in love with it and started making the case that it explained everything. That's a typical weed thing, right? You fall in love with a model. I"m sure you're right about too many changes in wealth destabilizing us, especially in the development of 2 groups with very different propensity for empathy and help-thy-neighbor.
Want to hear some weed dumb? I one wrote a long thing about orders of infinity, and how the natural numbers did not live comfortably with having a lower order of infinity than the reals, and how their seething jealousy, non-conscious yet vast, sort of a geological force rather than an emotion, drove the development of imaginary numbers, sort of like bubbles forming in liquid that's almost hot enough to boil.
Another time a thing about seahorses and meta-seahorses in the Mandelbrot set.
> their seething jealousy, non-conscious yet vast, sort of a geological force rather than an emotion, drove the development of imaginary numbers
That is rad. I approve of your drug-addled ramblings. I suspect stoned me would enjoy hanging out with stoned you.
What kind of weed were you on? I ask for entirely scientific purposes.
My dad grew up in Northern California, in a little town near Mt. Shasta. He told me that the town of Shasta was filled with people who believed lizard people called "Lemurians" lived under the mountain, and that every time the mountain erupted in the past it was actually the Lemurians launching spaceships into orbit. So after reading your article I thought maybe that's where those kooks came from.
I did some digging, and it turns out the kooks predate the 1940s by several decades! The name comes from a defunct 19th century theory that there used to be a continent in the Indian Ocean that has since sunk beneath the waves. The name comes from the zoologist Philip Sclater who proposed the idea in 1864 to explain why there were Lemurs in Madagascar and Lemur fossils in India, but no Lemur fossils in Africa. Clearly there used to be a land connecting India and Madagascar that no longer exists! After the idea plate tectonics and continental drift came around the Lemuria theory was dropped since it was no longer necessary.
However, Lemuria lived on because it was picked up by the Theosophists who claimed it was the cradle of mankind and the source of all kinds of esoteric knowledge that was scattered across the East: basically, it's Atlantis for Asians!
Then in 1894 Frederick Spencer Oliver published the book "A Dweller on Two Planets" which claimed that Lemurians survived the sinking of their continent (now located in the Pacific instead of the Indian Ocean) and currently lived in a subterrain city named Telos under Mt. Shasta. Then in 1931 a Rosicrucian named Harvey Spencer Lewis (lotta Spencers in this story) wrote "Lemuria: the Lost Continent of the Pacific" which further spread the idea that Lemurians were living large under Mt. Shasta.
Then a mining engineer-turned-cult-leader, Guy Ballard, claimed that while walking on Mt. Shasta in the 1930s he was visited by the ghost of Count St. Germain, a pseudonymous alchemist from the 18th century, who provided him with the "Ascended Master Teachings". Ballard started a cult called "The 'I AM' Activity" which, among other things, taught that Telos was totally real and chock full of Lemurians. Apparently they claimed to have had over a million followers in 1938, and the cult still exists today. It has an active chapter in the town of Shasta, and every year since 1950 they hold a pageant at the mountain, which features a "life-size LED Jesus" that rises into the sky on a pulley.
So I guess my dad was right.
That reminds that David Icke's folllwers refer to lizard people as Silurians, a terrm that comes from.1970s Dr Who.
I live near Shasta and can confirm that the Lemurians thing is still a big deal there, along with every other form of woo that you can imagine. The cult also maintains a church-like building right in the middle of Ladd’s Addition in Portland.
> Other writers started getting in on the shared universe, keeping kayfabe via various stratagems. (Not all were particularly subtle: One story was just called “I Have Been in the Caves.”)
Huh, the Salby fandom is older than I thought.
> The ur-abduction comes specifically from colonoscopies. These are generally performed under midazolam, a weak anesthetic that keeps patients confused and drowsy but not entirely unconscious.
This theory would also predict that abduction experiences would become less common as midazolam was replaced with propofol (1990s? 2000s?), which produces a much deeper anesthesia.
I love midazolam! I have had it for, I think, 3 colonoscopies. It seems
to neutralize all anxiety, and gives a very powerful sense of peace and wellbeing. It does not, though. make me confused. I remember parts of the procedure, and even some conversation I had with the staff. Once I said, “that hurts,”
and the doc said she was going around a tight corner. Once somebody told me they were almost done. And I remember feeling them plumbing my insides and thinking how weird it was that I didn’t feel pain or fear. There are definitely gaps in my memory, so those were periods when I was either totally knocked out or awake but not able to make memories. But no periods
of confusion. Have compared notes with a couple people and their experiences were similar. One calls the drug “liquid bliss.”
I was actually recently linked to a lengthy essay that kind of does the "history of L Ron Hubbard" thing as a digression from its main thrust, which is a damning overview of Neil Gaiman's overall career — given that Gaiman's parents were Scientology bigwigs.
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-cuddled-little-vice-sandman
Disclaimer that the author has, I believe, written an essay arguing against a completely other piece of Scott's very violently, and clearly doesn't like him. Not that I expect him to censor this on that basis or anything but it seems only fair when linking to it from his own comments.
And now off to read the Deros article itself I go.
Are you referring to this? https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method
Strikes me that as far as explaining the pre-modern origins of the myth, there is insufficient discussion of it stemming from people's literal experiences exploring literal caves. Any amateur speleologist can tell you that the absolute darkness and silence can play real tricks on you, up to and including hallucinations. And sometimes people who go down there suddenly drop dead for no apparent reason (poison gases). It's not hard for me to believe that a lot of primitive cultures, all the way to the fairy myths of the medieval Irish, came up with Underworlds, Hells, and troll kingdoms based partly on the the experiences of people who actually tried to go in and take a look, much as it's no great mystery why various cultures thought there were gods in the calderas of active volcanos.
Great point. I was once on a cave tour when the guide warned us that she would be turning off her flashlight so we could experience the pitch dark and that sometimes people fall over when this happens.
I recall reading that some antibiotics can damage the vestibulocochlear, a.k.a. auditory, nerve. Apparently, the sense of balance relies on a combination of proprioception, visual cues, and the vestibular system. If one of the three is damaged but the other two are OK, one can balance normally; but if two of the three are malfunctioning, balance goes.
As best I remember (it was a long time ago), the book or article in which I read it described something like "falling-into-the-bathroom-sink syndrome": if I've got a damaged eighth cranial nerve, so I don't have access to the vestibular system, and I then look closely in the mirror to shave, so I'm not visually monitoring my larger environment, then proprioception alone isn't enough to keep me upright. Maybe something similar happens to susceptible people when the cave guide shuts off the lights.
Is this related to people falling over in choir? That was a semi-regular occurrence.
The folk explanation I heard is that locking your knees for extended periods of time will deprive your body of oxygen rich blood and you will faint.
They did use to remind the kids not to lock their knees.
Is it early hominids? That human tales of orcs and trolls, elves and what not (and associated abductions) are remnants of ancestral interactions with other species of early hominid is a pretty popular meme theory, and makes a lot of intuitive sense. It is scientifically controversial though (although some scientists do propose it).
Re QAnon - my current theory is that the “left” has great epistemic hygiene but poor ability to effectively scan the search space of possible theories. Whereas the “right” is much more error prone but also likely to hit on something true in the left’s blind spots. (there’s probably a smart programming way to say this in terms of search algorithms.)
That’s how the right is able to form both intriguing, plausibly true hypotheses like “Epstein was a Mossad/CIA associated agent running a honeypot to gather compromising sexual info on high value targets for blackmail” as well as insane ones like “Hillary Clinton is a lizard person,” while the left produces many more wonkishly smart bloggers like Yglesias but is also stuck worrying about whether only putting two exclamation points after BLM!! makes you racist.
Could it be because the left's conspiracy theories have become mainstream truths?
Start writing a lot about how rich people conspire to oppress the poor, men conspire to oppress the women, or whites conspire to oppress the blacks... and instead of being recommended for a therapy, you might get a job in the academia.
Lol, yeah. The right wing equivalent of a University class on Intersectionality in Gender Studies is some dude posting on X about the combined forces of Soros/WEF/USAID sponsoring terrorism in West Africa to make money for BlackRock.
These seem importantly different.
The leftist theories are a question of perspective. Most people agree on what particular things are happening to women, what percent of women are homemakers, how common rape is, etc - you might have studies that slightly distort rape statistics, but overall both sides nearly-agree on the facts and the main question is whether to call it "oppression" or not.
The rightist theories that Turtle are describing are things where everyone agrees they would be bad if they were happening, but the facts themselves are in question. If Hillary Clinton is a reptilian alien, obviously that sucks, but the whole question hinges on whether or not that fact is true.
Many leftist theories are like that, but not all of them.
For example, the belief in blank slate. I don't think that most people agree on whether there are or aren't statistical differences between races or sexes.
Do rape statistics measure how frequently men are raped by women? I have never seen such numbers published, although maybe I just wasn't looking carefully enough. It is not obvious whether omitting such data implies a positive statement ("that never happens") or a value statement ("maybe it happens, but that doesn't matter"), so I am not sure whether this counts as a counter-example.
Similarly, domestic violence. I think you would find a lot of factual disagreement about how often men are victims of domestic violence, and how much of the domestic violence is reciprocal.
Finally, trans-sexuality. Are people really born with female brains and male bodies? (And how does that fit the blank-slatist belief that there is no such thing as a "female brain"?) Or is it a mental disease, spread mostly by social contagion?
Also, practically everything the leftists wrote about Soviet Union before it fell apart was pure bullshit.
I think there are some attempted female-on-male rape statistics. They're not very good, but neither are the male-on-female ones! I think most of the problem here is defining rape and domestic violence, not doing simple surveys.
Same with trans stuff. Is depression because you are born with a "depressed brain", or is it "socially contagious"? We know it's something like 30% genetic and that it can be caused by certain weird cancers, but also that people with depressed friends are (I think causally) more likely to be depressed themselves. Most mental disorders straddle the borders between these two things, and understanding them better is as much a philosophical task as a statistics-collection one. I am almost sure there will turn out to be many different causes of transgender (aren't people with blatant hormone imbalances much more likely to be trans than others? but obviously this is only a small percent of the total), and they'll probably be a gradient rather than distinct categories. This is how lots of diseases work, including "physical" ones.
It seems to me that we have a pyramid of... not sure what is the right word here...
At the top of the pyramid, we have serious researchers who collect the data and study the territory scientifically. Those I have no objection against. Some of them probably don't even identify as left-wing, and may regret that the topic they chose to study is so politicized.
In the middle, there is e.g. the average Oppression Studies teacher, who might do their job and convey the wisdom of the researchers to the masses. Or they could go batshit insane, and preach things not very different from conspiracy theories. In both cases, they will keep their job. And of course, there is a spectrum between these two extremes, and people can be anywhere on it.
At the bottom, there is the leftist mob yelling at you on social networks, and if you are unlucky, also in real life. That part is pure insanity. Having such mob suddenly and completely undeservedly turn against you sometimes produces the so-called "red pill" moment. Unfortunately, this mob cannot be ignored, because they have the power to get you fired.
So in practice, even if you care about the leftist theories as presented by the researchers, you also need to make very sure you don't accidentally say something that might sic the mob on you. This makes debating those topics different from debating the science as usual, because merely proposing an alternative hypothesis could get you in deep trouble. So when you hear the parts you agree with, you nod, and when you find a part that seems dubious, you hold your tongue.
*
I can imagine a mirror-image version of the pyramid for the right wing. At top, you have serious researchers, often considering themselves apolitical, who try to do a god job researching some topics that by coincidence happen to be related to the favorite talking points of the right. For example, Charles Murray researches intelligence and its correlates, including race.
Etc., and at the bottom you have the usual batshit crazy rightists talking conspiracy theories.
I think it is useful to consider the perspective that the difference between these two pyramids is not that the left one is intrinsically more sane, but simply that the right one was "decapitated" -- the people at the top and middle were persecuted and mostly eliminated from the mainstream discourse -- which leaves us exposed mostly to its worst part.
In other words, there are serious researches and utter crackpots everywhere, and the academic research is a mechanism that separates the former from the latter, but the right wing ideas are strategically denied the possibility to use this mechanism. The researchers of the left wing topics are defended (mostly correctly) as different from the mob, while the researchers of the right wing topics are accused (mostly incorrectly) of association with the mob and cancelled. The researchers who want to keep their job are very careful about popularizing their research that contradicts the leftist dogma, and the safest way is to avoid researching things that might predictably get them in trouble.
BTW, let's not forget the big daddy of all subterranean theorists, John Symmes Jr.! In the early decades of the 19th Century, he became famous/infamous for advocating the idea that the Earth was composed of concentric hollow spheres with large openings at the poles. Symmes claimed these inner worlds were inhabited, and we could get down to them through the "Symmes' Holes," at the poles. I believe the researchers in Himmler's Ahnenerbe planned an expedition to investigate this theory, but WWII put the project on hold.
one of the explanations i heard is that most of us now don't have the same wild, raw experience with nature that people used to have. It seems silly to think someone can be abducted by fairies but if you are living in a quiet, rural world with no electric lights the forest is a much more oppressive and dynamic force and it feels much more likely.
we kind of exist different with a belief we control nature and that kills the wildness of it. Bill McKibben in the Age of Missing Information contrasted electronic media with nature and thought the former wanting.
for more modern, sf/f owes a lot to both New Thought Movement and Theosophy. Lemuria was never a mythical place like Atlantis, but a more modern creation. New Thought has a long tail, and sort of was a spawner of rational "religions" like scientology: religion and science/materialism a bit more fused than usual. Theosophy leads to Wicca and the lost past.
i think ufo stuff is a child of that. things like mesmerism is scientific religion, pseudoscience based on more materialistic forces that can be manipulated by the adept but not commands of deities. religion becoming parapsychology, ghosts as more discoverable forces in existence.
ufos are kind of christianity rendered into that form.
orson scott card pointed out something that always stuck with me: any sf book can be rewritten into fantasy with very little effort. the reverse happens as well: Star Trek is closer to The Voyage of Saint Brendan than you'd think. (Though Kirk is closer to Don Winslow of the Navy, in terms of "captains don't work that way.)i think the same goes for religion, we are getting the sf versions of it, lol. not a few serials of the 30s treated Radium like a magical thing.
I started reading this under the assumption that it was a metafictional fakeout story about events that never really happened and then finally googled Richard Shaver after reading the first section and was surprised to realize it was just straight history.
Now I want a handsome coffee-table book made up of the we're-in-on-the-joke collaborative world-building subset of Amazing Stories, interspersed with all of the awesome commissioned covers and illustrations.
Great read, but I was surprised you didn’t explore evolutionary explanations.
Many elements of the “Ur-abduction” — fear of being dragged underground, immobilized, tortured, or sexually violated — align strikingly with ancient survival threats: snake or spider bites, ambush by predators or rival tribes, or being trapped in caves. Some of these fears are deeply hardwired.
You also mention the masochistic aspect, but skip a fascinating question: why do so many women report abduction narratives with sexual or ritual overtones that echo dark fantasies? There's a rich literature on female arousal by power dynamics, and it seems highly relevant here.
And there’s a deeper layer: during massive prehistoric migrations, genetic and isotopic evidence shows that many women died far from where they grew up — likely taken by force. The idea of abduction, captivity, and violation may not just be a cultural meme, but an evolutionarily conserved trauma template.
Maybe these stories aren’t errors — they’re ancient truths in disguise.
On the question of why sleep paralysis hallucinations are often sexual: the eye muscles are the genitals aren’t paralysed during REM sleep. If the genitals are one of the few parts of the body you’re feeling sensation from, it’s not surprising that the hallucinations turn sexual.
Weird to give consideration to "The abduction stories are poorly processed memories of colonoscopy and/or other medical treatments" narrative, and not the one where they're poorly processed memories of rape.
Can't say I have any experience in raping people, but feels like it should be easier to do in some sort of an enclosed space (away from potential witnesses) and against someone in an altered state of consciousness (who is unlikely to put up as much resistance). Sadomasochism link and putting stuff up peoples' asses also work just as well, if not better, as they are in other interpretations. In addition, many if not most cultures make even thinking (let alone talking) about rape, esp. male-on-male rape, shameful for the victim. Guess having to deal with literally unthinkable experience can prompt all sorts of crazy stories.
Great article, thank you very much! But there's always place for some nitpicking, so: you're wrong about the etymology of the word "fairy" (and I seriously wonder what's your source, because it's a well-known, unproblematic one.) "fairy" was borrowed in the 12th century from old French faerie (today's French féérie), itself derived from latin fata "fates", "destinies", hence "the Fates" (fate goddesses). It has nothing to do with the germanic word "fair".
Short correction: the diaphragm is not paralyzed during REM, so not affected by sleep paralysis
I have a simpler theory to offer. Back in our ancestors evolutionary past, it was relatively common to be kidnapped and tortured by strangers. Emotions that drove our ancestors to avoid this fate would have been heavily selected for. So there's a kind of "evil strangers who kidnap and torture people like me" hole in the mind somewhere in subconscious. What do humans do when we feel an emotional impulse like that? We tell stories about it .
We tell stories about strangers who want to kidnap and torture us for the same reason we watch horror movies and ride roller coasters. It satisfies an itch.
The “it’s sleep paralysis” answer doesn’t actually answer the question which was “why do people have these kinds of fantasies”. Ok so they had sleep paralysis, now why do people with sleep paralysis tend to come up with these specific fantasies about it, and not one of a thousand other ways to fantasize about it?
same is for the “space of human fantasies is limited” answer. well, why is it limited in precisely these ways?
both of these are examples of the way materialistic answers “explain-away” simple questions or change the subject instead of answering them.
I don't understand. Sleep paralysis is dark because you're in your bedroom. You feel like you're being tortured because you can't move and you're terrified. You feel like there are malignant figures because ... idk, for some people the figure is sitting on them and this is the brain's post hoc explanation for why they can't breathe, but in any case we know from lots of different reports that this is in fact a common pattern in sleep paralysis.
Yes I guess this is where the hole is "the brains post hoc explanations", why these explanations and where do they come from?
I've had sleep paralysis before, and for me at least the reason it seemed like there were malignant figures present was that I could see them--shadowy figures circling me while I fell endlessly. (If I hadn't already known about sleep paralysis when this happened, I remember thinking, I would have thought I was surrounded by demons and falling into Hell. I also remember thinking that someone could have the exact same sense data as me and think they were being levitated by aliens.)
I've always assumed that dreamlike hallucinations were part and parcel of sleep paralysis, and whether or not that's the case I'm probably not literally unique.
"Many abduction experiences come after hypnosis."
Sources for this claim?
I think the reason why QAnon doesn't fit neatly with your model is that QAnon isn't Ur Abduction, it's a different trope. QAnon is Blood Libel, the thing pagans said of Christians, Christians said of pagans, and just about everyone else said of Jews.
"Those other guys, they're super-duper-evil! They do the most evil stuff imaginable! Like, uh, they sacrifice and eat children!"
BTW this probably also somewhat based in reality of a handful of actual psychopathic pedophiliac sadistic serial killers. We don't know for sure whether Gilles de Rais and Ezrebeth Bathory really did what they were accused of, but it stands to reason that in preindustrial times some serial killer types would be born aristocrats, and you can get away with a lot if you're rich, powerful, and the most sophisticated forensic technology available is "trial by combat".