Apologies that I am not as active a blogger as I could be, since I usually have so much to say, whether it is a response to something I saw or someone said, and the fact that I’m constantly researching and piecing things together, especially with the powerhouse of artificial intelligence as a competent sidekick.
Even if it is a short blog, I could be posting more and sharing some of my thoughts. I’ve had more free time on my hands; more than I expected, considering I’m working for a living. Indeed, it is work to live, because it isn’t a job I would normally do, let alone remain in for the long term. It is outside my area of expertise and interest; thus, one could say I fall into the underemployed category, but worse of all, into the malemployed category, which is working a job that is substantially unrelated to my qualifications, training, or expertise. The AI fear-mongering of replacing white-collar jobs only amplifies such anxieties for job-seekers in a tough labor market in the United States.
Other than that, I occasionally would touch grass instead of remaining indoors and rotting to occupy that space of my free time and take advantage of the nice summer weather. The summer season is short here in the Big Apple.
I found a hilarious image on x.com that folks were sharing the other day called “The Schizo Hierarchy” and had ChatGPT reverse image search and trace its origins. I don’t think it reverse image search, but it did search using keywords and was able to identify one user. I wanted to give credit where credit is due. On the bottom of the post, it says the image was made using Grok Imagine. So it was AI-generated, which doesn’t in any way invalidate its usefulness, humor, and genius.
Whoever the person who made the chart is quite acute and has a good sense of humor. The accuracy is quite uncanny, provided we start from the premise that everyone is on the schizo spectrum. Granted, the specificity of the Teirs can overlap and render the chart invalid for accuracy. But it is circling around a general truth, hence its potency.
I’ve noticed many years back, especially during the COVID era, that some conspiracy theorists would be slapped with the label of ‘schizo’, the short version of the medical condition of schizophrenia.
Then some can see patterns everywhere, which can also be induced by drugs. But it does not necessarily mean or follow that each pattern is valid or meaningful. Few will, however, strike gold every once in a while, like the Mathmatician John Nash, who was schizophrenic and depicted in the film A Beautiful Mind.
Some conspiracy theorists connect dots that aren’t actually there and/or relevant. To be clear, I’m not against listening to conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories. I think they hold tremendous value since they often look at the right places and have good leads. Where they err is often in making wild inferences and leaping to huge conclusions without ample evidence. Sometimes they have a level of conviction and certainty that is akin to delusion and cognitive dissonance, as if something will certainly happen, like a doomsday scenario or apocalyptic thinking common in cults, even if evidence and reality go against their beliefs.
So, being the person that I am, when I come across a really inspiring chart or meme, I would have ChatGPT create new ones or alternative versions while keeping the same structure. I’ll share the ones that I like most that ChatGPT generated because it was sometimes hit-or-miss.
The funny thing about the schizo hierarchy is that the other day I was doing some research on financial and economic topics, like the current situation that’s prevalent in the news about the US and Japanese bond market, yen carry trade, and so forth. I might do an entire post on that topic too, since there is a lot to say there. One of the resources that I use is YouTube, but instead of YouTube, I use Filmot, which I find extremely useful in some cases because it is a decent search engine for YouTube videos for finding specific keywords. Rather than directly searching the YouTube website and its algorithms, I can find specifically where someone has said x. The drawback is that Filmot relies on videos that are transcribed, and of course, not every single YouTube video has been transcribed since its 2005 inception.
The video that was intriguing was one by a person named Webster Tarpley. Without knowing who he was or his background, my gut instinct was that, okay, this guy sounds like a conspiracy theorist. He is knowledgeable and has many good leads, but he makes strong claims that aren’t necessarily true. In my mind, he was a dollar doomer because he said that the collapse of the dollar was imminent. The video I clicked on was uploaded in May 2010, but in the video, it specifically said that the event was recorded in March of 2007. Meaning that this was right before the Great Financial Meltdown, before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other major banks that almost took down the entire global financial system. My instinct was indeed correct, because when you Google Tarpley, he is labeled a conspiracy theorist from the 9/11 truth movement.
Again, and I want to emphasize, labels to me aren’t the end-all, be-all, and don’t deter me from listening to them. I make my own conclusions. It is a shame that folks can be labeled conspiracy theorists as a derogatory term for questioning things, and that could leave the reputation of someone who views them with an asterisk(*). For example, if I were a popularly known figure, an intellectual that people listen to for information on certain topics that I’m an expert on, and was then slapped with the label of conspiracy theorist or even a schizophrenic, most people would then look at me funny or think of me in a certain way just because of it. To a degree, that is a shame and a tragedy. On the one hand, I can understand that label, as in, watch out, this person may not be telling the truth. On the other hand, there is a danger of being mislabeled, and thus your reputation is forever tarnished even if you were a truth-teller.
Surprisingly, though, with hindsight 20/20 and a powerful AI companion, many of the things Tarpley said in that 2007 video and other subsequent videos on finance and economics were spot on and prescient. He obviously kept up with financial news and geopolitics and was well-informed on these topics for a long time, which is why he had a book published in 1999 on how to prepare for an economic catalyst. But he was also catastrophically wrong with other predictions and claims too. There’s the catch-22 with conspiracy-minded folks.
More comments I wanted to add about the schizo hierarchy are that spiraling can occur to those who fall into the AI delusion trap where they are constantly validated. We know this phenomenon to be unfortunately true. It is like a negative feedback loop of a self-echo chamber. It is like a self-induced hypnosis. Or, as I newly coined (I think it is original), self-induced intellectual narcissism. The cure is epistemic humility from philosophy.
The AI delusion isn’t so different from the 1960s-70s, when some folks spiraled out of control when consuming hallucinogenic drugs. Which, ironically, is not that different when one dives into the mystical side of various religious traditions. The ‘warning label’ could be: “spiral at your own risk, since the other side is supposedly worth it.” A philosopher once said that life is a pattern and a sort of patterning. This is true from one perspective, or when generalizing.
Here are more alternatives to the schizo hierarchy.
The Christian Hierarchy:
I like the Christian Hierarchy ChatGPT made, despite not giving it any direction or telling it what to add. It made it entirely up on its own, and every other image it made was inspired by the first schizo chart. In the Christian Hierarchy, once you get to Tier 2, 1, and 0, the population dramatically falls. Meaning saints and mystics are a rarity. Most people who call themselves Christians would likely be in Tier 4, 5, and 6.
More images:
The Enlightenment Hierarchy:
The Autism Hierarchy:
The Hindu Hierarchy:
The Buddhist Hierarchy:
The Atheist Hierarchy:
Source – ChatGPT:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a9190c6-6064-83ea-b524-3600398efee5
Social Scholarly 