August 16, 2024     

What do current, past, and future planetary motions tell us about the upcoming election? Astronomy and astrology are built on the same foundation, although they have little to do with each other today. But let's not throw the "mystical" insights of Kepler, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle out the window because of our modern insistence on observable cause and effect. On Friday, AstroTracker Andrea will open our minds in more ways than one. Expect the Unexpected!

 August 9, 2024    

For thousands of years, people all over the world have wondered about the role that planetary movements have on life on Earth. Although some deny any relationship whatsoever, others from the Greek tradition such as Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Kepler were convinced that "As Above, So Below" had great significance for each individual. Tonight we will delve into the mystery by looking at the broad historical evidence as well as the way individual lives have played out. Prepare yourself to be surprised if not fascinated - as long as you have an open mind.

KNOW THYSELF NOW! with DAVID the MIT Deviant and ANDREA the AstroTracker. TONIGHT, we'll be discussing the cycles of the planets of our solar system and how history, world and personal are influenced by them. The planets and Mother Nature are NOT capricious as David Hand would have us think! Andrea says, Don't fool with Mother Nature! Because, remember what Mother says, "I brought you in; I can take you out! We'll discuss the divine feminine, if we have time!
Doors Open 10 minutes before the hour.
Doors Close 5 minutes after the hour.
AGENDA

• Overview of Current World Events
• Group Discussion
• Laser Focused Individual Hot Seats
• Preview of Next Week's Program

 August 2, 2024   

  Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962) of the UK is widely known for his seminal contributions to statistics and experimental design. What is less known is it he also argued quite seriously that contracting lung cancer can cause you to smoke. He was hired by American Big Tobacco companies to defend themselves against lawsuits, successfully winning the first 200 cases. He even claimed from the grave that the cigarette cancer link was bunk. One scholar tells us that his position was eventually seen as "ridiculous," which people increasingly knew from the 30's onward. Fisher's involvement was reprehensible and has had repercussions across multiple domains that are still being felt today. I will remove the wool from your eyes. 

 July 19, 2024   

 Mr Whipple, a TV staple from a bygone era, was at one time more recognizable than the President. A loveable and self-aware hypocrite, he admonished shoppers while furtively engaging in the very practice he decried. What does his fetish for softness have to do with Evolutionary Theory, Probability, and the work of Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Ronald Fisher, David Hand, Pierre Simon de Laplace, and countless others across diverse fields?  

 July 12, 2024   

Tonight's focus is on a book published by the MIT Press called Post-Truth, from the Essential Knowledge series. Written to help us navigate the treacherous world of obfuscation (intentional and unintentional), confusion about what to believe, and blatant misinformation, we examine how well the book measures up. Upon careful analysis, accompanied by a comedy of errors, it turns out that the book has major shortcomings that undermine its important message. Find out why Post-Truth is better called Post-It Truth.

(A shout-out to Twisted Sister for their help with the title.)  

 July 5, 2024     

Tonight we will dissect the main picture of the Meetup Group and summarize the year-long program of the same title that will be launched in Sept 2024. The three main subject areas shown are Jim Morrision-The Doors; T. S. Eliot; and Albert Einstein. Each shares a very similar worldview, and all provide doorways that align you with the hidden order of the universe, or what I call the "divine dance." If you are seeking Peace of Mind, Enlightenment, Stillness, Cosmic Consciousness, Final Answers, or the goal of meditation or mindfulness, you can find them all here. Find out what the fuss is all about. Your life will change for the better now and forever. Guaranteed.

The title of tonight's presentation is a variant of The Firesign Theatre's Everything You Know is Wrong, a 1974 LP that also contains the line "Your brain is no longer the boss." The picture shows the motto for the Santa Fe Energy Lab: "Classified Top Secret Under the Department of Redundancy Department." The second part is taken from the Firesign Theatre's album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970).

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything.)
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

 July 3, 2024   

 What do Jim Morrison, Iran Air 655, and David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather have in common? Through a quirk of fate, there is a link to July 3. While Americans are getting ready to celebrate Independence Day, Iranians are mourning the accidental shootdown of a commercial airliner (1988). And July 3 this year is the 53rd anniversary of Morrison's death. You'll find out about the "crazy" David Ogilvy connection (1980) next week. 

 June 28, 2024   

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you have undoubtedly heard how Artificial Intelligence, automation, and robots are transforming society at a dizzying pace. It is far too early to understand exactly where all this is headed, but there is no turning back.

Having attended classes on AI at MIT beginning in 1970 and more recently been offered the position as the Director of AI, Analytics, and Data Strategy for the State of Pennsylvania by the 2020 Michael Bloomberg Presidential Campaign, the MIT Deviant will present the results of his multi-year assessment on Artificial Intelligence. Do the promises live up to the hype? Is AI dehumanizing us or making us smarter, or both? Are we threatened by extinction, as some claim? How efficient is the prevailing AI Operating System Model of randomness? Is the massive investment in technology worth the cost?

 June 21, 2024  

Luminaries from Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker) to David Hand (The Improbability Principle) to Brian Greene (Until the End of Time) argue that your being here is due to chance and randomness. "You might not have been born," claims Dawkins, saying that "the thread by which your existence hangs is wincingly tenuous." They have even created fancy mathematical statistics to support their belief system.

You are free to believe whatever you want, of course, but the fact is that you were born at a certain time and place. The idea that your birth was the culmination of a long chain of random accidents dating back generations is entirely subjective.

Tonight we will unravel the complex and convoluted thinking behind the modern world view and see why Einstein called it "the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts."

Free yourself of the counter-factual world of "it could be otherwise" and achieve alignment and grounding in the here and now. There is "something going on" behind the scenes, and we can help you find it.

 June 14, 2024   

Tonight's focus is on how statistical thinking allows you to never be wrong. What a feeling of power and invincibility!

Drawing on the work of Jordan Ellenberg (How Not To Be Wrong), David Salzburg (The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century), and Annie Duke (Thinking In Bets, How To Decide), The MIT Deviant, aka the Wizard of West Cambridge, deconstructs the entire statistical enterprise (dating back to 1654 and earlier). He exposes the incontrovertible fact that the underlying nature of probability and statistics is based on nothing but untestable assumption. The vast majority of scientists and mathematicians are convinced that they have proven statistics to be true (Cf. Salsburg), but they are in for a very rude awakening. Their mathematical formalism will eventually be recognized as a bad joke (Cf. Einstein), although it may take a bit of time for such clear-headedness to take hold.

Find out what is really going on at the foundations of science, math, and AI. Now you can extricate yourself from superstition and wishful thinking (if you have bought into the prevailing world view) and ground yourself in reality. As Bill Belichick says, "it is what it is."

 June 7, 2024:

TONIGHT'S FOCUS IS ON THE ADVERTISING SERIAL IN THE SANTA FE REPORTER SOON TO BE IN BOOK FORM: CLASSIFIED ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHER ORDERLY OBSERVATIONS FROM INSIDE THE MIND OF GOD.

RUNNING CONTINUOUSLY SINCE 11/9/22, THE ANNIHILATOR'S ADS CAN BE FOUND AT THE FOLLOWING SITE, WHICH CONTAINS ALL PAST ISSUES OF THE REPORTER DATING BACK TO 2016.

issuu.com/santafereporter7

Paying homage to Norman Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Claude Shannon, James Joyce. Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, The Annihilator takes you inside his classified advertising campaign on the Back Page of the Santa Fe Reporter that has been running continuously for 80 issues (and counting). Your host explains the logic (occasionally twisted) behind headlines such as:

Get ready for a wild ride through vast regions of time and space, always grounded in the actual of the here and now (No pie-in-the-sky counterfactual Multiverses or Alternative Realities here). Your merriment guaranteed or your money back.

Brought to you by the Albuquerque Center for Chaos Annihilation and the Santa Fe Energy Lab: Classified Top Secret Under the Department of Redundancy Department.

 May 31, 2024:   

Tonight will Center around PLAYTIME WITH THE SHANNONS IN THE 60'S, EXPOSING THE FALLACY OF INFORMATION IN THE 70'S, AND TAKING ON CLAUDE IN THE 20'S.

The MIT Deviant had the good fortune of growing up a mile from the Claude Shannon family residence in Massachusetts. Robert Shannon was one of his close friends at the time. They occasionally met when the elder Shannon, now called "the architect of the information age," was at home. In 1979, the Deviant showed that the assumption underlying Information Theory (cf, Shannon, 1949) has no basis in experiment. Fast forward to the 2020's, an entropy-soaked world of uncertainty and confusion that Shannon cautioned against in 1956. Upon close examination, it turns out probability, based upon the counter-factual "What Might Have Been" and the foundation of AI, is entirely unscientific.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.

 May 24, 2024:  

T. S. Eliot, an American who emigrated to England after graduating from Harvard, is one of the most under-rated figures in English literature, despite his having been awarded a Nobel Prize. Traditional interpretations of his trajectory have him going from despair to faith. The Annihilator will suggest that his journey is quite different and begins in extraordinary knowledge, not doubt or uncertainty. In 2022, the 100th Anniversary of The Waste Land, one reviewer said that Eliot saw all the present chaos and insanity coming in 1922. But Eliot is much more than a keen observer of the human condition. He has a solution that takes us out of our present state.

"And there is only the dance"
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

 May 17, 2024:  

Tonight The Annihilator takes you back to the '70s at MIT and what it was like to receive an education there. Said to be like drinking out of a firehose, the atmosphere can be summarized by "If you don't do numbers, you don't count."

"We don't even bother to ignore you" is what a physicist said to a philosopher at the MIT Faculty Club in 1972. Find out how it all went down.

 May 3, 2024: Tonight we will continue with WHEN MATHEMATICIANS FOOLED THEMSELVES AND THEN MADE FOOLS OF THEMSELVES. Last time, we touched upon the "national disgrace" known as the Marilyn Vos Savant - Let's Make a Deal Affair (1990) and its vast implications for education and how our world has been constructed.

In case you missed it, here is an excerpt from the July 21, 1991 front page of The New York Times.

"Since she gave her answer, Ms. vos Savant estimates she has received 10,000 letters, the great majority disagreeing with her. The most vehement criticism has come from mathematicians and scientists, who have alternated between gloating at her ("You are the goat!") and lamenting the nation's innumeracy.

Her answer -- that the contestant should switch doors -- has been debated in the halls of the Central Intelligence Agency and the barracks of fighter pilots in the Persian Gulf. It has been analyzed by mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and computer programmers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It has been tested in classes from second grade to graduate level at more than 1,000 schools across the country."

[Note: when 2/3 of the math professionals got it wrong and only 1/2 of them later changed their minds despite all the evidence from the nation's classrooms, we've got a big math literacy problem, America. Cf. Mark Twain, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."]

 April 12, 2024:  UNDENIABLY IRRATIONAL: HOW 1920’s PHYSICISTS MISREAD MATH, BECAME PHILOSOPHERS, AND MADE THE WHOLE WORLD ANXIOUSTonight we will begin by watching and discussing an excerpt of an MIT Deviant presentation covering the evolution of modern thinking, especially why humans have become more anxious than ever (see title below). Thinking in terms of probabilities is a main source of our fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Did the world of rational thought go off the rails in 1654? What about Einstein's 1952 claim that quantum theory is a "system of delusions?" What does probability have to do with Artificial Intelligence and AGI? And what does this all of this mean in 2024 for us as individuals and as members of the collective?

Be prepared to take a look at your own life - past, present, and future. Note: Friday Night LIGHT is designed to be immediately practical for everyone. Curiosity and the desire for self-knowledge are the only prerequisites. No theories that are "uncontaminated by evidence" here.

 March 29. 2024: Live from Santa Fe on Zoom. Raw and unscripted, baked and half-baked. FREE FRIDAY NIGHT CHAT with DAVID SHIANG, MIT deviant, and THE BOOKLADY, Aquarian Age astrologer. This week, we’ll discuss eclipses, the bridge collapse--and how expecting the unexpected can make your life more peaceful, happy, and LESS CHAOTIC—not more! And other topics, always!