
New-Age Bullshit Generator (2014) - lawrenceyan
http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/
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yesenadam
Hey, looks awesome! Only.."REIONIZE ELECTRONS" really doesn't sound New Agey
at all. I don't think a new age person has ever said "electron"..I read a lot
of New Age stuff a long time ago, and my mother was a full-blown New Ager.
David Spangler, it seemed to me, had the most full-blown New Age rhetoric
going on; I think he created that millennial-vibe writing.
Aquarian..manifestation..cosmic consciousness etc. Can't find his stuff online
now, I've got some of his early pamphlets floating around somewhere I think.
Never read them, but they're just classic. :-) I can't imitate the jargon now,
it's been too long. (25 years or so)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spangler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spangler)

Based solely on stuff from that Spangler page, mostly his book titles, how
about "REIMAGINE THE WORLD", "MANIFEST INCARNATION", "CO-CREATE MIRACLE OF
REBIRTH", "RECRAFT SACRED HOME" or something. You can't go wrong :-) But yeah,
very cool, I never read much Chopra.. <<"Quantum" means a reflowering of the
psychic>> as I read on your Generator, I think, is awesome.

(None of the other New Agey-type stuff I can think of features quite such
classic New Age ranting as Spangler, e.g.

writers: Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Jean Houston

channelled: Sanaya Roman, Elixir/Eileen Caddy, Emmanuel, Lazaris

pre-New Age: Annie Besant, Rudolf Steiner, Alice Bailey, Swedenborg, Jung)

~~~
dorkwood
I don't know, "ionisation" seems to be a pretty big topic of conversation
among new-age types.

I once knew someone who liked to visit the ocean because of all the "positive
ions" there. What are positive ions, anyway? Are they good for you? I don't
even know myself.

~~~
yesenadam
Yes, I didn't say they don't say "ions". :-) They have those bedside-table
machines that make them. Probably not many New Agers know ions have anything
to do with electrons. It's a strange combination of reverence for science (any
new age book written by a PhD sells better) and contempt for and ignorance of
it. I read some description of New Thought's students (19th C movement very
like New Age) as people who had never been known before to be students of
anything. Suddenly here's a Royal Road to the secrets of the universe, and
those scientists are all too close-minded to listen...

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Animats
These have been around for decades. They're still not very good.

GPT2, though. That really is good. And it's so simple. They just trained a big
neural net to predict the next word given some text. It's like autocomplete. 8
million web pages in the training set. You give it a sentence to get it
started, and you get some good paragraphs.[1]

Somebody should train that on Stack Overflow and use it for tech support.

[1] [https://blog.openai.com/better-language-
models/](https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/)

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tugberkk
This is pretty fun. The site also links to
[http://www.wisdomofchopra.com](http://www.wisdomofchopra.com) which is also
gold.

