Baldeee said:
That's not statistical telepathy, that's simply statistics of what people think based on collected data.
I actually would have expected "statistical telepathy" to be a slightly superstitious term for an extraordinarily obvious manifestation of a particular talent by which one can look at statistical tables and recognize trends much more easily than others. Statistically speaking, it's going to happen every now and then; whether one of those people finds their way into a statistical professional field or just becomes a baseball fanatic is its own question, but if some people can "see" the actual math describing the world around them just looking at things it doesn't seem so strange that one could look at the collated data set and know what the plots will say.
And, yeah, the first time one sees it, perhaps it would look a bit like magic; in a more romantic age, we might even have called it telepathy.
That, at least, would provide a framework for interesting discussion. To wit, how would it work? What are the odds that the person with the talent to recognize trends in a data set prepared for this or that particular script language will actually be working with that particular script language?
As to the context we actually have? Well, there are a couple potentially fascinating aspects, or so says my obscure sense of focus. There is a general question, another general question, and a particular question that occurs in the overlap. General question one, as such, pertains to the sort of feelgood thoughtproduct presented as philosophy, psychology, enlightenment, or otherwise, and a seemingly prevalent subset in which the goal seems to involve inventing glossaries of obscure terms describing mundane ideas.
General question two is even more obscure, having to do with the idea that "nothing ever begins"; Clive Barker argues that mythology is perpetually derivative, except "each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making"; though I would posit there are ways in which we seem to be in a period of
unanchored and
unattached redefinition. One of my favorite examples is to recall when the word "meme" was supposed to have some profound definition that would redefine how we saw human behavior and all they were doing was rediscovering applied semiotics, and that description is probably a bit generous. My daughter only knows memes as dumb jokes primarily transmitted via the internet, a particular subdivision among viral sensation phenomena. It seems worth observing the downgrade. You might recall such notions as
New Age pop psychology among various alternative and inchoate wellness philosophies; the funny thing was watching people try to redefine South American esoterica when they didn't have a clue what they were on about―it was even more embarrassing than the Gardenerian Revival of the early nineties, though at least I have the comfort of not having attended the Harmonic Convergence, and, in truth, I have greater affection for Gardenerian Craft than, say, Lutheranism.
Oh, right, I digress.
At any rate, there have of late been some of these psychomoral-philosophical reformulations that seem, like many recent generational reformulations―I wonder if it's statistically telepathically trending?―utterly detached from what precedes and continues to feed them.
It's not just trying to
invent feelgood; it's also
branding feelgood with exclusive lexicon, which probably reasonably attends the particular derivative question.
Baseball says no telepathy is required to call it a can of corn.
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Notes:
Barker, Clive. Weaveworld. New York: Poseidon, 1987.