A few months back, I proposed an idea for a website that would keep oracles/experts honest by tracking their predictions (and the outcomes of these predictions).

The pitch is that, whenever you come across a public figure making an unjustified prediction, lodge it on the Cassandra Complex against that individual.

When the prediction either proves successful or unsuccesful, this outcome can also be recorded (either by yourself or another user).

Over time, a given individual's prediction track record will accumulate and act as an objective measure for their credibility.

The idea received positive feedback, so I have put together a prototype and have called it The Cassandra Complex.

I'm putting out the call to anyone who would be interested in getting involved in this project. Help could include:

• Help with the front-end (this is not my forte at all).

• Populating predictions.

• Simply checking out the website, providing feedback/ideas on design or features.

You can provide feedback through the website itself, or I have set up a Discord server if you would like to get involved.

NB: This is not a for-profit venture. Advertising would absolutely ruin it and (even if it were successful), I could not see it ever being especially profitable. If in time the cost were to become too much for me, I would explore transferring ownership to an trusted organisation such as the Center For Inquiry.

Follow up to my conspiracy post from yesterday, a huge part of my being into conspiracy was believing that the government shadow cabal controlled everything. The saying in our circles was.

If voting mattered the government wouldn't let you do it.

I voted for Trump in 2016 knowing he'd lose bc the cabal would choose Hillary. The fact that Trump won actually was a blow to my mindset and I realized that at least for now, voting still matters in the USA. By 2020 I was completely off the Trump train and conspiracy theory and had become progressive. It's another one of those contradictions I mentioned that the right mistrusts voting and thinks elections are stolen while still insisting on campaigning and voting and even Trump is flip flopping on mail in ballots.

I have been seeing an increasing amount of extremist rhetoric on r/UFO’s by their community members calling for trials and executions for public officials whom they deem “the deep state” and they think are “covering up crimes against humanity” due to alien technology apparently being hidden from the World.

The rhetoric is absolutely unhinged and is creating a new Q Anon type movement.

Therefore, I have collected a multitude of comments that have gone unmoderated calling for violent extremism based entirely on fantasy, going back at least a year, and emailed them to the Reddit admins.

I haven't really bothered with it other than for maintaining communication with people, and I have, over the past couple of days, been scrolling the feed. Now, bear in mind about 10 years ago, I made a conscious decision to change my feed from showing me people's meal photos and constant duckface selfies to instead show me more academia - and so I searched for science, philosophy, history, psychology, nature, yadda yadda, and followed all the pages I found.

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This was a great improvement. I was learning new stuff every day - I was even getting smart enough to spot when the science articles were dubious via my passive education through more science content in my life.

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Fast forward to this month, I have been scrolling my feed for the first time in ages (mainly just scroll Reddit now because it's better at providing me what I specifically want to see), and the Facebook feed is literally chockablock with flat Earth, anti-vax, and chemtrail "I told you so"s. (Has something been proven that I am unaware of?) and hidden alien/more advanced than us ancient human history crap, etc.

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The comments are an incredible echo chamber too, with most skeptical contributions being filtered out by the "Most Relevant" comment filtering feature. Is this just my feed or this happening to others? Like have I engaged too often with this kind of content cookiewise or is facebook becoming over populated with morons while suffering a braindrain? Can I repair my feed or is it dead to me?

For those who do not know Garry Nolan. He is a Stanford Professor of Immunology, who is at the forefront of the UFO community. Basically he claims that the recorded UAP (such as the Tic-Tac UFO from 2004) are aliens, or at the very least non-earthly higher conscious beings. While this may at first glance seem absolutely insane, his claims do have some scientific backing in the sense that we do have military radar recordings of UAP that move in a way that defies science, that are backed up by testimonials, and he has found biomarkers for post-UFO injuries. However, as a proud skeptic of the supernatural, and a person who values evidence-based thinking, I do question the validity of these claims.

From around 2011 I was into jfk, 9/11 truthers, UFOs and bigfoot, I was into pretty much everything except space lasers and lizard people ( which were around at the time but even I had standards).

I am no longer into any of those things, and of course it is no Secret that conspiracy theories are huge in conservativism today. But watching the utterly fascist response police officers to the protests in texas, what shocks me regarding conspiracy theorism is that while I was involved in it there was always a deep-seated mistrust not only of the federal government but also of the police force. You would never have found a conspiracy theorist flouting a back the blue, Punisher logo covered truck.

For some reason the current conservative party version of conspiracy theorism is full of self contradictions. Somehow they are militantly Pro police while also flying yellow don't tread on me Flags. They say "from my cold dead hands" about their guns while constantly worshipping cops, while claiming they want small government while supporting the police and military. Just who do they think is going to enforce gun control if the government they apparently mistrust ennacts it? I know a lot of conspiracy theory is not very grounded in reality, but I don't understand how the party that has embraced conspiracy theory, which inherently mistrusts authority, somehow think of the police as the good guys in the US.

I saw a statistic on this and can't find it.

Basically. ..

• If you are plumber - what you were taught is still pretty valid for a long time, not a lot of changes in the basics
• Physicist - x number of years
• Psychologist - x number of years
• Heart Surgeon - MUCH less number of years because the technology is advancing so quickly

The reason I ask is that I saw a recent paper citing sources from 20 years ago and though - WTActualF? Knowledge is an exponential growth in science and medicine. How can these references be valid.

Spoiler - it was a Psychologist

I remember there was a name for the practice of citing previous papers in academia where the initial position was incorrect and it just keeps get repeated and repeated in later papers.

In my mind it was named after Tin Tin's dog - a terrier, but that was probably just an image I saw and is ingrained in my mind..

- was it called "White Terrier Conundrum" (It wasn't - but something along that line)

I was searching "problem citing previous academic sources dog analogy" but search engines SUCK these days.

Ever since I was a kid, I loved stuff like aliens, ghosts, the unexplained but man, the kind of people who are generally into this stuff are……not skeptical.

Is there any sub Reddit or internet sites that deal with these topics that aren’t batshit crazy and intellectually lazy? It’s hard to find a community of paranormal people that aren’t adding to a made up mythology in real time and getting further and further away from any truth claim to aliens or ghosts or whatever.

Talking about the woman who claims to have been subjected to Project Monarch, assaulted by figures such as Dick Cheney, George Bush and the Clintons, and almost burned alive at the Bohemian Grove

She has somehow stuck by her story since 1995 if I recall correctly. And there's a video from a documentary on YouTube where photos of her mutilated vagina are shown, which she said was done by her MK Ultra handlers for Hillary's enjoyment

I haven't seen anyone analyze her story from a critical position, the only thing I can find online is Qanon accounts sharing it as absolute truth. I'm curious to hear other opinions