9 ms·

Set Adrift

135 points by Thevet 4y ago

themanmaran 4y ago
Quite depressing, but well worth the read. Is this problem getting worse? I know cults are nothing new. Plenty horror stories from the 70s/80s. Perhaps because it's happening right now it seems more prevalent. But it's incredible to me that people with access to information (even phd candidates like Shukree Abdul-Rashed) can fall so far into these cults. This story in particular is incredible, because when the group shows up in Hawaii, they find yet another likeminded individual willing to accompany them on a (relatively) dangerous trip. While the captain seemed to have slightly more self preservation instincts than the crew, it is amazing he was willing to jeopardize his life for this cause (zigzagging to avoid covid testing, charting courses that would leave them without supplies).
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Previously if you had an extreme opinion, you had to moderate it because others around in the real world most likely don't share the same opinion. This causes extreme opinions to stay at the fringes of society. Now with the internet, you can find any community willing to share your extreme opinion, geographic closeness is no longer needed. Echo chambers then form and you feel like you're part of a community, and so no one moderates your opinions. If anything, opinions get even more extreme.
  - TrainedMonkey 4y ago
    To add to that, internet also ensures all the extreme things are amplified because attention economy. So if previously you would read a local newspaper about worst cult in your city, now you read NYT about worst cult in the country.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >But it's incredible to me that people with access to information (even phd candidates like Shukree Abdul-Rashed) can fall so far into these cults. Mental illness doesn't discriminate. Intelligence before the fact has nothing to do with it (and has often been shown to make someone even more prone to it). People get sick, and are subsequently preyed upon and victimized because of it. Works the same every time, from Jonestown to QAnon.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  Throughout history weird cults have occasionally formed. The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era, the Muenster rebellion, Quakers, Shakers, dozens of cults in the Great Awakening, the Oneida, the pre-scientology UFO cults of the mid-20th century, Scientology, Jonestown, The Family, Unification Church, Rajneeshpuram, Children of God, Heaven's Gate... the juggalos? Who knows. It happens all the time and each time the cult grows very quickly until it becomes an organism large enough that people hear of and reject it before they can be exposed to the infectious hook. Every cult has a few things to say where any reasonable person will say "huh, you have a point." The speed of that growth phase is critical. By the mid-70s the American public knew to not listen to the guys in orange robes at the airport and the Hare Krishna plateaued. We are still in the growth phase on the new internet meta-cult. The population as a whole is not ready to say "oh, I know there are kooks on the internet who will lie to me and I know how to recognize them." A memetic infection is inevitably going to be worse with an internet to spread it. It's not clear when this one might fizzle because the available set of hosts is billions instead of thousands for the first time ever. So yes. It's worse. It will probably be the most infectious cult spread since the origins of Christianity and Islam, and unlike those two it has nothing positive to offer. Without the internet it would just be a few hundred people in a compound, but now? We won't know how far it can get until it's over. And a few decades later we'll have another, and another. It's enough to make you wonder if we've found the Great Filter.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - violiner 4y ago
    > The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era I'd hesitate to categorically lump all of the ancient mystery religions in with the rest of your list. Some of them were pretty strange, even for the ancient world, but e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism were very mainstream for hundreds of years.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Mithraism, in particular, is arguably very tightly linked to Christianity in early Christian history. By one theory, before Constantine's reforms that merged the two religions, Christianity was popular among the plebians while Mithraism was very popular among the patrician class, and the modern form of Christianity is arguably more similar to the old religion of the patricians.
- michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  While cults have always been around I feel like the "infection rate" of them has become higher. Instead of a small group of individuals that separate from society (as in the article) it feels like large portions of the population have all taken on somewhat cultlike behaviors of beliefs.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Getting worse with a zoomed out view of history? Probably not. One of the deadliest conflicts in history was started essentially by a (likely schizophrenic) individual who believed he was the brother of Jesus over 150 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion). Getting worse than say, 2010 or something? Perhaps.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Worth remembering that there are about 330 million people in the United States. The very fact that this is newsworthy is evidence that it's not that common on a percentage-of-population basis.
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  It's nothing new. Cults, populist demagogues, and other forms of magical thinking spread more during bad times. Unreason, unreasonableness, and substituted realities take hold and waste the lives and time of many people if they can't see any alternate, tangible, positive conclusion from reason, reasonableness, and the status quo.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Reminds me of this comment I made the other day [0]: --- There are stories of adult children deprogramming their parents / in-laws by blocking these sites via their routers [0], and within a few weeks they're able to see their parents' views and demeanor visibly change for the positive [1]. The post from BestOfRedditorUpdates [1] for example shows the progression, basically the same as the 5 stages of grief, or withdrawal from a drug habit. First they get angry, then they try to find ways around it, then they accept that they can't and start doing something else. The truth is most people don't really go to these sites out of choice, they do it out of habit. If you can alter the habit, you can stop them from consuming such content. It's no different than stopping any other habit, like (if you're a smoker or alcoholic) not going to places where people smoke for example. You can also replace the habit with something else; like smokers chewing nicotine gum instead of smoking, or like those trying to lose weight going for a walk instead of sitting at home and cracking open a cold one after a long day of work, this person's aunt replaced it with BTS [2]. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/vb3ddu/rhermancainaward_daily_vent_thread_june_13_2022/ic7khh6/?context=99 https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/vb3ddu/rhe... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/yz7ya7/victim_of_qanon_asks_how_to_block_alt_right_news/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/yz7y... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/sis22t/my_qaunt_was_saved_by_bts_i_shit_you_not/ https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/sis22t/my_... --- I wonder if in this case these techniques might have worked as well. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725517
- throwawaydad12 4y ago
  This is perhaps scientifically interesting, but doing this to someone without their knowledge and consent is wildly unethical.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    My response to a similar reply on the linked comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725758
Tangurena2 4y ago
archive link: https://archive.ph/7qIGz https://archive.ph/7qIGz
tptacek 4y ago
Something similar, though not as grim, happened to my childhood best friend; physics PhD, assistant professorship at a regional university, a wife and a house. Something early in the pandemic fucked him up, and he went off into a long series of paranoid delusions about nanotech, a Zionist conspiracy, vaccines, and 5G. He started sleeping in his basement "grounded" to electrical outlets. He went off on weird racist rants on Twitter. He gave a plandemic-style lecture on a faculty Zoom call, and lost his job. His wife left. He's a short-order cook now. Like the people in this story, the signs were there before the pandemic. A decade before, I watched him give a eulogy at his father's funeral, which dipped weirdly into a conspiracy in the Chicago Police Department. He was at the time otherwise completely rational-seeming; it seems to have taken the pandemic (and pandemic conspiracy culture) to completely derail him.
- RustLove 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 4y ago
    No, it doesn't.
- javajosh 4y ago
  This is a sad story. Do you think it would make a difference if you could sit him down with someone who would patiently listen to his claims, provide (counter) evidence, and point out when a claim is too vague or falsifiable to even check? I can imagine this a kind of AI patiently working through big chunks of a huge decision tree with the user, allowing itself to be lead through it as slowly or quickly as needed, a many times as needed. You would either get agreement, or be able to isolate with great precision those assertions of fact and/or assumptions that seem to undermine the user's reason.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't know. In a related vein, I assign a great deal of blame for this situation to two groups of people: first, his employer, which was confronted with crystal-clear signs of severe mental illness (his termination was the culmination of a series of deep-dive student newspaper articles that revealed all sorts of disturbing stuff) and chose to cut him loose, and second --- and much more significantly --- to para-"normie" activists like RFK Jr who know full well they're capitalizing on serious pathology to build their followings. I'd like to believe that I could help bring my friend out of it, but I'm in no way qualified, and then there's all the guns.
renewiltord 4y ago
What would be absolutely wild would be to hook up an LLM to a Messiah site. You could then tarpit cult-candidates. This guy googled "Does a small group of people control the world?". Dude, you could have them talking to an LLM for like years probably. Voice is the last hard part for this for AI, but once we have that, we could overlay on video!
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  What's "LLM" in this context?
  - pfortuny 4y ago
    I guess it means Logic Learning Machine.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Sorry. Large Language Model. Like the GPTs and OPT.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Thanks.
bytehowl 4y ago
One thing I don't understand is why people like these embrace religion instead of rejecting it - aren't most tied to centuries-old, powerful and somewhat shady/mysterious organizations?
- erulabs 4y ago
  You're not wrong, but I doubt very many people who think the Illuminati exist are Catholics. One can be a Christian without being a Catholic - and it only adds to the self-reenforcing narrative: If Christianity was taken over by a shadowy evil cadre, why not any other large organization? To me the big mystery isn't why some people believe untestable self-reenforcing ideas, but why any of us don't. Being skeptical and careful with your conclusions is the harder option, by far.
- naet 4y ago
  People suffering from mental issues like this usually aren't thinking fully rationally. A good friend of mine had a sudden schizophrenic break once. Before it happened he was very much a math/science/computer guy, smart and logical and very anti religious. But after something happened that changed his brain chemistry he wasn't able to keep up the same level of logical thinking; he failed out of classes he was previously doing well in, lost his job, lost his girlfriend, and started behaving strangely. He had begun hearing voices and having strange thoughts and couldn't always form coherent sentences or ideas. Since I was a close friend he eventually confided in me some of his personal thoughts, like that he thought the world was ending and he was hearing from angels and demons. He would do irrational things like play the same songs over and over on his speakers for me, as though he was trying to use them to communicate some hidden meaning that I couldn't grasp from listening to them (they were very random songs without any obvious intrinsic meaning). On one occasion he suddenly became violent and lashed out towards some people he had previously gotten along with, and when I looked into his eyes in that moment it was like there was zero recognition despite our years of friendship. It was very sad and a bit frightening to see him go through such a drastic and sudden change in personality and ability.
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  The only bona fide centuries-old (actually, millennia-old) religious institution I can think of is the Catholic Church. All the others are largely religious traditions, more or less, that are centuries-old, but not continuously operating institutions. There is nothing here that suggests these guys had any love for the Church (certainly, their conspiratorial mode would not sit well with the rational spirit of Catholicism). Just because someone says "Jesus!" or "Satan!" doesn't make him a Catholic, or even a Christian or a Muslim, for that matter. For all we know, these guys thought Pope Francis is a reptilian who drinks the blood of altar boys who've recovered from COVID, or at least the usual array of Protestant conspiracy theories about the papacy. (I might add that calling the Catholic Church shady/mysterious is giving too much credit to whatever malicious elements exist within it, similar to how conspiracy theories in general assume a scale and degree of coordination, competence, and secrecy that is practically impossible. As the joke goes, if a business were run this way, it would not last two weeks, let alone two millennia.)
fosefx 4y ago
Can not recommend the podcast series "Rabbit Hole" (2020) from the NYT enough. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prologue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...
- admn2 4y ago
  I was surprised this was only 6 episodes. Felt like it could have been an on-going series.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
neonate 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/27/us/set-adrift.html http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytime...
naet 4y ago
Bit of a sidenote but I'm an NYT subscriber partly because I really enjoy their web design. It may be a controversial opinion on HN (where all websites lead to discussions of "no JS"/ HTML only / no custom fonts, etc) but some of the NYT articles to me have very nice atmospheric effects weaved into them. They don't always land or work perfectly, some are overly heavy and don't perform well, but I always enjoy the effort and attempts at pushing some boundaries and making a more interactive or immersive experiences. I get the printed paper which I can always fall back on when I prefer a no-nonsense reading experience, but I like how they use available web technology to progressively enhance certain pieces. This article has a couple full screen parallax style videos that fade in and out as you scroll to enter and exit the story. They aren't strictly necessary for reading the story, so some might consider them extra fluff, but to my eyes the effect helps set the scene of a wide open and lonely ocean right off the bat which adds to the emotions I feel get reading it. The performance seems better on the official site than the archive.org link btw.
- qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
- paulcole 4y ago
  Whether on a peanut butter sandwich or in an NYT article, isn’t it the extra fluff that makes life worth living? I just can’t understand the attitude of so many people here on HN who seem to wish everything was so plain.
  - naet 4y ago
    I definitely like some things with more plain and simple styling when it's a good choice. For example I far prefer HN to Reddit style wise. I love checking baseball scores on plaintextsports over ESPN (partly because baseball serializes so well into text). But I also think there are plenty of positive styling opportunities for modern websites that can be great when used tastefully, like this NYT article. Nothing here was taking away from the reading experience, only adding to it IMO.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
hsuduebc2 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/27/us/set-adrift.html http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytime...

135 points by Thevet 4y ago

Quite depressing, but well worth the read. Is this problem getting worse? I know cults are nothing new. Plenty horror stories from the 70s/80s. Perhaps because it's happening right now it seems more prevalent. But it's incredible to me that people with access to information (even phd candidates like Shukree Abdul-Rashed) can fall so far into these cults. This story in particular is incredible, because when the group shows up in Hawaii, they find yet another likeminded individual willing to accompany them on a (relatively) dangerous trip. While the captain seemed to have slightly more self preservation instincts than the crew, it is amazing he was willing to jeopardize his life for this cause (zigzagging to avoid covid testing, charting courses that would leave them without supplies).

satvikpendem 4y ago
Previously if you had an extreme opinion, you had to moderate it because others around in the real world most likely don't share the same opinion. This causes extreme opinions to stay at the fringes of society. Now with the internet, you can find any community willing to share your extreme opinion, geographic closeness is no longer needed. Echo chambers then form and you feel like you're part of a community, and so no one moderates your opinions. If anything, opinions get even more extreme.
- TrainedMonkey 4y ago
  To add to that, internet also ensures all the extreme things are amplified because attention economy. So if previously you would read a local newspaper about worst cult in your city, now you read NYT about worst cult in the country.
ramesh31 4y ago
>But it's incredible to me that people with access to information (even phd candidates like Shukree Abdul-Rashed) can fall so far into these cults. Mental illness doesn't discriminate. Intelligence before the fact has nothing to do with it (and has often been shown to make someone even more prone to it). People get sick, and are subsequently preyed upon and victimized because of it. Works the same every time, from Jonestown to QAnon.
StrictDabbler 4y ago
Throughout history weird cults have occasionally formed. The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era, the Muenster rebellion, Quakers, Shakers, dozens of cults in the Great Awakening, the Oneida, the pre-scientology UFO cults of the mid-20th century, Scientology, Jonestown, The Family, Unification Church, Rajneeshpuram, Children of God, Heaven's Gate... the juggalos? Who knows. It happens all the time and each time the cult grows very quickly until it becomes an organism large enough that people hear of and reject it before they can be exposed to the infectious hook. Every cult has a few things to say where any reasonable person will say "huh, you have a point." The speed of that growth phase is critical. By the mid-70s the American public knew to not listen to the guys in orange robes at the airport and the Hare Krishna plateaued. We are still in the growth phase on the new internet meta-cult. The population as a whole is not ready to say "oh, I know there are kooks on the internet who will lie to me and I know how to recognize them." A memetic infection is inevitably going to be worse with an internet to spread it. It's not clear when this one might fizzle because the available set of hosts is billions instead of thousands for the first time ever. So yes. It's worse. It will probably be the most infectious cult spread since the origins of Christianity and Islam, and unlike those two it has nothing positive to offer. Without the internet it would just be a few hundred people in a compound, but now? We won't know how far it can get until it's over. And a few decades later we'll have another, and another. It's enough to make you wonder if we've found the Great Filter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- violiner 4y ago
  > The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era I'd hesitate to categorically lump all of the ancient mystery religions in with the rest of your list. Some of them were pretty strange, even for the ancient world, but e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism were very mainstream for hundreds of years.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Mithraism, in particular, is arguably very tightly linked to Christianity in early Christian history. By one theory, before Constantine's reforms that merged the two religions, Christianity was popular among the plebians while Mithraism was very popular among the patrician class, and the modern form of Christianity is arguably more similar to the old religion of the patricians.
michaelbuckbee 4y ago
While cults have always been around I feel like the "infection rate" of them has become higher. Instead of a small group of individuals that separate from society (as in the article) it feels like large portions of the population have all taken on somewhat cultlike behaviors of beliefs.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
Getting worse with a zoomed out view of history? Probably not. One of the deadliest conflicts in history was started essentially by a (likely schizophrenic) individual who believed he was the brother of Jesus over 150 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion). Getting worse than say, 2010 or something? Perhaps.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
Worth remembering that there are about 330 million people in the United States. The very fact that this is newsworthy is evidence that it's not that common on a percentage-of-population basis.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
It's nothing new. Cults, populist demagogues, and other forms of magical thinking spread more during bad times. Unreason, unreasonableness, and substituted realities take hold and waste the lives and time of many people if they can't see any alternate, tangible, positive conclusion from reason, reasonableness, and the status quo.

satvikpendem 4y ago

Reminds me of this comment I made the other day [0]: --- There are stories of adult children deprogramming their parents / in-laws by blocking these sites via their routers [0], and within a few weeks they're able to see their parents' views and demeanor visibly change for the positive [1]. The post from BestOfRedditorUpdates [1] for example shows the progression, basically the same as the 5 stages of grief, or withdrawal from a drug habit. First they get angry, then they try to find ways around it, then they accept that they can't and start doing something else. The truth is most people don't really go to these sites out of choice, they do it out of habit. If you can alter the habit, you can stop them from consuming such content. It's no different than stopping any other habit, like (if you're a smoker or alcoholic) not going to places where people smoke for example. You can also replace the habit with something else; like smokers chewing nicotine gum instead of smoking, or like those trying to lose weight going for a walk instead of sitting at home and cracking open a cold one after a long day of work, this person's aunt replaced it with BTS [2]. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/vb3ddu/rhermancainaward_daily_vent_thread_june_13_2022/ic7khh6/?context=99 https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/vb3ddu/rhe... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/yz7ya7/victim_of_qanon_asks_how_to_block_alt_right_news/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/yz7y... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/sis22t/my_qaunt_was_saved_by_bts_i_shit_you_not/ https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/sis22t/my_... --- I wonder if in this case these techniques might have worked as well. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725517

throwawaydad12 4y ago
This is perhaps scientifically interesting, but doing this to someone without their knowledge and consent is wildly unethical.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  My response to a similar reply on the linked comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725758

Tangurena2 4y ago

archive link: https://archive.ph/7qIGz https://archive.ph/7qIGz

tptacek 4y ago

Something similar, though not as grim, happened to my childhood best friend; physics PhD, assistant professorship at a regional university, a wife and a house. Something early in the pandemic fucked him up, and he went off into a long series of paranoid delusions about nanotech, a Zionist conspiracy, vaccines, and 5G. He started sleeping in his basement "grounded" to electrical outlets. He went off on weird racist rants on Twitter. He gave a plandemic-style lecture on a faculty Zoom call, and lost his job. His wife left. He's a short-order cook now. Like the people in this story, the signs were there before the pandemic. A decade before, I watched him give a eulogy at his father's funeral, which dipped weirdly into a conspiracy in the Chicago Police Department. He was at the time otherwise completely rational-seeming; it seems to have taken the pandemic (and pandemic conspiracy culture) to completely derail him.

RustLove 4y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 4y ago
  No, it doesn't.
javajosh 4y ago
This is a sad story. Do you think it would make a difference if you could sit him down with someone who would patiently listen to his claims, provide (counter) evidence, and point out when a claim is too vague or falsifiable to even check? I can imagine this a kind of AI patiently working through big chunks of a huge decision tree with the user, allowing itself to be lead through it as slowly or quickly as needed, a many times as needed. You would either get agreement, or be able to isolate with great precision those assertions of fact and/or assumptions that seem to undermine the user's reason.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't know. In a related vein, I assign a great deal of blame for this situation to two groups of people: first, his employer, which was confronted with crystal-clear signs of severe mental illness (his termination was the culmination of a series of deep-dive student newspaper articles that revealed all sorts of disturbing stuff) and chose to cut him loose, and second --- and much more significantly --- to para-"normie" activists like RFK Jr who know full well they're capitalizing on serious pathology to build their followings. I'd like to believe that I could help bring my friend out of it, but I'm in no way qualified, and then there's all the guns.

renewiltord 4y ago

What would be absolutely wild would be to hook up an LLM to a Messiah site. You could then tarpit cult-candidates. This guy googled "Does a small group of people control the world?". Dude, you could have them talking to an LLM for like years probably. Voice is the last hard part for this for AI, but once we have that, we could overlay on video!

dredmorbius 4y ago
What's "LLM" in this context?
- pfortuny 4y ago
  I guess it means Logic Learning Machine.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Sorry. Large Language Model. Like the GPTs and OPT.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Thanks.

bytehowl 4y ago

One thing I don't understand is why people like these embrace religion instead of rejecting it - aren't most tied to centuries-old, powerful and somewhat shady/mysterious organizations?

erulabs 4y ago
You're not wrong, but I doubt very many people who think the Illuminati exist are Catholics. One can be a Christian without being a Catholic - and it only adds to the self-reenforcing narrative: If Christianity was taken over by a shadowy evil cadre, why not any other large organization? To me the big mystery isn't why some people believe untestable self-reenforcing ideas, but why any of us don't. Being skeptical and careful with your conclusions is the harder option, by far.
naet 4y ago
People suffering from mental issues like this usually aren't thinking fully rationally. A good friend of mine had a sudden schizophrenic break once. Before it happened he was very much a math/science/computer guy, smart and logical and very anti religious. But after something happened that changed his brain chemistry he wasn't able to keep up the same level of logical thinking; he failed out of classes he was previously doing well in, lost his job, lost his girlfriend, and started behaving strangely. He had begun hearing voices and having strange thoughts and couldn't always form coherent sentences or ideas. Since I was a close friend he eventually confided in me some of his personal thoughts, like that he thought the world was ending and he was hearing from angels and demons. He would do irrational things like play the same songs over and over on his speakers for me, as though he was trying to use them to communicate some hidden meaning that I couldn't grasp from listening to them (they were very random songs without any obvious intrinsic meaning). On one occasion he suddenly became violent and lashed out towards some people he had previously gotten along with, and when I looked into his eyes in that moment it was like there was zero recognition despite our years of friendship. It was very sad and a bit frightening to see him go through such a drastic and sudden change in personality and ability.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
The only bona fide centuries-old (actually, millennia-old) religious institution I can think of is the Catholic Church. All the others are largely religious traditions, more or less, that are centuries-old, but not continuously operating institutions. There is nothing here that suggests these guys had any love for the Church (certainly, their conspiratorial mode would not sit well with the rational spirit of Catholicism). Just because someone says "Jesus!" or "Satan!" doesn't make him a Catholic, or even a Christian or a Muslim, for that matter. For all we know, these guys thought Pope Francis is a reptilian who drinks the blood of altar boys who've recovered from COVID, or at least the usual array of Protestant conspiracy theories about the papacy. (I might add that calling the Catholic Church shady/mysterious is giving too much credit to whatever malicious elements exist within it, similar to how conspiracy theories in general assume a scale and degree of coordination, competence, and secrecy that is practically impossible. As the joke goes, if a business were run this way, it would not last two weeks, let alone two millennia.)

fosefx 4y ago

Can not recommend the podcast series "Rabbit Hole" (2020) from the NYT enough. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prologue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...

admn2 4y ago
I was surprised this was only 6 episodes. Felt like it could have been an on-going series.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

neonate 4y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/27/us/set-adrift.html http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytime...

naet 4y ago

Bit of a sidenote but I'm an NYT subscriber partly because I really enjoy their web design. It may be a controversial opinion on HN (where all websites lead to discussions of "no JS"/ HTML only / no custom fonts, etc) but some of the NYT articles to me have very nice atmospheric effects weaved into them. They don't always land or work perfectly, some are overly heavy and don't perform well, but I always enjoy the effort and attempts at pushing some boundaries and making a more interactive or immersive experiences. I get the printed paper which I can always fall back on when I prefer a no-nonsense reading experience, but I like how they use available web technology to progressively enhance certain pieces. This article has a couple full screen parallax style videos that fade in and out as you scroll to enter and exit the story. They aren't strictly necessary for reading the story, so some might consider them extra fluff, but to my eyes the effect helps set the scene of a wide open and lonely ocean right off the bat which adds to the emotions I feel get reading it. The performance seems better on the official site than the archive.org link btw.

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
paulcole 4y ago
Whether on a peanut butter sandwich or in an NYT article, isn’t it the extra fluff that makes life worth living? I just can’t understand the attitude of so many people here on HN who seem to wish everything was so plain.
- naet 4y ago
  I definitely like some things with more plain and simple styling when it's a good choice. For example I far prefer HN to Reddit style wise. I love checking baseball scores on plaintextsports over ESPN (partly because baseball serializes so well into text). But I also think there are plenty of positive styling opportunities for modern websites that can be great when used tastefully, like this NYT article. Nothing here was taking away from the reading experience, only adding to it IMO.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

hsuduebc2 4y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/27/us/set-adrift.html http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytime...