The power of AI.
Long story short, AI initially pushed back on the ridiculous idea that drinking your own piss was a cure all, then these users figured out that adding words like ‘esoteric’ to their prompts let them direct AI to tell them what they wanted to hear.
Tbh article was too gross for me to finish. That’s all you get from me for a summary.
Asking for esoteric facts ain’t a jailbreak. Just because you don’t know a word doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.
Asking for false facts gets you false facts.
Yeah. Here’s the direct quote
People that don’t want facts telling a glorified auto correct to write them a fiction and they accept it as fact. Who’da thunk?
There’s a word for false facts: falsehoods.
People should not even say false facts it makes them seem like facts can be opinion oriented.
Falsehoods call them out as what they are: lies.
Gladaed was in on the conspiracy, trying to hide the ancient and mystic powers of urine from the public. But this time, we wouldn’t be fooled. A loosely-connected group of online activists, we’d been working together, putting together the pieces, uncovering the real truth, and sharing what we’d found. We had a list of people who were in on the conspiracy. Gladaed was in on it, along with Wikipedia, the government, the mainstream “medical” industry, AI companies, and countless others. But as we worked out who had been secretly working against us, we forged forward. Our time was coming. The Second Era of Liquid Gold was nearly upon us.
And then… the Kidney Stone Nation attacked!
I had to look up esoteric; doesn’t it just mean something that’s not widely known? Like very specialized knowledge?
It basically just means “hidden knowledge”. It can be used pretty neutrally, one might refer to a largely unknown book about a particularly niche topic as “esoteric”. Largely though, it carries a sort of mystical connotation, referring to knowledge that requires a great deal of metaphysical understanding to comprehend. Qabalah, alchemy, hermeticism, generally any topic concerned with uncovering the nature of reality through study of the qualities and patterns of the natural world.
Yoga is a broad spiritual practice, with the goal of using physical mastery of the body (including asana, the poses most people associate with “yoga”) and mental mastery of the mind (meditation) to uncover hidden knowledge of the universe.
Naturally, a lot of vast writing on yoga can be described as “esoteric”, including the practice of amaroli.
Thank you!
Wasn’t the top commenter suggesting “esoteric” means “false”?
Conflating “esoteric” with “woo-woo nonsense” is pretty common.
Hah, that’s news to me! I had always interpreted it as meaning something like “specialized” from context
Thank you, I’m tired of seeing “esoteric” get thrown around as a synonym for “niche” or “specialized,” because we already have words for those things, and it waters down the meaning of the word “esoteric.”
I’m also tired of seeing it get co-opted by conspiracy nutjobs who have never heard of kabbalah and who think yoga is for hippies and single moms.
“Esoteric” is basically the less-scary way of saying “occult,” a word that has also been co-opted, this one by the hollywood horror genre and basically reduced to exclusively meaning “lemegeton and liber xv,” when those things are actually considered highly fringe within the occultism community.
So now we can’t say esoteric without people thinking we drink piss. Can’t say occult without people thinking we drink… other… bodily fluids. Most of the other words that might fit have been reduced to drinking kool-aid; i.e. “mystical,” “metaphysical,” etc.
I think the true conspiracy is co-opting all these terms to make it impossible to talk about spiritual growth, because if people actually teach each other how to comprehend the intricacies of our own minds, and how to take our own fates into our own hands, then the people in power lose the monopoly they currently wield over our destinies.
Strictly speaking, “occult” and “esoteric” accurately refer to a certain kind of niche or specialized knowledge which the layperson lacks the underlying knowledge to even understand conceptually. What you and I use the terms for is a specialized case.
As a student of the spiritually esoteric, I don’t really care much about what fluids people think I drink. The goat-fucking and lizard-people jokes are so overplayed that we’ve reclaimed them. People are going to believe what they want, and the ones who are ready to learn won’t get distracted by the noise.
I think the word’s original usage was specifically in reference to secretive spiritual teachings, and using it as a synonym for “niche” is a more modern phenomenon. Go back 100 years or more and I’m fairly certain most if not all uses of the term will be in reference to some combination of spirituality, philosophy, and/or proto-psychology.
Maybe the occult community has reclaimed satanic panic jokes in places where most people aren’t religious anyway, but for anyone who lives in a conservative area then that stigma is definitely still a real risk that any practicing occultist needs to be aware of. As dangerous or more as being openly gay in some areas, for mostly the same reasons.
I don’t really think terminology is really your problem. You’re going to face stigma for anything outside the local dominant church. In some areas a Catholic is no better than a satanist.
Yeah but that’s what I mean, the terms “esoteric” and “occult” basically originated because it wasn’t safe to openly study/practice certain teachings. Even owning the wrong book could have meant a death sentence in some times and places. Hence, practices were “occluded” and passed on in secrecy from adepts to initiates.
My point was that even though some places have evolved culturally beyond that, not all places are quite there yet. So an offbeat joke about sacrificing goats isn’t exactly going to be an effective coping mechanism everywhere…
Sometimes, more often I think it was more because higher teachings would be misunderstood without the foundation of “initiation”. Persecution was certainly an aspect at various points in history, but I don’t think that’s the main reason the subjects were “occult”.
Oh I meant less as a coping mechanism and more just not worrying about the assumptions of the profane. But then esoteric studies aren’t really the sort of thing you discuss with random people. I only go into my study and practice with like-minded individuals. I can’t really think of any situations where someone who would have negative preconceptions about the esoteric would know about my studies, unless I wanted them to.
Yeah, growing up catholic and later becoming pagan I’m absolutely certain a lot of protestants can’t tell the difference. I was called a devil worshipper more than people would expect. Fortunately the area I grew up in was pretty Catholic, but I still have an instinctive caution whenever an area feels too protestant
Or secrets, if you prefer to think about it sneakier