You played the Mavis card really well- I was convinced you really believed there was such a person and, while I had literally no memory of her myself, I did try some various searches to find her, but only after answering your 3 questions last night. After about 5 minutes, I began to realize what your purpose might have been since I couldn't find any results at all, not even as a Mandela Effect, which strongly suggested you had fabricated the story itself.
This morning, I went through some lists of things people have called Mandela Effect stories- there were really none that tweaked my own memories. I had either never heard of the things mentioned, or I remembered them correctly.
I then thought for a while about memories I have had that were proveably wrong on further evidence, and I could only come up with a single instance. The Pet Shop Boys first US hit was "West End Girls", a song I was utterly convinced was a hit in the Spring of 1985 in the US- the song was intimately connected in my memory with my freshman year in college and a very specific event, and yet about 25 years later, I was scanning the Billboard Hot 100 for the Spring of 1985, and the song wasn't listed anywhere I looked in the months around that time. I eventually found it in the Spring of 1986, and the song hit #1 several weeks after that. This disturbed me a great deal- my memory for music and timelines involving them is almost at an idiot savant level- if it was a hit in the US between 1978 and 1987-88, I can tell you when it was on the charts to the year and season/s, and having this memory literally seared into my brain about hearing this song in the Spring of 1985 connected to an event I literally recorded in a diary freaked me out- I thought I had either slipped into a parallel universe, or I had a brain tumor screwing up my perceptions. However, I eventually figured out why my memory was screwed up- the song was released in an earlier version in 1984, and it was the recording I was remembering, not the one that became the hit a year later. I cancelled the CAT scan.
Ah, I thought it was very strange that after completing the poll I could find no mention of Mavis on any internet or video platforms. I thought damn, she must have done something really wrong, or be really important, to be so thoroughly scrubbed from the internet. My naive trust of the poll's honesty remained pure. 😄
That may explain why current AI (fancy curve fitting to duplicate human expression) efforts have been funded so strongly lately. They don't have much commercial use, but they have LOTS of uses in creating a reality that is entirely false.
By the way: I didn't know about the Mandela effect when I read your post yesterday.
I thought it referred to a unusual situation that happened during Mandela's funeral. I don't know if it is true, but the story goes that there was a comedian pretending to translate into sign language the solemn panegyric that a guy was reading as part of the solemnities of a state funeral. He just walked there and said he was hired by the tv to translate in sign language, and everyone thought it was real. All the gestures were fake. I think I heard they put that man in prison, which is ironic:
Comedian: Why are you here?
Prisoner: Murder and theft, what about you?
Comedian: I heckled the funeral of a former political prisoner.
Prisoner: Okay, that's scary dude. How could you do that!!! Don't even come close to me!!!
I have a reflection about the flat-earth mind-pet (more like a chia pet, but more dry.)
"...the Mandela effect as a concocted amalgam of banal tricks of the mind, and engineered alterations of history."
Flat-earthers would have you believe that astronomy is an engineered alteration of the mind.
Ellipsoidal-earthers (normies) in general have never pondered some important questions:
1 If I know something is that a valid argument or a fallacy?
2 If I don't know why the earth is round, does my ignorance constitute an argument to prove flat-earth?
3 If evidence for something has been destroyed, does that change the events of the past? In other words, is retrocausality possible?
4 If, as the Eastern religions and philosophies teach, History is circular, periodical, and if we cannot find the curve of History, does that imply logically that History is linear?
5 Is there a better model than grativy to explain common physical phenomena, such that this model has simpler mathematics and explains at least as much everything that gravity explains?
There is a problem of "emotional codependency." People have mini-panic attacks when they hear or read taboo questions. People's pulse frequency rises, the nostrils dilate, the muscles in the lower back become tense, the hands become hot an ready for action, and a lot of mental chatter is suddenly shut off. That is a mini-panic attack.
Causing that mini-panic attack may also be linked to some trauma, and trigger a PTSD-like response of greater intensity than what I have described: in some cases, people may throw up or have diarrhea, just from a question.
I have the theory that one of the things flat-earth arguments seek is precisely to cause mini-panic attacks by exposing people to the esoteric and the forbidden. Like questioning the foundations of modern science.
I am testing that when the occasion emerges. I have found that the trollish flat-earthers run away scared from my questions: they are exploiting that internet trope just for fun.
Flat-earthers who are more in control of their emotions tend to produce a better conversation. I have asked some times if they realize what happens to people when they are confronted with koans or pseudo-koans, and if they are trying to mentally abuse people.
That blunt question is a conversation-ender.
In general, people are surprised to realize that they know less about logic than they think. People with higher education degrees tend to be angry about that, but overcome the frustration. But people with basic education get stuck in their emotions.
Logic is a huge topic. Probably bigger than epistemology. No one needs to have a huge knowledge of highly specialized topics that expand in all directions and touch all other topics. But this separation of emotion and reason is as important to our modern world as the theory Gravity. Some historians argue that Descartes created the modern world by turning consciousness inward. The middle ages were the product of having too many people thinking mostly about the external world, and the Ancient World (until the 5th century of the Christian Era) both the inward look and the outward look are in equilibrium. This could explain why no one really understands Buddhism, Christianity, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or why the philosophy of Aristotle was the underdog, then it was recovered through the influence of Islamic thinkers, and then it was lost again when idealism ravaged European thought and brought about the political violence and chaos of the last 250 years.
Is the Mandela effect just another term for exploiting the vices of the mind of people?
An interesting point on the Berenstein vs Berenstain argument - I found about as many newspaper articles citing Berenstein as I did Berenstain back in the 80s. There just seemed to be legimate confusion about the proper title from the beginning which led to one or the other getting cemented into people's heads. The funny thing is the whole argument probably boils down to ONE lazy ass journalist who didn't have a Berenstain Bears book handy and just guessed at the spelling.
That was one of the best STNG episodes, I had that in my head all year last year, or the past two years (losing track of time with all this madness that has been inflicted upon us). When you watch the episode you assume Picard is simply so strong-willed he withstands the torture, and he does at first. But the kicker is the very end of the episode, after he's rescued, he tells Riker (I think it was Riker he confides in), that right before he was rescued, he was about to say There are five lights, that he actually saw five lights. So eventually he would have succumbed to it, his own perception had been changed.
You definitely got me on mavis! The backup singer I was thinking of was definitely not mavis. But there was a movie/documentary made which I was reminded of when you explained the situation, it was 20 feet from fame or something like that. So I just assigned my memory of seeing that (might be that Mavis). I suppose although I had no bells ringing because of her name, It was purely the descriptive nature you gave of a situation with similarities of an actual person’s set of circumstances that actually happened.
Back in the 70s after the Watergate story broke, a poll was conducted asking people to list these five "public figures" in the order of their trustworthiness. One of the names was fictitious, and didn't even resemble the name of anyone who was a public figure at the time, but was ranked higher than Nixon by the poll takers.
Josh Slocum recently wrote about such an issue like this. He called the clinic where he had an appointment asking if there was a mask requirement. The woman he talked to said yes, and agreed with him that is not scientific, that it is theater. Except she still goes to work masked.
Narwhals are all the rage now. Stuffed animal creatures for kids. Characters in Minecraft. Probably in tv animation. Etc. Yet no one had ever ever heard of a narwhal until less than 8 years ago.
A dolphin unicorn? You're telling me that in the 1980s and 1990s when girls were in love with unicorns that don't exist and dolphins that do, that dolphin unicorns existed and WE NEVER KNEW IT??? They made a freaking Star Trek movie about saving the whales. Seems they'd have saved unicorn whales if they'd existed right???
I believe the narwhal proves either parallel universes are real and we've skipped between world lines or a time Traveller has gone back and retconned us--or we are all subject to mass hoaxes often.
Because no way we went from a thing that never existed and no one had ever heard of existing to everyone knows it exists as if it has always existed "naturally."
Matthew, this was a fascinating experiment I have a personal experience with what appears to be a wrong time memory, but for the life of me I can't make any sense of what appears to be "reality" in this case.
This is how this memory goes: I've been a "Star Trek" fan since I discovered it in re-runs in the late 1970s. I enjoyed it so much that many times, into the '80s, I wished they would bring the series back. The occasional ST movies were enjoyable, but not nearly enough. There being a paucity of science fiction series on TV at the time to catch my interest, I would regularly scan the TV listings for promising-sounding titles.
One day I found a series I hadn't heard of, "War of the Worlds." I checked it out and it was absorbing, each episode carrying forward the intense struggle between humans and the alien invaders who made themselves look human but, in the privacy of their own lairs, would revert to looking like the lizard people that they actually were.
I enjoyed this series for a year or two in the mid-1980s, as it filled my hunger for good sci-fi. Then Paramount came back with "Star Trek: The New Generation" and of course I was hooked.
So far, so good. But a couple of years ago I remembered having enjoyed that "War of the Worlds" series and wondering what ever had become of it. But -- and here's the problem -- every place I looked claimed that this series came out AFTER the new Star Trek, even giving the impression that it was an attempt to coattail on the renewed popular interest in televised science fiction.
To my mind, these sources could not be correct because I distinctly remember wishing Star Trek would come back sometime and THEN discovering this series as a serviceable substitute *in lieu of* ST. And yet, the sources I've checked all contradict my clear memory of the sequence of events. Very strange.
You played the Mavis card really well- I was convinced you really believed there was such a person and, while I had literally no memory of her myself, I did try some various searches to find her, but only after answering your 3 questions last night. After about 5 minutes, I began to realize what your purpose might have been since I couldn't find any results at all, not even as a Mandela Effect, which strongly suggested you had fabricated the story itself.
This morning, I went through some lists of things people have called Mandela Effect stories- there were really none that tweaked my own memories. I had either never heard of the things mentioned, or I remembered them correctly.
I then thought for a while about memories I have had that were proveably wrong on further evidence, and I could only come up with a single instance. The Pet Shop Boys first US hit was "West End Girls", a song I was utterly convinced was a hit in the Spring of 1985 in the US- the song was intimately connected in my memory with my freshman year in college and a very specific event, and yet about 25 years later, I was scanning the Billboard Hot 100 for the Spring of 1985, and the song wasn't listed anywhere I looked in the months around that time. I eventually found it in the Spring of 1986, and the song hit #1 several weeks after that. This disturbed me a great deal- my memory for music and timelines involving them is almost at an idiot savant level- if it was a hit in the US between 1978 and 1987-88, I can tell you when it was on the charts to the year and season/s, and having this memory literally seared into my brain about hearing this song in the Spring of 1985 connected to an event I literally recorded in a diary freaked me out- I thought I had either slipped into a parallel universe, or I had a brain tumor screwing up my perceptions. However, I eventually figured out why my memory was screwed up- the song was released in an earlier version in 1984, and it was the recording I was remembering, not the one that became the hit a year later. I cancelled the CAT scan.
Ah, I thought it was very strange that after completing the poll I could find no mention of Mavis on any internet or video platforms. I thought damn, she must have done something really wrong, or be really important, to be so thoroughly scrubbed from the internet. My naive trust of the poll's honesty remained pure. 😄
First person to register an identity as Mavis Winehardt* wins.
That may explain why current AI (fancy curve fitting to duplicate human expression) efforts have been funded so strongly lately. They don't have much commercial use, but they have LOTS of uses in creating a reality that is entirely false.
By the way: I didn't know about the Mandela effect when I read your post yesterday.
I thought it referred to a unusual situation that happened during Mandela's funeral. I don't know if it is true, but the story goes that there was a comedian pretending to translate into sign language the solemn panegyric that a guy was reading as part of the solemnities of a state funeral. He just walked there and said he was hired by the tv to translate in sign language, and everyone thought it was real. All the gestures were fake. I think I heard they put that man in prison, which is ironic:
Comedian: Why are you here?
Prisoner: Murder and theft, what about you?
Comedian: I heckled the funeral of a former political prisoner.
Prisoner: Okay, that's scary dude. How could you do that!!! Don't even come close to me!!!
I have a reflection about the flat-earth mind-pet (more like a chia pet, but more dry.)
"...the Mandela effect as a concocted amalgam of banal tricks of the mind, and engineered alterations of history."
Flat-earthers would have you believe that astronomy is an engineered alteration of the mind.
Ellipsoidal-earthers (normies) in general have never pondered some important questions:
1 If I know something is that a valid argument or a fallacy?
2 If I don't know why the earth is round, does my ignorance constitute an argument to prove flat-earth?
3 If evidence for something has been destroyed, does that change the events of the past? In other words, is retrocausality possible?
4 If, as the Eastern religions and philosophies teach, History is circular, periodical, and if we cannot find the curve of History, does that imply logically that History is linear?
5 Is there a better model than grativy to explain common physical phenomena, such that this model has simpler mathematics and explains at least as much everything that gravity explains?
There is a problem of "emotional codependency." People have mini-panic attacks when they hear or read taboo questions. People's pulse frequency rises, the nostrils dilate, the muscles in the lower back become tense, the hands become hot an ready for action, and a lot of mental chatter is suddenly shut off. That is a mini-panic attack.
Causing that mini-panic attack may also be linked to some trauma, and trigger a PTSD-like response of greater intensity than what I have described: in some cases, people may throw up or have diarrhea, just from a question.
I have the theory that one of the things flat-earth arguments seek is precisely to cause mini-panic attacks by exposing people to the esoteric and the forbidden. Like questioning the foundations of modern science.
I am testing that when the occasion emerges. I have found that the trollish flat-earthers run away scared from my questions: they are exploiting that internet trope just for fun.
Flat-earthers who are more in control of their emotions tend to produce a better conversation. I have asked some times if they realize what happens to people when they are confronted with koans or pseudo-koans, and if they are trying to mentally abuse people.
That blunt question is a conversation-ender.
In general, people are surprised to realize that they know less about logic than they think. People with higher education degrees tend to be angry about that, but overcome the frustration. But people with basic education get stuck in their emotions.
Logic is a huge topic. Probably bigger than epistemology. No one needs to have a huge knowledge of highly specialized topics that expand in all directions and touch all other topics. But this separation of emotion and reason is as important to our modern world as the theory Gravity. Some historians argue that Descartes created the modern world by turning consciousness inward. The middle ages were the product of having too many people thinking mostly about the external world, and the Ancient World (until the 5th century of the Christian Era) both the inward look and the outward look are in equilibrium. This could explain why no one really understands Buddhism, Christianity, Platonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or why the philosophy of Aristotle was the underdog, then it was recovered through the influence of Islamic thinkers, and then it was lost again when idealism ravaged European thought and brought about the political violence and chaos of the last 250 years.
Is the Mandela effect just another term for exploiting the vices of the mind of people?
An interesting point on the Berenstein vs Berenstain argument - I found about as many newspaper articles citing Berenstein as I did Berenstain back in the 80s. There just seemed to be legimate confusion about the proper title from the beginning which led to one or the other getting cemented into people's heads. The funny thing is the whole argument probably boils down to ONE lazy ass journalist who didn't have a Berenstain Bears book handy and just guessed at the spelling.
No Mavis Wineheart?
I coulda sworn she used to date my old pal Elmo Gooch.
That was one of the best STNG episodes, I had that in my head all year last year, or the past two years (losing track of time with all this madness that has been inflicted upon us). When you watch the episode you assume Picard is simply so strong-willed he withstands the torture, and he does at first. But the kicker is the very end of the episode, after he's rescued, he tells Riker (I think it was Riker he confides in), that right before he was rescued, he was about to say There are five lights, that he actually saw five lights. So eventually he would have succumbed to it, his own perception had been changed.
You definitely got me on mavis! The backup singer I was thinking of was definitely not mavis. But there was a movie/documentary made which I was reminded of when you explained the situation, it was 20 feet from fame or something like that. So I just assigned my memory of seeing that (might be that Mavis). I suppose although I had no bells ringing because of her name, It was purely the descriptive nature you gave of a situation with similarities of an actual person’s set of circumstances that actually happened.
Back in the 70s after the Watergate story broke, a poll was conducted asking people to list these five "public figures" in the order of their trustworthiness. One of the names was fictitious, and didn't even resemble the name of anyone who was a public figure at the time, but was ranked higher than Nixon by the poll takers.
Josh Slocum recently wrote about such an issue like this. He called the clinic where he had an appointment asking if there was a mask requirement. The woman he talked to said yes, and agreed with him that is not scientific, that it is theater. Except she still goes to work masked.
https://disaffectedpod.substack.com/p/what-medicos-really-think-about-masks
This is interesting, about the false memory concept being exploited to cover pedophiles / criminals ~ https://tlavagabond.substack.com/p/the-false-memory-syndrome-foundation
(Either the concept being exploited, or made up altogether.)
You should have gone asked about narwhals.
Narwhals are all the rage now. Stuffed animal creatures for kids. Characters in Minecraft. Probably in tv animation. Etc. Yet no one had ever ever heard of a narwhal until less than 8 years ago.
A dolphin unicorn? You're telling me that in the 1980s and 1990s when girls were in love with unicorns that don't exist and dolphins that do, that dolphin unicorns existed and WE NEVER KNEW IT??? They made a freaking Star Trek movie about saving the whales. Seems they'd have saved unicorn whales if they'd existed right???
I believe the narwhal proves either parallel universes are real and we've skipped between world lines or a time Traveller has gone back and retconned us--or we are all subject to mass hoaxes often.
Because no way we went from a thing that never existed and no one had ever heard of existing to everyone knows it exists as if it has always existed "naturally."
Matthew, this was a fascinating experiment I have a personal experience with what appears to be a wrong time memory, but for the life of me I can't make any sense of what appears to be "reality" in this case.
This is how this memory goes: I've been a "Star Trek" fan since I discovered it in re-runs in the late 1970s. I enjoyed it so much that many times, into the '80s, I wished they would bring the series back. The occasional ST movies were enjoyable, but not nearly enough. There being a paucity of science fiction series on TV at the time to catch my interest, I would regularly scan the TV listings for promising-sounding titles.
One day I found a series I hadn't heard of, "War of the Worlds." I checked it out and it was absorbing, each episode carrying forward the intense struggle between humans and the alien invaders who made themselves look human but, in the privacy of their own lairs, would revert to looking like the lizard people that they actually were.
I enjoyed this series for a year or two in the mid-1980s, as it filled my hunger for good sci-fi. Then Paramount came back with "Star Trek: The New Generation" and of course I was hooked.
So far, so good. But a couple of years ago I remembered having enjoyed that "War of the Worlds" series and wondering what ever had become of it. But -- and here's the problem -- every place I looked claimed that this series came out AFTER the new Star Trek, even giving the impression that it was an attempt to coattail on the renewed popular interest in televised science fiction.
To my mind, these sources could not be correct because I distinctly remember wishing Star Trek would come back sometime and THEN discovering this series as a serviceable substitute *in lieu of* ST. And yet, the sources I've checked all contradict my clear memory of the sequence of events. Very strange.
GANGS! Love it!