I saw the thread entitled "This is the 8th" and thought "oh good someone's started a thread about it not being the 7th anymore and we're all still here" - that's not how that thread turns out though!

Anyway, the asteroid didn't do much, the markets continued on the fall they've been merrily engaged in for the last year, a plane fell (a bit) in Australia, a plane was grounded in Iran and then sent off again, and neither Obama or McCain even fell of their stool.

The web bot predicted something different, something epic was going to happen not between 10/7 and Spring but starting on 10/7 definitely. Listening to their lengthy two hour interview a thought kept occurring to me "this is a modern version of haruspicy" except its not animal entrails they are reading - its the entrails of the internet. As they continued to explain that it's nothing so simple as looking for keywords but rather a kind of psychic excrement left over, it underlined my suspicion. Ancient haruspices didn't examine the food the animals ate they examined the effect it had on their entrails.

While religion and science often seem to argue and disagree science is taking on the characteristics of religion - at least in the hands of the student's of popular science and the zealous high priests of the cult. The web-bot phenomenon may be an extension of this, it seems more modern and likely to our world which has laptops in the kitchen instead of chickens but perhaps its the same thing. Spurrina Vestricius was "right" about the Ides of March, web-bot was "right" about 9/11 but anyone who listened to the Rostra or read the NYT, respectively, could have made similar predictions.

Serious science needs to do what serious religion did and urge people not to succumb to such charlatanism and perhaps handing out some "excommunications" of it's own to those who peddle a superstition that is distinct from those of the past only in that it deals with wires and binary instead of veins and blood.

Maybe by drawing attention to that date, it has shifted. Kinda like the butterfly effect or the movie Heroes.

It was quite a day though

I'll tell you how I know the 'time monks' are just liars.

On an old episode of C2C where they gave an interview, they mentioned that on the bots travels, it came across hostile bots at times, and bots from governments.

The cold truth is this is not how the internet works. A bot is just like any program that accesses the net, it connects to port 80, and requests the page you want, same as your browser. Now when this happens, there is no way to know who else is on the site, unless the site publicises those details. One example would be on this site (ATS), there is a list of currently logged in users. However, that data would be insufficient to determine for example that a chinese government bot is on the site (unless it's username was chinese_gov_bot, lol), the only way to determine something in that detail is to know the IP address and do a lookup on it. Only the site owners have that kind of detail, and 99.9% don't put it out there. Add on top of this the fact that those kind of projects would never be run from an actual government network, they would use a front business, or even just a front home for small jobs, so it would not be traceable.

I call shenanigans on their whole scheme, I don't believe they even run the bot at all, I doubt they ever wrote a single line of code for it,

First, WebBot identified Oct. 7th (specifically 7:10UTC) as the centroid of the model space related to a major, cataclysmic emotional heightening --- likely triggered by some historic-level event; the effects of which are expected to last until early Spring.

Second, WebBot is based upon human precognition. A phenomenon that has been demonstrated in a large number of scientific studies. Like our fellow animals, we have a 'sixth sense'. WebBot attempts to tap into this phenomenon.

Finally, measuring this precognitively driven 'heightened state' on a large (in WebBot's case, global) scale is difficult. Certainly, there's no practical way to measure skin conductivity changes, for example, on a significant sample of the world's population 24/7. Instead, WebBot uses shifts in linguistics as sampled from the internet to detect the subconscious manifestations of this 'heightened state'. Pattern recognition modeling against this proxy (linguistic shifts) would identify these precognitions.

There is a human component to all of this. As robust as pattern recognition modeling may be it still requires human interpretation. The model will identify what is important and what is not (statistically) but a human needs to determine what the pattern shifts mean. Linguistic modeling is a new frontier in data analytics and far more complex than traditional numerical modeling.

So no... it's not exactly the same as handling chicken gizzards unless someone can publish data to support their findings. But even the WebBot orginators freely admit that their interpretations can miss.

Is the October 7th prediction a bust? Not yet. People have run amock with the prediction insisting that it was going to happen on the 7th at 07:10UTC. That's not true. It was never presented that way. Oct. 7th is the center of a narrow window ('the center of the scatterplot' as the WebBot creators have said) so we're still, for the time being, under the gun. As we move away from Oct. 7th the probability that something is going to happen drops off quickly.

We'll see if anything comes of this. I, for one, hope they're wrong. But as someone who has made his living for over two decades doing population pattern recognition modeling, I know it's way too early to be popping the champagne.

The webbot is founded on a faulty premise. The internet is not just full of facts, it's full of non-truths as well. The webot does not go and check every individual poster for veracity of what they post. Therefore, from the very beginning the data is corrupted. Can it pick up on trends involving rumors and conspiracy? Maybe, but no one can claim that this is based on facts anymore than it is based on cultures of conspiracy based on books and other media that have not been fact checked either.

webbot

deny ingorance

I really like the comparison between haruspicy and the reading the entrails of the internet.

I think there's something to haruspicy. I'd like to sacrifice a few CEOs and read their entrails. I think it might even be surprisingly accurate as I'm sure their innate greed is going to be reflected in cholesterol, liver disease amongst other things.

Better still we should have a system of sacrifical Sun Kings. When the going gets rough, we sacrifice our politicians and CEOs until it starts going right again.

I was considering posting this very stuff yesterday, but wanted to make sure I understood more about the webbots before I did. Thanks to 'search' I get to participate.

The webbot predictions are, to me, a joke. They search the web for keywords, string them together and make a prediction based on what they have already found.
The internet has a higher percentage of garbage text than credible text. People who buy into and express fear and doom on the net are feeding the machine with doomsday predictions. People who outright lie about events are feeding the bots lies. They predict based on what WE put out there.

With so much misunderstanding, fear, stupidity, and disinformation on the net, its no wonder they predict so ill-fated a future for us. We fear it, post our fears and theories, the bots round up the keywords and boom....self-induced doomsday prediction.

Currently, technology is bound by its programming. While the barrier is shifting so that a program can learn, it is not to the point of self-evolving yet, which is what the webbots would have to do to predict the future.

Its a good effort, but the technology is nowhere near ready to be trusted as a fine source of fortune telling. It may never be.

Originally posted by Supercertari

Serious science needs to do what serious religion did and urge people not to succumb to such charlatanism and perhaps handing out some "excommunications" of it's own to those who peddle a superstition that is distinct from those of the past only in that it deals with wires and binary instead of veins and blood.

No kidding!

Science got no business to urge people to do anything; science is supposed to come up with prognoses that turn out to be correct and replace all those charlatans and computer alchemist.