Cinema matters. It used to be that if the average person read it in a newspaper or magazine, she assumed it to be true. Now, that is reversed and the "presumed true" quality goes to things you see with your own eyes.
In TeeVee and this sort of documentary (which was made for TeeVee in Austria by Russians) the visuals are salted with talking heads, always presented as experts-who-know. Well, we get into all kinds of trouble.
The problem is that it is easier to make a good story than to make a story that overlaps with the world we live in. It is doubly, triply hard when we think of that world that we live in as the real world, where we act and reap consequences.
Russian science is a bizarre mix of suppressed Russian Orthodox magical realism, a similar thread of Kaballistic superstition and a ten-years-too-late new age spiritualism. Russians are strong in math and engineering but generally dunces in basic science. This likely goes back a century where the society as a whole was told to not believe their lyin' senses and instead buy into the great narrative.
I know some of these folks. I know the type thoroughly, as I am involved in what they call "systems science." The way they define it has to do with global principles that we cannot see in normal science because we always are looking at a mere part of a system. This provides a means for them to apply whatever systems narrative they want that feels good.
But it is scooby-doo science. Actually, I readily argue that science is broken and we need a more human logic if we want to stick with the scientific method. But these guys are simply goofs. They tamper with data. They aver double-blind protocols because their experiments don't work when performed that way. Their results are profoundly irreproducible.
They huddle in conferences and societies that they invent and convince themselves that everyone else doesn't get it. But these societies collect narratives that are contradictory. You can even see it here. 90 minutes is a lot of time to fill if you purport to give facts. So they have many experts testifying. Listen closely and you will see that no two tell the same story; each has developed the narrative in a direction that makes sense to them alone. It is only because the thing keeps moving smoothly that the illusion is given that this all makes sense.
If you choose not to see it, the basic idea here is that water is unique on the planet. It is the only thing that does or has a whole list of things they mention. (Most of these are wrong, but never mind.) From there, it has this "mother" quality, where it is associated with all life. From there, we have it governing all life. The most outrageous concept in this is the one around which the master narrative is loosely collected: water has not just a memory of everything on the planet, but that same structure provides the template for each future event and being. Also the memory is universal, something like the trees on Pandora; the water knows everything going on anywhere instantaneously.
The core of this comes from some party loyalists who found their way into the corrupt Soviet university system. They took the well known fact that water has interesting and varied structure. (There is scant mystery about what and why; it likely is the most studied thing in history.) And on this fact they built a theory.
If you are likely to waste your time watching truly useless TeeVee, you might want to switch to this just as a case study in narrative gone awry.
This has many cinematic tropes, mostly defined by the ad business. It has monks, rabbis and priests. It has "researchers." There are animations that make it all clear. A lot of money was spent building this.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
In TeeVee and this sort of documentary (which was made for TeeVee in Austria by Russians) the visuals are salted with talking heads, always presented as experts-who-know. Well, we get into all kinds of trouble.
The problem is that it is easier to make a good story than to make a story that overlaps with the world we live in. It is doubly, triply hard when we think of that world that we live in as the real world, where we act and reap consequences.
Russian science is a bizarre mix of suppressed Russian Orthodox magical realism, a similar thread of Kaballistic superstition and a ten-years-too-late new age spiritualism. Russians are strong in math and engineering but generally dunces in basic science. This likely goes back a century where the society as a whole was told to not believe their lyin' senses and instead buy into the great narrative.
I know some of these folks. I know the type thoroughly, as I am involved in what they call "systems science." The way they define it has to do with global principles that we cannot see in normal science because we always are looking at a mere part of a system. This provides a means for them to apply whatever systems narrative they want that feels good.
But it is scooby-doo science. Actually, I readily argue that science is broken and we need a more human logic if we want to stick with the scientific method. But these guys are simply goofs. They tamper with data. They aver double-blind protocols because their experiments don't work when performed that way. Their results are profoundly irreproducible.
They huddle in conferences and societies that they invent and convince themselves that everyone else doesn't get it. But these societies collect narratives that are contradictory. You can even see it here. 90 minutes is a lot of time to fill if you purport to give facts. So they have many experts testifying. Listen closely and you will see that no two tell the same story; each has developed the narrative in a direction that makes sense to them alone. It is only because the thing keeps moving smoothly that the illusion is given that this all makes sense.
If you choose not to see it, the basic idea here is that water is unique on the planet. It is the only thing that does or has a whole list of things they mention. (Most of these are wrong, but never mind.) From there, it has this "mother" quality, where it is associated with all life. From there, we have it governing all life. The most outrageous concept in this is the one around which the master narrative is loosely collected: water has not just a memory of everything on the planet, but that same structure provides the template for each future event and being. Also the memory is universal, something like the trees on Pandora; the water knows everything going on anywhere instantaneously.
The core of this comes from some party loyalists who found their way into the corrupt Soviet university system. They took the well known fact that water has interesting and varied structure. (There is scant mystery about what and why; it likely is the most studied thing in history.) And on this fact they built a theory.
If you are likely to waste your time watching truly useless TeeVee, you might want to switch to this just as a case study in narrative gone awry.
This has many cinematic tropes, mostly defined by the ad business. It has monks, rabbis and priests. It has "researchers." There are animations that make it all clear. A lot of money was spent building this.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
