Thursday, April 18, 2024

Semantically Related…Democracy??

Start your morning off with a Google search of something like “semantically related words” and you’ll find something like this page as the top hit:

https://www.semrush.com/kb/593-semantically-related-keywords#:~:text=Semantics%20is%20a%20branch%20of,keyword%20research

We’ll get to the business marketing in a minute. Going back to our first few words, how many people would follow up start your morning with COFFEE?  Starting your morning with a stimulant that’s dangerous in large amounts but has a sort of democratically elected popularity that it’s not going away soon - it’s damn near ubiquitous.  It would be ubiquitous if it weren’t for the tea drinkers and their powerful lobbyists and hit squads.

MORNING and COFFEE are semantically related.  Either can be used in completely different contexts without being put together.  Morning walk.  Morning glory.  Morning dew on the grass.  Cup of coffee.  Coffee flavored ice cream.

Search engines utilize semantics to help provide hits based on what the algorithm thinks you’re looking for.  And you may need to refine your search if the top hits don’t suit your need.  A place that’s in the business of washing cars doesn’t get use out of the top hits being products you buy at Wal-Mart for a car owner to wash his car in his driveway.  CAR WASH AT HOME and CAR WASH NEAR ME clues the algorithm in to what you’re looking for.  The additional context means a lot.

The bullshit of gematria leads you to think that you can type in 113 into a search engine and get some kind of meaningful result with just the number and no additional context.  This is why there is a benefit to YouTube putting context boxes on scientifically proven things like chemtrail videos.  You stumbled on someone putting out bad information.  Your search (or the algorithm trying to give you more of what you just watched) hooked you up with bad info.

But that doesn’t stop the misinformation and disinformation ecosystem from creating new bad content on a daily basis.  The algorithms for searches or cross pollination from trying to give you more of what it thinks you want goes by the VOLUME of searches.  And the bad information has a big advantage.  Honest searches rely on finding good information that’s already out there.  Bad information relies on constantly searching for tricks to abuse the system.  Bot networks give undue importance to volume.  Things like gematria give undue influence to semantically related words.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X66MGRN364c

You too can learn how to make a completely bogus conspiracy theory clickbait video with relatively little effort.

Looking ahead to the near future I wonder what it’s going to be like with advanced AI trained on bad information.  If actual people engaged in a form of semantic democracy I’d have little choice but to live with it.  The will of the masses, now an entire planet instead of just my small tribe by the stream, believes gematria is super cool.  OK, if I don’t want to be off the grid on my own I’ll consider sucking up and faking it.

But for now, there’s enough good information to not be too worried yet.  A problem the future holds is the information superhighway semantically tying in the subjects that don’t really belong together.  Instead of GEMATRIA without further context returning, “A confirmation bias based system used by internet grifters and agenda pushers for engagement” it gives in this order:

1). Neutral info about the basics

2). Bad info and grifter calculators

3). The part about the scammy stuff

Based on the volume of activity pumped into the internet over the last decade the first time consumer is more likely to believe that the elites are murdering random people to rig sports games than finding the SportsGematria channel with documentation of the racist and hateful content that provides the context they missed in their search.  And that was planned and purposeful a long time ago.  And I’m not ready for the planet to tell me I have to live with that because I’m out voted without some fight.

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