As sometimes happen, I was following a chain of links on Substack to a place where I was reminded that two people using reason and logic to navigate the Scamdemic years can end up in entirely different places. These places are so different, they might as well be entirely separate universes.
Here’s what happened: I was looking at Gabe’s post on what he’s been looking at on Substack lately. There was a link to a stack I’d never seen before: The Starfire Codes. That sounded intriguing.
The Starfire Codes turned out to be an eclectic mix of subjects I had almost no clue about, but fascinating nonetheless. One article titled How to Start Building New Models talked about everything from artificial intelligence to double blind studies. Again stuff I know little about.
So I followed one of the first links in the article, a discussion between two very smart people about the dangers of AI. Oh dear, it’s almost three and half hours long! Maybe there’s something in text on the web site of one of these two very smart people, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
It looks like he was the founder of a group/site/discussion forum called Less Wrong. That’s an amusing name. (I used to work with a guy who, when discussing different solutions to a programming problem, would say we had to choose the Less Bad solution.)
What’s this Less Wrong thing about? According to their FAQ, “[…]LessWrong is a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems.” Sounds great!
But then an evil idea occurred to me: What do these very rational people think about the Scamdemic? Let’s look at the forum and see what people are saying most recently about Covid-19. Surely by now, after four years, these highly trained rational people would come to the same conclusions that I did.
I was wrong.
I found several posts asking about which booster to take and when. Another post talked about how the writer trusts the experts more than the sceptics, because the experts are experts. It’s as if these people are in entirely different universes. I don’t know how this happened. I was raised by parents who had advanced science degrees, and I obtained a science degree and worked in a field that was built around logic and reason. Yet somehow we ended up in different universes. I feel this difference more personally in my family relationships. Most of my relatives believe everything the mainstream media and Dr. Fauci ever said about the Scamdemic, and are happy to line up for the latest boosters.
But Less Wrong is not entirely hopeless. I did come across a decent article titled COVID Scepticism Isn’t About Science. I’m not sure I agree with the title, but the writer makes some good points about how the responses to the Scary Virus caused more harm than good and were almost entirely unnecessary. But the writer is very careful not to go too far: he still thinks masks were a good idea even if they weren’t very effective. In my view, masks are never a good idea, and are simply compliance and virtue indicators.
On second thought, maybe that article title is correct. People on both sides of the Scamdemic Narrative try to use science to support their positions. But clearly we need something else besides science and reason and rationality to explain the divide. I’m not sure what that might be. In my case, it might be just plain contrariness, but surely that’s not the deciding factor for most people. This is one of the many mysteries about the Scamdemic.
BOT
I don’t think anything will bridge the gap until the brainwashed wake up.