Yes, because our current system selects not just for raw IQ, it also selects for cowardice. To get into Harvard, you need a 1500+ SAT. To stay at Harvard, you need to be cowed into saying that men can get pregnant.
The same people who giddily enslaved themselves at the first whispers of a cartoonish threat were simultaneously deaf to the blaring sirens warning against literal threats to their lives.
People who would never consider bungee-jumping were first in line to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge with a cord manufactured from novel material untested for its ability to withstand weight + gravity + inertia. Because Science!
I said time’s up and pencils down on the Obedience-Prison-Conformity experiment nearly a year ago in this piece:
Scott Adams’s tone-deaf statement about “winning” and the delusion that he performed “analytics” means he will fail my 20 questions on the next test, forever remaining a Good German until he can acknowledge the root causes of his catastrophic inability to discern between legitimate and fictional threats.
To be honest, going with “everything the government does is stupid and evil” is not a bad baseline to start from. It has served me well for 40 years.
However, I saw through this bullshit (not from the very beginning, but by early April 2020) for a confluence of kinda-accidental reasons that went well beyond that.
1. I did my graduate training, and taught, economics. Not woo-woo Modern Monetary Theory, magical pull-a-government-multiplier-rabbit-out-of-John-Maynard-Keynes-ass economics. The kind of economics where you learn about the real nature of cost, making decisions with imperfect knowledge, and how voluntary mutually beneficial exchange produces far more wisdom than dictates from autocratic ‘experts.’
2. I have spent a long career in medical informatics, public health, and health public policy, and I have known for decades how deeply stupid most people working in these fields really are. You would have to dig deep to find someone more academically mediocre and less intellectually curious than the average MD-PhD on the Harvard Medical School faculty. 95% of the science cadre at CDC are dumber than a bag of hammers. Eric Feigl-Ding came as no surprise to me.
3. I have almost 700 hours acting as pilot in command of small aircraft. Most of flying is risk assessment, management, and mitigation. Not elimination. Risk is never zero, and it has to be constantly reassessed in the light of new information. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to make a decision, and you have to act confidently while under a great deal of pressure and experiencing serious fear. But there is a right amount of acting, and too much is as bad or worse than too little.
I was laughing at Scott Adams when he implied that I "just got lucky". There was always data to consider for COVID's lethality (from Italy & Diamond Princess) and then for the vaxxes. How about, "All previous vaccines required at least 7-10 years of testing before being approved. This brand-new tech has had 6 months. Hmmm...what conclusion might I draw?" 🧐🧐🧐
For me, the test was when the initial fear turned chronic, after which it didn't pass the smell test. Fear's good to get your ass out of harm's way, but not much more than that. Whether a day or a week or a bit longer, if you didn't start questioning it as an unnatural state of mind, you were lost.
"People who are not trained in risk management"...Au contraire, I got this one right precisely because I was professionally trained in risk management (Naval aviation safety officer). Chances of a bad COVID outcome as a healthy person after having a natural infection, super super duper low. Chances of a rushed vaccine having unforseen side effects (with any knowledge of all the "too good to be true" drugs/products that have all turned out to be disasters), super super duper high. It wasn't hard unless, as you say, fear overruled critical thinking.
Covid was a test run for what inevitably lies ahead. More importantly, the powers that be haven’t forgotten how easily people complied with their draconian over reaches. This dystopian nightmare is going to get much worse... 🤦🏻♂️
At first I wondered if using a Dilbert panel for one of the pics was a coincidence. Then I finished reading.
Worth remembering that fear IS the "rational" response... if there is a legitimate, urgent threat. The problem is, what if an enemy can trick you into thinking there's such a threat? This is ancient Art of War type stuff.
I can forgive people who were scared and could not see the most obvious scam of all time, but I cannot forgive people who DEMANDED that others get injected with the toxxine, on pain of job loss, no travel, expulsion from military or school, excommunication, etc.
No one is safe with those people in power. They will do it again, and your life is in _serious_ danger from them.
It's like if your friend says, "Should I play Russian Roulette?" and you say, "No, that seems like too much risk for too little reward." Then your friend plays Russian Roulette and loses, and everyone says, "You were right, but you just got lucky. It could have gone a different way." The important thing to remember with this analogy is that even if your friend played and won, you were still right. You were right no matter how things turned out.
Ayup. This morning on coffee&covid I was ready to give Scott Adams amnesty. He sounded bitter, but admitted he was wrong.
Then I saw a longer clip of him saying it was guessing, 50/50 & luck.
No, Scott. I didn't graduate summa cum laude in medical lab technology due to luck or guessing. I learned the job & initially gave the gov a pass. I thought "There's something they're not telling us. This must be really bad because they are grasping at straws." I was right & wrong at the same time, & it wasn't long before I knew they were lying through their teeth with masking, lockdowns, & testing.
At first, with the quackcines I was intrigued with the technology. But within a short time I woke up. How long would the artificial mRNA persist? Couldn't find an answer, only hand waving. And then, what if the spike causes the disease.
Worst cases in my 1st 2 questions. And I figured out early on it would cause auto-immune disorders, at the very least.
FWIW, Milgram was a graduate student of Asch for the social normative experiments, IIRC, and Zimbardo [StanfordPrisonExperiment, funded by the Navy I believe] drew comparisons to AbuGhraib and other incidents in TheLuciferEffect, one of my early reads after leaving the military in 2007 when I was studying for the Psych GRE...again.
Obedience is the easy path to servitude, IMO, and the epitome of irresponsibility if not betrayal of self, and our little culture of lies has gone far enough that it's not only encouraged, but coerced, as the MaskArena & Vaccinistas will try to deny with a little help from the MandelaEffect and some insecure "friends".
Left unsaid in this discussion is that "Not trusting government" is a pretty fucking good starting point.
Yes, because our current system selects not just for raw IQ, it also selects for cowardice. To get into Harvard, you need a 1500+ SAT. To stay at Harvard, you need to be cowed into saying that men can get pregnant.
The same people who giddily enslaved themselves at the first whispers of a cartoonish threat were simultaneously deaf to the blaring sirens warning against literal threats to their lives.
People who would never consider bungee-jumping were first in line to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge with a cord manufactured from novel material untested for its ability to withstand weight + gravity + inertia. Because Science!
I said time’s up and pencils down on the Obedience-Prison-Conformity experiment nearly a year ago in this piece:
• “Are You a Good German or a Badass German?” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/are-you-a-good-german-or-a-badass)
Scott Adams’s tone-deaf statement about “winning” and the delusion that he performed “analytics” means he will fail my 20 questions on the next test, forever remaining a Good German until he can acknowledge the root causes of his catastrophic inability to discern between legitimate and fictional threats.
To be honest, going with “everything the government does is stupid and evil” is not a bad baseline to start from. It has served me well for 40 years.
However, I saw through this bullshit (not from the very beginning, but by early April 2020) for a confluence of kinda-accidental reasons that went well beyond that.
1. I did my graduate training, and taught, economics. Not woo-woo Modern Monetary Theory, magical pull-a-government-multiplier-rabbit-out-of-John-Maynard-Keynes-ass economics. The kind of economics where you learn about the real nature of cost, making decisions with imperfect knowledge, and how voluntary mutually beneficial exchange produces far more wisdom than dictates from autocratic ‘experts.’
2. I have spent a long career in medical informatics, public health, and health public policy, and I have known for decades how deeply stupid most people working in these fields really are. You would have to dig deep to find someone more academically mediocre and less intellectually curious than the average MD-PhD on the Harvard Medical School faculty. 95% of the science cadre at CDC are dumber than a bag of hammers. Eric Feigl-Ding came as no surprise to me.
3. I have almost 700 hours acting as pilot in command of small aircraft. Most of flying is risk assessment, management, and mitigation. Not elimination. Risk is never zero, and it has to be constantly reassessed in the light of new information. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to make a decision, and you have to act confidently while under a great deal of pressure and experiencing serious fear. But there is a right amount of acting, and too much is as bad or worse than too little.
Scott is so annoying. That’s his superpower now.
Mulder got it right...
“Fear. It’s the oldest tool of power. If you’re distracted by fear of those around you, it keeps you from seeing the actions of those above.”
Agent Fox Mulder, “The X-Files,” “Blood,” 1994.
Well. We’ve certainly witnessed THAT principle in action over the past three years…
🫤
I was laughing at Scott Adams when he implied that I "just got lucky". There was always data to consider for COVID's lethality (from Italy & Diamond Princess) and then for the vaxxes. How about, "All previous vaccines required at least 7-10 years of testing before being approved. This brand-new tech has had 6 months. Hmmm...what conclusion might I draw?" 🧐🧐🧐
For me, the test was when the initial fear turned chronic, after which it didn't pass the smell test. Fear's good to get your ass out of harm's way, but not much more than that. Whether a day or a week or a bit longer, if you didn't start questioning it as an unnatural state of mind, you were lost.
"People who are not trained in risk management"...Au contraire, I got this one right precisely because I was professionally trained in risk management (Naval aviation safety officer). Chances of a bad COVID outcome as a healthy person after having a natural infection, super super duper low. Chances of a rushed vaccine having unforseen side effects (with any knowledge of all the "too good to be true" drugs/products that have all turned out to be disasters), super super duper high. It wasn't hard unless, as you say, fear overruled critical thinking.
Covid was a test run for what inevitably lies ahead. More importantly, the powers that be haven’t forgotten how easily people complied with their draconian over reaches. This dystopian nightmare is going to get much worse... 🤦🏻♂️
At first I wondered if using a Dilbert panel for one of the pics was a coincidence. Then I finished reading.
Worth remembering that fear IS the "rational" response... if there is a legitimate, urgent threat. The problem is, what if an enemy can trick you into thinking there's such a threat? This is ancient Art of War type stuff.
I can forgive people who were scared and could not see the most obvious scam of all time, but I cannot forgive people who DEMANDED that others get injected with the toxxine, on pain of job loss, no travel, expulsion from military or school, excommunication, etc.
No one is safe with those people in power. They will do it again, and your life is in _serious_ danger from them.
Emily Oster did the same thing as Scott Adams did in her Amnesty article. She attributed anyone getting it right to luck.
It's like if your friend says, "Should I play Russian Roulette?" and you say, "No, that seems like too much risk for too little reward." Then your friend plays Russian Roulette and loses, and everyone says, "You were right, but you just got lucky. It could have gone a different way." The important thing to remember with this analogy is that even if your friend played and won, you were still right. You were right no matter how things turned out.
Ayup. This morning on coffee&covid I was ready to give Scott Adams amnesty. He sounded bitter, but admitted he was wrong.
Then I saw a longer clip of him saying it was guessing, 50/50 & luck.
No, Scott. I didn't graduate summa cum laude in medical lab technology due to luck or guessing. I learned the job & initially gave the gov a pass. I thought "There's something they're not telling us. This must be really bad because they are grasping at straws." I was right & wrong at the same time, & it wasn't long before I knew they were lying through their teeth with masking, lockdowns, & testing.
At first, with the quackcines I was intrigued with the technology. But within a short time I woke up. How long would the artificial mRNA persist? Couldn't find an answer, only hand waving. And then, what if the spike causes the disease.
Worst cases in my 1st 2 questions. And I figured out early on it would cause auto-immune disorders, at the very least.
None of it was guessing. None of it was luck.
Good read.
FWIW, Milgram was a graduate student of Asch for the social normative experiments, IIRC, and Zimbardo [StanfordPrisonExperiment, funded by the Navy I believe] drew comparisons to AbuGhraib and other incidents in TheLuciferEffect, one of my early reads after leaving the military in 2007 when I was studying for the Psych GRE...again.
Obedience is the easy path to servitude, IMO, and the epitome of irresponsibility if not betrayal of self, and our little culture of lies has gone far enough that it's not only encouraged, but coerced, as the MaskArena & Vaccinistas will try to deny with a little help from the MandelaEffect and some insecure "friends".