One thing that seems to be common and is my working hypothesis, is that they're so smart and so respected in their field (or, in subset of cases, arrogant), that they simply trust themselves more than anybody else. There is nobody in their family and friends who can truly "slap some sense into them"; provide perspective, course-correct, nudge into objective reality or mainstream story, whatever we call it. I've actually asked a couple of them point blank - and they admitted, nope, there's nobody that they trust more than themselves. Couple of them even said - if you don't have trust and faith in yourself, you're weak.
So I'm hoping I'm somewhat inoculated against going off the deep end by having at least 3 people in my life (wife, sister, and one good friend) who can, and have, slapped some sense into me when I was going off the rails.
Super smart people are so good at constructing plausible narratives that they can convince themselves of almost anything. You have to actively look for ways to disprove your own narratives. This is hard because they sound so plausible.
But where does critical thinking come in? Seens there should be a heuristic or generalized approach for deciding what to believe. Epistemology, I suppose.
And this should all preface the formation of our ideas in the first place.
Socratic Method is one way, I can recommend "The Socratic Method - A Practitioners Handbook" by Ward Farnsworth.
(any recommendations on that specific book?)
When people trust themselves above all it means we'll never have a utopia because we all can't help but believing some pretty stupid stuff at times. But at the same time we'll never have an absolute dystopia, because the diversity of thought ensures we'll never all fall off the deep end, or be pushed off it, together.
On a daily and regular basis, I trust myself, my thought process, experience, rationale, etc. I spent decades consciously honing my analytical and logical skills and I will spend lifetime continuing to do so. And it serves me well.
But, I believe, there needs to be a "safety valve". A "who watches the watchmen", somebody to provide a sanity check on your own rationale and story and narrative and thought process, which left alone can take you from first principle to lala-land, one seemingly logical step at the time, over years if needed. There needs to be an external influence/person who can, if situation calls for it, help you see things from an external yet trustworthy perspective, when your internal narrative, the "personal story of your life", starts strongly diverging from objective consensus reality.
(on a deeply personal note, I'll freely admit my sister did that for me ~15 years ago - after for a year or so I spun an increasingly personal internal narrative about something in my life, with a short but incisive comment, she momentarily enabled me to see myself through her eyes, and not love what I saw, and get that instant split-vision of my narrative and external narrative of what and why and how and whence I am where and how I am. Anybody else, I would've discarded or been defensive or otherwise ignored it. And I see many people around who desperately need a "grounding" or "reality check" or "slapping sense into" or "righting the boat" or whatever we choose to call it, but don't have anybody that can reach them. )
And I'd take this a step further -- the ability to unlearn/reprogram is a mark of intelligence, but ego definitely factors in as well.
I trust myself very little when it comes to many topics, because I have next to zero expertise in them, and I know that "common sense" often does not lead us to good decisions on topics where we have little understanding. That doesn't mean I'm going to outsource decision-making to others who are experts on those topics, but I am probably going to most often do what they say, after applying their information to my own situation and determining what seems reasonable and doable.
As an example, I will most likely get the Omicron-tuned COVID vaccine when it becomes available, assuming the relevant experts I trust say that it's a good idea. I have no idea if I really need it, but the non-zero threat of long COVID, coupled with the fact that we still know fairly little about the long-term effects of having contracted COVID, means I would rather face the very low risk of vaccine complications than increase my risk of getting COVID, with the attendant risk of it being something that causes lingering health problems for some significant part of my life. I won't be outsourcing my decision-making to a third party, but I recognize that I do not trust my expertise in this field (since I do not have any), and will allow those with expertise to heavily inform my decision.
I've had discussion with a guy in lab of a top university and they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.
It doesn't seem to correlate to technical ability, there are something in psychology that draws a certain type of people towards conspiracy and in which they go into a mental state where normal explanations are removed from their logic and they go seek outlandish explanations or slightly hard to explain things and turn a twist into it. I don't understand why but I think a pretty decent amount of people subscribe to this kind of thinking.
Neurology researchers here, please give us answers.
911 is definietly a conspiracy. A bunch of telecom engineers acting in unison with dispatchers and first responders. There is no other explanation how else police/emt/fire brigade shows up when you dial that number and tell them about an emergency. But what it has to do with steel beams I don’t know. \s
Joking aside: I have noticed that sometimes when I preceive that everyone around me thinks X i feel an urge to think the opposite of it. I only had mild and inconsequential cases of this (opinion about shows, products, etc), but I can imagine that this type of contraryness in edge cases can convince people that everyone is wrong about some important historical event. And it seems once they convinced themselves their belief is stable enough to make them stick with it.
Obviously hating Game of Thrones when everyone was raving about it feels very different from subscribing to conspiracy theories, but maybe the phenomena is similar, just one latches on to a different subject?
Good thing you mention or I fell for it (that you meant it seriously, not that I believed in the conspiracy). Poe's law in effect.
But that's the thing. People who believe in conspiracies are susceptible to them. For example, they could've lost their trust in society, or smoke a lot of pot, or have a friend or two who are into it. Very much like a cult.
And I am saying that as person who was into conspiracies, who lost faith in society, who used drugs (psychedelics, mostly), and had a severe psychosis (not at all related to the previously mentioned though but stress from another factor).
you should probably reword that, “steel beams don’t melt at the temperature jet fuel burns at”.
Thankfully my experience was acute and triggered by drugs, so a few years of anti-psychotics and refraining from anything other than cannabis and alcohol in moderation have let me stop taking the anti-psychotics and at worst I experience cyclothymia, which I've decided to just live with and not medicate.
For some reason, Computer Programmers think they're experts in every subject.
Like for example, their analyses of "conspiracy theorists" (when what they are actually analyzing is their own incredibly flawed semi-conscious representation of conspiracy theorists). It's quite funny that the world is this way if you think about it deeply, because it could be otherwise.
Alternatively, you could desire to know what is true, at least in theory.
Consider what is going on from an architectural perspective - do you believe that what I say is incorrect?
Not every factoid in every field can be derived from a small set of first principles, particularly when that field is primarily empirical in nature.
Engineers do know how to argue rationally, because they have to remember why things work to a pretty intense depth. The question is how people can wall off that ability instead of applying it to other things that are important to them.
Being "human" isn't an explanation, though. That's just saying that humans are frail, and this is a failure, therefore it should be expected from humans.
There's nothing special about engineers that makes them less prone to human weaknesses. I had a (software) engineer colleague who believed in overunity energy, and was so into it they traveled to paid conferences.
Stefan Lanka could keep his money due to a formality. The judges even said that it was clearly proven the measle virus exists.
If Lanka said "there is no proof that gravity makes things fall down" he'd loose the 100k. That proof is really well supported by hard evidence.
At this point viruses are simply not proven by hard-science and Lanka was made to pay up based on non-hard-science papers, that are now vetted by a court case to be just that: no hard scientific proof.
http://lrbw.juris.de/cgi-bin/laender_rechtsprechung/document...
I dont think that counts as "a formality". It simply is not hard-scientifically proven.
The measles virus may still exist and make people sick, but to me that is a theory as the proof is still outstanding.
> The judges even said that it was clearly proven the measle virus exists.
Do you have a source for that?
I would count that as a "formality": the bet required the proof to be in a single publication, but as it was instead split across several it didn't count.
On the latter question the machine-translated text is hard enough to read that I can't reliably tell what the defendant is claiming and what the court is declaring, but I think maybe the court is saying they're not convinced the submitted papers constitute proof?
But if you read on from where your citation stops (i.e. after "...on the diameter of the measles virus"), you find:
"Furthermore, the content of the publications submitted did not meet the requirements for proof. The phenomena presented therein as measles viruses are actually transport vesicles (bubbles) of the cell itself. None of the documentation submitted is based on attempts where the pathogen - as required - had previously been isolated and biochemically characterized or even such an isolation had been scientifically documented. [... (cut out some more things that are formalities to me)...] The determination of the diameter was also not well-founded. The size range of 300 to 1000 nm given in one of the publications presented already refutes the thesis of the virus, since viruses are characterized by a small variation in their diameter between 15 and a maximum of 400 nm. Incidentally, information from the RKI dated January 24, 2012 states that the diameter of measles viruses is said to be 120-400 nm and often contain ribosomes inside, although the latter contradict the existence of a measles virus."
What I get from this is:
1. The virus was not properly "isolated and biochemically characterized" and "isolation had been scientifically documented"
2. The diameter established by the evidence provided was not well founded, and greatly contradict other findings.
What Lanka's main point to me is, is that in order to scientifically establish the existence of a (sub-)microscopic infectious disease carrier, you need to first truly isolate it.
Not "claiming to have isolated it in virologist terms", that is: claiming to have it contained in a concoction monkey kidney tissue, bovine fetal serum, and more; thus in a soup with other DNA carriers. Because this "redefinition of isolation" makes it impossible to say we actually found it. Also we cannot sequence the DNA/RNA of the virus in order to establish it's identity, when we are testing a soup that has other DNA/RNA in it. (That's why virologists use "in silico" sequencing, which is not trustworthy either: especially not when other DNA/RNA is present in the sample)
Since the theory of viruses has become widely accepted, we have learned a lot about other sub-cell biological things with DNA/RNA in them, like exosomes. We have truly isolated them, and truly sequenced their genetic material.
But somehow for viruses with still cannot do that.
I hence hold the position that the hard-scientific evidence on the existence of viruses is very thin, or just not there. It's merely a theory at this point.
Only once the existence is established we can meaningfully establish contagiousness.
For instance with polio it is claimed by "the horrific anti-vaxxers" that the vaccine was introduced when the wave of polio-like symptoms was on the decline. And that polio-like symptoms are since also, conveniently, characterized as other diseases. So there are other reasons than the effectiveness of the vaccine to the disappearance of symptoms in the population.
Hence we need to establish first the virus exists and is contagious, or we end up with the vaccine's effectiveness being the proof of the existence of the virus. Which is basically what I believe is where we currently are. And a decline of the wave of polio-like symptoms for other reasons can then easily be mistaken for effectiveness of the vaccine.
Therefor hard-scientific evidence is so important. Especially if states enact laws based on it, like we saw with covid measures and all state run vaccination programs.
Thanks for sticking to the discussion btw, I really appreciate you take the time to respond to my points that --i also know-- seem ridiculous from a mainstream viewpoint. Have a great day.
You write: "Also we cannot sequence the DNA/RNA of the virus in order to establish it's identity, when we are testing a soup that has other DNA/RNA in it." That is generally not correct. When you sequence, what you get are subsequences ("reads") of around 200 base pairs. Generally a very large number of them. Then you try to figure out what genetic sequences could have led to you observing those reads, through a process called "assembly". The idea here is that if I have one read that looks like ABCDE and another like BCDEF, it's very likely that these were generated from an original sequence of ABCDEF. If your reads were drawn from a sample that has multiple things in it you will piece each one together separately, and as long as you took enough reads you'll be able to get the genetic sequence for each.
I've been working on wastewater recently, which is a huge mixture of many different things, but we see some extremely common genetic sequences. When you look up these sequences with BLASTN they turn out to be ones people have previously identified as plant viruses from vegetables people commonly eat, such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. [1] You can download the data and play with it yourself if you want?
Here's an approach that should let you replicate the identification of these sequences and is simple enough that you could code yourself:
1. Download one of the 180 FASTQ files the authors published
2. Extract the nucleotide sequences ("grep '^[ACTG]' fname.fastq")
3. Write a little program that emits all subsequences of length 40. Short enough not to get too many read errors, long enough that mismatches are unlikely.
4. Sort those subsequences. (Unix sort will do it, even though this will exceed the memory available on your machine unless you have a much better machine than I do.)
5. uniq -c
6. sort -nr
7. At this point the data should all fit in memory. Write a program where you make a map from the first 39 characters in a sequence to the last character, and from the last 39 characters to the first. Take the most frequent subsequence in the data and attempt to extend it using those two maps. You should end up with a sequence about 6k long.
8. Enter that sequence into https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PROGRAM=blastn&BLAS... It will probably identify it as Tomato brown rugose fruit virus.
I don't know how I would explain this if viruses didn't exist?
Additionally, are you claiming that virologists, an area of study that has proven, repeatedly (through the very apparent efficacy of countless vaccines for diseases that ravaged humanity for millennia) to be one of the most remarkably successful scientific endeavors in human history, is somehow…not scientifically rigorous?
(I’m going to take a lot of karma damage for this, but I believe it has to be said)
Do you have the same opinion on particle physics? Scientists have spent the better part of 80 years on an obviously wrong standard model - has that caused you to doubt Maxwell's equations or how the circuits in your computer works?
More seriously, "lack of skepticism" is bunk when the "skeptics" don't provide equal or greater research and reasoning. People have started to think of themselves as nobel laureates because they can say "no, I don't think so", and have 0 data to back them up.
I only meant that, in this particular case of polio detection, the cause and origin of the case is fairly cut-and-dry (there are other articles that have been published about it that give additional information), and introducing skepticism of the manner I responded to initially is likely to do more harm than good. Disinformation often begins with a distortion of a grain of truth, and the effects of that public skepticism and, dare I say it, ignorance (ironically?) breeds the environment that causes the reemergence of, for example, polio, amongst a public that is just being "skeptical" of vaccines.
In regard to Polio vaccines, there is some head-scratching to be done if you go down that rabbit-hole. It’s all ancient history now, but the numbers of polio cases was dropping even before the vaccine roll-out. I don’t know enough about it to comment beyond that. But, I do know human nature: polio outbreaks were terrifying to parents, and there would be every reason not to be a bit skeptical when a solution to the problem was found… that is, it wasn’t a time for clear thinking in the midst of the panic. It’s precisely times like that when people are prone to overlook things.
For instance, imagine the chaos that could ensue if a disease that was overwhelmingly trivial and asymptomatic was advertised as possibly being 10 or 20 percent lethal? Heck, I bet folks would be so scared that they’d shut down entire countries, weld people into their apartments, gulp down horse de-wormer, mandate experimental drugs, etc. Of course, I exaggerate. I doubt something like that could happen in modern times. But, if it did, the skeptics back when it was going on and even after the panic had died down, would most likely be pilloried and accused of being unthinking idiots. Just saying.
Quite simply, not understanding something, or not liking the consequences of it, is not skepticism, it's ignorance. Skepticism requires having good reasons to reject good models/research/outcomes etc. In the Alzheimers case, the reason for skepticism, which many people in the field had, was difficulty reproducing results, and lack of positive outcomes from therapies using that working hypothesis.
Blind skepticism makes you beyond stupid, and eventually turns you into an idiot who watches Alex Jones and thinks your own son is a crisis actor
https://rumble.com/v13jt4t-science-pseudoscience-and-the-ger...
> especially now that we have shown mRNA vaccines work
Right, they dropped from 100% effective to 30% effective in the first weeks, then requiring boosters. They totally lied/oversold them. And everyone got "it" anyway. How does that mean "they work"?
Also they do not look at truly isolated samples of viruses: they look at concoctions of monkey kidney cells, bovine fetal serum and more with the supposed virus in there. When looking at a concoction like that, what certainty you have you see the virus and not another small biological particle (like exosomes, or dead cell debris)?
Last thing, it seems that with many of these EM photos of viruses, is that the control group was omitted. You also need to bring a concoction that does not have supposed virus in there and somehow show that does not contain the visual element that ARE seen in the sample with supposed virus. Virologists disagree and are okay with going ahead without control groups in these cases.
Because a virus looks nothing like cells that would make up any of those organs. When you examine enough samples and suddenly see some cells that don’t look like they belong that’s a pretty good indicator of a foreign body.
This is pretty well true with all illnesses though, so that’s a bad indicator.
I didn't know scurvy was considered contagious; that's pretty cool. I did know people used to cure it by drinking tea made from Arborvitae trees - or at least its European counterpart (I think they have the same common name).
I find the stance a little baffling though; if Measles isn't a virus, why can it's spread by halted by vaccination? Aside from the general usage and success thereof, sometimes it's easy to wonder just because the major outbreaks in the US happened a fairly long time ago. But a couple years back I had a coworker from Nigeria - I guess they still have outbreaks there?... anyway he scrambled to help get them money for MMR vaccines (I don't know if they're usually free via the WHO but supply wasn't abundant so - I guess bribes are a thing there moreso than here). And lo-and-behold none of his family got sick at all, but most of their smaller town did -- including their neighbors; a few had persistent physical problems (I don't recall what now) and a few people died. That's anecdotal, but goes very well with existing evidence and provides a nice microcosm for observation.
The MMR vaccine isn't a nutrient cocktail and I find it quite hard to conjure a Occam's razor explanation that doesn't involve a known virus (or maybe I severely lack imagination or am too tainted by existing knowledge). To make the vaccines (at least ones like the MMR vaccine) they culture viruses - letting them replicate in cells - and then weakening or killing them. Do the vaccines just happen to have a weakened form of a virus that doesn't cause Measles and it's protective quality merely a startling coincidence?
I mean, the virus can be viewed under a microscope https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC375751/ - if that isn't responsible for the preventative effects of the vaccine, then what actually is?
Sometimes science gets used badly and misconceptions abound or bad routes are taken for a while until they prove untenable; sometimes prevailing wisdom lasts a thousand years and then a Copernican revolution happens. They tend to be most useful to question though when there is a better alternative explanation that better fits the observations than the current prevailing wisdom.
Anyone can "question" anything - but what is the better fitting explanation exists for observations about Measles than the prevalent wisdom and evidence that it is a virus?
I mean surely anyone making the first claim would also make the claim that the measles vaccine is bogus. That second claim is already infamously popular enough in areas of the U.S. that there have been measles outbreaks among unvaccinated children.
I say that viruses are still a theory. To truly scientifically prove it they need to isolate (truly isolate) the virus, and they never did that. Always there was cell materials in the concoction the virologists call an "isolated" virus.
> I mean, the virus can be viewed under a microscope https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC375751/ -
They looked at an concoction with lots of other biological particles: cells, decaying cells, cell parts, etc. There is simply no way to know they EM-photo'ed a virus or one of the other things.
And all the while they have not been able to truly isolate viruses, they were able to isolate all kinds of other small biological particles. Some carrying DNA. They managed to properly sequence that DNA. So far they never manage to truly sequence the DNA of a virus , but instead virologists do an "in silico" sequencing, which is more guesswork than actual sequencing.
Viruses clearly exist. You can observe them infecting and lysing cells in real time. You can do controlled experiments where only the cultures containing viruses you've added get lysed. You can purify antibodies against them. You can prove that the antibodies inactivate the virus. As there are viruses that affect everything from bacteria to plants and animals, proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial.
None of that depends on EM. Microscopy merely gave us a picture of these things which lets us understand their structure better.
It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary.
However, both those techniques are substantially more valid than you give them credit for and are always used in the context of other tests to assure you're studying the right thing.
You talked about bovine serum and monkey cells. While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses. In any event, if both the control culture and the test culture use the same media and cell type, anything different between them is likely due to the test. That's kind of fundamental to how science works. After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity.
I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong. I think you're relying on the fact that you won't have to put your ideas to the test and nobody in your real life will be sophisticated enough to show you the reality. In that case, perhaps you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist? Otherwise you'll just go on like this.
Where? How?
> proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial.
I thought Koch's postulates were too strict for virologists... And hence were relaxed. (lol)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182102/
Can you show a somewhere the old postulates are all met for a virus?
> It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary.
And, not totally unimportant, to ID the particle we're looking at.
> While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses.
Nice trend. Now can they also truly isolate (that is without other DNA/RNA carrying particles present) a virus? Like biologists have done with other biological particles of similar size?
Because without true isolation you could always be looking at "dead cell debris" or other stuff that is there and is not the virus, but may look like one.
> After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity.
Bingo! So as long as you put "culture" cells in the sample and call that an isolate, it is polluting the sample.
> you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist?
Isolate them. Truly isolate them.
> I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong.
Because in the zoo you can see the animal all by itself. Now if you say you can only see deer mouse when they are in a soup with 50 other species of mouse, and you make a crummy black white pictures of the soup claiming some provide proof of your deer mouse: should I take you seriously?
Why is it so hard to believe viruses exist?
So what does it look like? We only have crummy black-white EM images, that look like any dead cell debris to me.
> Why is it so hard to believe viruses exist?
It was easy, I did it most of my life. It's much harder to question my beliefs, but maybe that's something you have less experience with.
> Why is it so hard to believe viruses exist? (2)
Because they have never been truly isolated. While other bio particles of similar size have.
No, it is not. HN is for more or less like-minded people and if you stay too far from the beaten path you risk the ire of moderators regardless of whether you are right or not.
Apparently this is the price of keeping it civilised.
I don't think you have anything to worry about, HN is well-known to be highly tolerant of a variety and even dissenting opinions.