Previous articles in this series:
Assaying Entropy II: Dying during Covid
Assaying Entropy III: Thinking about Covid
We prefer the quip to the argument, the repartee to the discussion, certainty to doubt, and to satisfy that desire we latch onto falsehoods, truisms, half-truths, or irrelevant truths, and we think by associations and intuitions rather than laboriously by reason. But if these limitations were universal, we would see Covid deaths in similar proportions across the globe. But the death rates are wildly different among nations. Can Kahneman’s fast thinking be unevenly distributed around the world due to cultural differences?
Most of Kahneman’s research subjects were American, Canadian, Israeli, and British college students, many students of statistics. This suggests at least a Western bias if not a class bias. More important, so many of the features of slow thinking that fast thinking avoids are learned, not instinctual or self-evident, a product of education, in fact things that we collectively in our culture are not good at or very consciously avoid: mathematical and statistical reasoning, for example. The United States has been in the middling to low international rankings in general education for many years. In 2005, we ranked 21st out of 27 in percentage of high school completions.
Just before Covid, the Program for International Student Assessment (part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) ranked the performance of American 15 year olds in mathematics at 37th in the world. This mediocre performance has been going on for years. This current year, the local high school had a math proficiency score of 18%, which means that 18% of students in Sierra County were able to perform at expected grade levels (82% could not). State wide, the score is 14%. We may not have the general, public ability to deal reasonably with Covid since almost all information about Covid is mathematical, not only the statistical basis of all studies but the concepts like rates of transmissions, proportional instances, etc. Even the virus itself acts in real life not as a little spiked ball but as a swarm which operates en masse so that its actions can only have significance statistically. While this mathematical thinking should be normal for health experts, it is most times totally opaque to the public, to political leaders, and even to many doctors who lack easy familiarity with statistics. Does the general level of mathematical performance matter in how people acted during Covid?
The top ranking countries in the recent International Student Assessment have been more or less the same ones for years; so, they are likely the countries with a high general educational level of mathematics. With the exception of one, these countries have managed Covid deaths really well.
| Ranked countries by math scores |
Covid deaths per million population (12/7) |
| 1. China | 4 |
| 2. Singapore | 287 |
| 3. Macao | 9 |
| 4. Hong Kong | 1,429 |
| 5. Taiwan | 609 |
| 6. Japan | 405 |
| 7. South Korea | 601 |
| 37. USA | 3,310 |
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but the correlation suggests some sort of complicated relationship. That connection, I think, might go through the odd nature of statistics, something not tested directly in the assessment of 15 year olds but which is based on mathematical principles tested. Understanding statistics is essential to thinking reasonably about Covid because with Covid we enter an uncertain world of random and accidental chance.
Let’s take the classical example of flipping a coin. A flip can be looked at mechanistically as the result of the force of your thumb, the distance the coin travels up and down, its spin, how it lands, etc., all of which together result, causally, in the coin being heads or tails. In this way of thinking, each flip of the coin is distinct and unrelated to other flips. The idea of chance (statistics) sees the flip entirely differently, not as a series of physical causes but as a random one of an infinite or very large number of identical flips. Statistically, we all know that the flip has a 50/50 chance of showing heads or tails. We say the odds of the flip being tails are 50% or 0.5 or ½ or one change out of two tries on the average of infinite flips. That’s not the cause of the coin being heads or tails. It is simply a number between 0 and 1 that shows how probable the flip will turn out heads or tails. This number is the same for every individual and independent flip of the coin regardless of how hard you hit it or how high it goes or how many times it flips. Probability is just as real, if not more real, as physical causes even though it is just numbers. Because all the physical causes of the flip’s result are unknown, they are real only as abstract hypotheses; whereas, probability fits actual occurrences in the past (the data) and in the future (the prognosis).
If we flip the coin nine times, and they all come up tails, what’s the probability that the 10th flip will be tails? Bayesian or conditional statistics says there is a probability of a reversion to norm, that while any individual flip has a 0.5 chance of being tails, any tenth flip, if considered as the 10th flip in a sequential group, will have a much smaller chance of being tails. But the statistical view has no specificity. It always describes any flip or any sequence of 10 but never a flip, this or that flip as does the causal view. It’s a question of how you see it, just as a coin looks round from one side and rectangular from another. Statistics sees the flip as part of a collective of flips or collective of groups of 10 flips.
I can apply the statistical equations, but I cannot think how it “works.” My confusion comes from being used to operating in a finite and causal world where things “work” – as we all are. The random world of statistics is not causal and is ideally infinite yet totally real in its data and in its prognosis, and that is the world of virology, epidemiology, and Covid. If we don’t think statistically, we will have difficulties understanding Covid and most medical problems. The collective perspective is different from the individual, personal one, just as collective, common rights differ from individual, personal ones We need in Covid times not our limited and personal point of view but a collective and knowledgeable one. Perhaps a society better trained in and with a greater confidence in mathematics accepts what the collective we knows. But a society that instinctively feels that identification by an abstract number rather than by an equally abstract name, especially a first name, dehumanizes and violates our identities will struggle with mathematics and with Covid.
We in America rebel against collective thought and knowledge even as we talk of community and equality. We favor our personal, individual fast think and assert our personal right to act out our errors. We position our freedom against a government which we presume curtails those rights. But, in fact, governments –local, state, and national – representing us and as our creatures, are themselves mired in the fallacies of fast think, if not a major spreader of those mistakes.
Like our national avoidance of abstract thinking through mathematics, the linking of Covid with the issue of freedom seems particularly American. One might expect this connection given our mythological perception of our unique history, but we can specify this linkage in great detail by looking at another feature of Kahneman’s fast think. Words have associations, and Kahneman shows that following verbal associations leads to error. Throughout the pandemic, American media has used the term “lockdown” (a prison term) to speak of quarantine, branding the traditional and effective public health practice as unacceptable and a violation of our freedom and rights. The origin of this term was ideological. When China restricted travel to and from Wuhan and other Covid-19 areas on January 23, 2020, both the New York Times and the American edition of The Guardian called it a “lockdown.” In contrast, The Washington Post initially called it a “quarantine” but – like everyone else in the corporate media, national and local – changed its editorial policy to take the opportunity to remind everyone repeatedly that this is what enemies of corporate ideology, the socialist bad guys do. This deliberate word choice was fatal for us as it translated every argument on public health into the simplistic binary clusters of us/them, good/evil, freedom/ slavery, democracy/authoritarian/, capitalism/socialism by which we define ourselves in fast think.
With binary clusters, I return to Miller’s magic number seven. Those are seven bits of information. But thinking isn’t just remembering information. It’s about understanding the possible relationships among factors, and the interrelations among seven factors or bits of information are many more than we can handle. Once, a theoretical physicist told me he could imagine the relationships among five factors. He thought in five dimensions. Einstein proposed that our reality was four dimensional. But we still think of our reality in three dimensions, and when we work with pencil and paper (as in graphs and pictures) we live in two dimensions. We are pretty comfortable with binaries: we have a propensity, a preference, a habit, an instinct, a need for seeing and thinking in clusters of two.
In this country, we have made a virtue of this limitation. The whole complex world of politics, of public policy, of any publicly debated issue is fitted to a two-party system. All social conflicts are reduced by our legal system to a two-part, adversarial form. We define a free market by a competition between only two companies. Choice is conceived of as choosing one of two alternatives (almost all of Kahneman’s experiments define decision as binary choice). So it seems clear why quarantine is the last thing this democratic society would choose to do, and when done, why it would be done half-heartedly.
But are we a democracy?
NO, we are supposed to be a Democratic Republic. What we have become and where are headed is a discussion for another time.
“A good decision is based on Knowledge and not on Numbers” – Plato
Nowhere in this thread have I seen any discussion of the ‘vaccine’ and its potential for it to have affected the numbers either way. I find that within this area of discussion, cognitive bias is huge as people take firm positions based on the source and not the content of the information and dismiss out of hand any view that goes against what they already ‘know’ to be true.
Per 18 USC 175, a biological weapon is any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system (device/LNP/vaccine) that is not reasonably justified by a prophylactic or protective; bona fide research, or other peaceful purposes.
PEGylated lipid nanoparticle encapsulated gene-editing technologies that produce immunogenic disease causing and sometimes life-threatening biosynthetic spike proteins.
I think that anyone who has not been living under a rock 3 years after ‘2 weeks to flatten the curve’ must see that there is far more going on that meets the eye.
“The truth is out there” X – Files
Jack’s comments here and later are an interesting collection of mental errors, some of which I discussed in reviewing Kahneman and some are what I would call first order errors, thought based on misinformation, undigested facts, or simply logical contradictions.
Jack’s first paragraph is ostensibly an answer to the last sentence of my article, and that is why I published his comment. Unfortunately, he is wrong (as my next article will discuss). This is a simple factual error, but it comes about usually because we take what we hear for granted and don’t bother to check. We did not start life as a nation with the intent of being a Democratic Republic. Quite the contrary, the Constitutional Convention, the Constitution itself, the ratification of the Constitution, and the first elections were all won by the Federalists. The anti-Federalists or the Democratic Republicans were the losers until Jefferson became president, and even then his vice President was a Federalist.
In his second paragraph, Jack quotes Plato. Apparently, he means to show that Plato valued knowledge above numbers as a basis of decision-making, but what “Numbers” mean in this context is not the what mathematics and statistics meant in my article. Plato means that decisions should be made by people who know things and not by popularity. In fact, numbers in the sense of mathematics and statistics, that is, a number system (counting) is the very heart of Plato’s philosophy of knowledge, which he saw as rational, rules bound, and always yielding a correct answer, like arithmetic. That is why the number One was equated by Plato with the absolute Good, the concept of unity being the basis of a counting system. Jack’s mistake was to jump to a possible conclusion without knowing or understanding the context (Plato’s writings generally).
After that, Jack’s comment turns to Covid vaccines, which are hardly the topic under discussion. But let’s give him the benefit of a doubt since we agree with him about cognitive biases and look at what he says about vaccines. They are “weapons,” he says. Without reference to the US law, I think we know what weapons are. Someone uses them to harm other people. Jack doesn’t say who is using them. He doesn’t say who they are against. He doesn’t say how they are harmful. So, it’s a pretty empty claim. He does offer the reader a bunch of clauses that don’t make a sentence (a whole thought) which because it has no predicate predicates (says) nothing.
Since, he recognizes that you can’t call vitamin pills weapons, he does provide us a valid description of biological agents that are not weapons: they are “reasonably justified by a prophylactic or protective; bona fide research, or other peaceful purposes” — which sounds to me (in spite of the grammatical problems and broken parallelisms) like a description of Covid vaccines, contradicting his overt intentions.
I would say that Jack is wavering between being being balanced and just riding his hobby horse around our public house of discussion.
This is a very interesting read, as is the comment from Jack Noel… It starts out as very complex, but ends with a simple conclusion that most folks cannot understand statistical methodology, and most folks are not willing to accept math or science, except in their own up or down way of thinking… That showed quite heavily in our county when it came to Covid and in our most recent election rhetoric… it also shows when it comes to economic development “plans” or “proposals”, presented and eventually pushed upon us by the PTB… a prime example is the “roundabout” to be built at Date and School Rd… What???!!! Our community’s history of binary thinking by the PTB and their willing followers is not so good!!!
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” — John Adams
Thanks Max for letting me contribute.
Thanks LeRoy for your comment on the PTB. That is a discussion that needs a forum and good citizens to step forward to expose the corruption moving in a more inclusive and ‘Democratic’ process.
This is a nice quote from Adams, one of the Federalist leaders showing his great distrust of the people, the demos in democracy. But perhaps Adams was not as thorough a scholar of democracy as Machiavelli — whom Adams seems to have read — whose sense of realism was much greater than his commitment to ideology. Machiavelli proposed from his study of the political history of Mediterranean states that Democracies because they valued individual competition always degenerated into Plutocracies, that is, a rule by the wealthy. But as wealth and power became familial through inheritance, plutocratic families produced Aristocracies. As Aristocratic families competed, a single family became dominant, and that resulted in a Monarchy. Inevitably, Monarchies became despotic and the people would rise up in revolt to overthrow it, creating, once again, a Democracy. But remember entropy; the return is a loss of energy and a gain in entropy.
The definition of a vaccine was changed by the CDC (~ a year ago) to include these experimental rDNA injections. As more and more whistle blowers and medical folks step forward, we are learning more and more about them and the gene editing technology behind them. Of course there is a great deal of misinformation from both sides of the argument, but a clear picture is beginning emerge of the harm being done – they are still pushing the booster. They seem to have wide variations in the contents of the shot depending on manufacture and lot numbers.
To me the information/numbers from the insurance companies actuarial tables and VEARS tells the story. I just read the the CDC has stopped reporting them. This, in my mind, was pure evil, not bad science. The miscarriages among mothers who got the shot is over 80% and they are targeting small children. Cancers and heart problems are exploding.
“To learn who rules over you simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”- Voltaire
We try not to give a platform for misinformation and rumor. However, I approved Jack’s blurb on his hobby-horse topic of Covid vaccines because it displays such casual spreading of fake news it needed a reply. I say “casual” because Jack never pauses a second to give any explanation, thought, evidence, or reference for any of the many assertions, and that is far from what one wants in a discussion.
1. The CDC did change its definition of “vaccine” but not in order to include the already denoted Covid vaccines as “vaccines.” It changed its definition precisely because of people like Kyle (see my earlier reply to a comment by Kyle) can’t understand the word “immune” to be a statistical term and thinks that “immune” means total, 100% protection for 100% of the time for 100% of the vaccinees. So they changed the definition of “vaccine” to refer to “protection.” I don’t think it changes anything as long as some people will continue to say, “it didn’t protect .0001% of the people, so it doesn’t protect anyone.” See, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html.
2. Jack says that VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System, has stopped publishing its data? The system’s numbers are easily accessed and were last updated December 16, 2022. Not good enough?
3. Jack says that there are lots of variations of vaccines among makers and lots. I don’t know what he means by “manufacturers”: whether he means between the four makers or among their factories, and I don’t know where he can find that kind of information except in the rumor mill.
4. Jack says that the miscarriages of vaccinated mothers are up 80%. Does he really mean “up 80%”? From what? Does he really assume the miscarriages are related to vaccination? I’m sure the mothers vaccinated also did many other things besides get vaccinated. How does he know these numerous other things are not the cause? If I have a heart attack while drinking a glass of water, will Jack say that water causes heart attacks? Actually, we can make a good guess that Jack just jumbled up the Twitter post circulating this summer and meant what that post said: that 80% of vaccinated mothers had miscarriages (not “up 80%”). But this version, too, was just a bit of fake Twitter news. First, I doubt that we generally would accept Twitter posts as clinical studies of anything. But it seems according to some detailed checking of the numbers that the author of the nonsense miscounted, counting a single incidence many times over, etc., and was forced to reword the assertions. Furthermore, the data that was counted was never verified. See the whole debunking by AP News in June: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-950821598874. Also, if you can read scientific reports accurately, read this Norwegian study from the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2114466. It concludes:
“Our study found no evidence of an increased risk for early pregnancy loss after Covid-19 vaccination and adds to the findings from other reports supporting Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy.”
The study cites several other studies which concluded the same thing. So there is no evidence of a relationship between vaccination and miscarriages and there is no spike in miscarriages to find a cause for.
5. Jack says cancer incidence is “exploding.” The American Cancer Society’s database on cancer shows no such explosion. It shows a more or less holding pattern for number of cases and a distinct downward trend for the last 20 or 30 years for deaths from cancer. It is, of course, true that people on cancer treatment can have a bad time with vaccination due to threats to the immune system; however, there is a clear workaround. It is no less true that cancer patients are more susceptible to SARS CoV2 infections so that Covid deaths include cancer deaths. But there has been no explosion of people getting cancer or any ties between getting cancer and the vaccination.
6. Similarly, with heart problems. Jack’s claim about explosions here are equally but more complicatedly false. There is no question that people with heart conditions have died from Covid when they might not have without Covid, but these are deaths due to Covid and not deaths due to the vaccine. We expect, therefore, an increase number of deaths from heart failure but not necessarily an increase incidence of heart problems. It turns out that some studies show vaccination does increase the cases of heart problems, especially among young men. However, the numbers and thus the percentages are pretty small (though significant): 224 verified cases of heart muscle and peripheral muscle inflammation 3 months after about 7 million doses of vaccination. See https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-227. How serious is this? A relatively small study conducted 90 days after the emergence of heart muscle problems in 500 patients showed that these had resolved so that the patients led better lives than before. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36152650/.
I don’t even want to bother thinking about why and how Jack came to make these false assertions. Let’s just say that this comment is full of fake facts that are the more dangerous publicly because asserted so casually they can so easily be picked up casually and then repeated casually.
A correction. It is mRNA and not rDNA in last post.
Kyle’s mistakes are almost always the same: reducing any complexity, especially numerical complexity (and therefore statistical meaning) to not just two-dimensionality but one dimensionality. As a result, Kyle misreads and also misstates what he reads.
If Kyle returns to his 1970s Oxford English Dictionary under “immune” he will find the following example of its use, “But . . . we are never ‘immune’ altogether from the contagion.” That says, I believe, that immunity (and therefore vaccines) is never a question of it-is-or-it-isn’t. It’s a statistical question of a fraction between 0 and 1.0. It’s about effectiveness. That statistical notion is built into the dictionary definition of the word “immunity” and therefore should be understood and used that way.
Kyle is wrong. The four approved vaccines for Covid are vaccines, and they do confer immunity. How much immunity? You decide: among about 6,500,000 people in Israel, the number of unvaccinated person-days who got Covid was 91.5 out of every 100,000 person-days but the number of vaccinated person-days who got Covid was 3.1 person-days. A person-day is a person multiplied by the number of days the person was at risk and followed during the study, so that it reduces the difference between people studied to a same time period of observation. You can read the study yourself at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621009478, but I think the difference between 91.5 and 3.1 is pretty huge. The vaccines in this study are 95.3% effective. This study was done after only 4 months of Israel’s vaccination campaign. Since then there are many, many such studies with different groups of people, in different countries, with different methods, all showing the same thing. See this American study of 11 million people: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm. The vaccines produce immunity, though not totally, in people.
Similarly, many studies have shown that the vaccines do reduce transmission very significantly, which is what we, collectively, want, even if some of us, individually, argue against it. Reduction is again not a stop-or-not-stop question but a numbers question. We really don’t need statistical proof to remember that we were in a huge spike of cases and deaths from Covid when the vaccines were issued and the vaccines reduced those numbers so rapidly and drastically that people started thinking the epidemic was over.
Thank you Max for the time spent to show me the errors of my ways and thinking. I do acknowledge your ability as a wordsmith to make your points and demean your ‘opponent’ at the same time. I appreciate your willingness to expose your readers to my positions. Only time will tell who is misinformed as dominant narrative unravels – Covid, shots, election, FTX, Twitter, climate change and the Ukraine war.
I had hoped that we could open a dialog to discuss the many issues confronting our community, a dialog desperately needed on our 3 community platforms – the ‘Sentinel’, KCHS and the ‘Citizen’. I would not say the Right and Left, because Francis has no politics and controls both newspaper and radio content to sell ads and feed her ego – the ‘Voice of T or C’.
Nor would I call the ‘Citizen’ Left because of the lifestyles of its members having never known cultural experiences that created the class warfare that Marx described.
Having ‘woken up’ after 2 tours in Vietnam I realized that I had better start thinking for myself after my ‘Time/Life’ liberal ideas got me there and opened my eyes. Upon return to the land of the ‘big PX’ I got involved in the antiwar movement and lived in a commune dedicated to the protection of Herbert Marcuse, a prof at San Diego and a member of the German Franklin School. We started an antiwar newspaper and formed an organization – Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM). Nixon attributed part of his pull out of Vietnam to being unable to trust his awakened and bloodied soldiers.
I then moved up to Berkeley for my graduate work in Socialism/Communism. The occupation of Alcatraz happened and I worked with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and spent time supporting Wounded Knee and the FBI shoot out on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
I will not bore you with the evolution of my political thought as I became one of the first radical environmentalists in Washington State – a good story with a great ending. I never became a Republican – the Right wing of the War Party (now uni party), walked the Capitalist road for a while, and bought the Charles Motel and Bath house in T or C. Been trying to help the community realize the gift of the Hot water – for both economic and Spiritual health of the ‘City of Health’ for ~25 years.
I trust that you publish this in good faith. You have made, as have others, your position and control very clear. I honor that and trust that as conditions worsen we can put aside our ideological differences come together and make decisions based on (knowledge) the survival of the next 7 generations and not the size of our bank accounts and egos.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
“We can only know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
Leo Tolstoy
Thank you, Jack. It helps enormously in the discussion to know where you are coming from. The community, if there is one, is privileged to have someone in it of your background and experience. Since I am moving in my entropy series into areas you are familiar with, I hope for more comments from you in the future.
You mention my control, which is apt, but the control that I exercise in approving or not approving comments has certain easily understood objective limits; that is, they are neither whimsical nor self-protective. I publish comments about the essays, that is, about the topic, about the way the essay is argued (the facts or the reasoning), as long as they are about the essay. In so far as the text of the essay is out in public and somewhat fixed, it is no longer just my personal opinion. Publication transforms personal utterances into public texts that become then the object that is shared in public.
I think of the comment and response as a discussion, like a very slow, drawn-out conversation. Like a conversation, I would like the discussants to listen to each other, to engage each other, in agreement, in disagreement, and in extending the topic. That means to me, a comment has to engage (like gears engaging) in what I write; that is, consider the arguments, check the facts, read the references. And in response, I will listen to the comment. I read the references; I think about what is said and how it is said; I wonder about the implications of the comment. Without engagement on both parts, the reader of the text and me as reader of the comments, there is no engagement, just gears without cogs, spinning away in their private spaces. Engagement can drive the vehicle forward.
Public discussion, as you recognize, should be shorn of ego. My decision to publish a comment transforms something personal into a public object, and when I write a reply, my response is not about the person but about the public object. In that sense, no one should feel personally slightly by my responses. They are responses to what is said and not to the person who wrote it. Commentators need to realize that publication separates the ego from the text. Publication means letting go.
My control of this process, then, is circumscribed by my idea of what a comment is, what a textual object is, and what public discussion is. While there is a good deal of me in those judgments, they all depend on an attempt to respect an objective world of shared ideas rather than using the platform as a megaphone of my subjective whims.
You speak of our differences in ideology. I’m not sure what my ideology is. One of my intentions in writing this series is to find that out. I think you can tell by my writing that I do not write to express some pre-conceived idea. I write to think, and I notice what I write. So far, my ideology, if I have one, seems wedded to an extensive metaphor of the difference between the many and the one (collective equality vs. individual rights; collective knowledge vs. individual psychological limits; statistical imagination vs. causal particularity; and now public vs personal) and these in a context of growing randomness. Is that my ideology?
No, Kyle was mistaken. The topic of my essays is not Covid and the deaths at the Vets. They are mentioned in the context of something else, which is also related to Adams and Jefferson. For example, I mention the deaths at the Vets as an example of how the policy of privacy prevented us from memorializing the victims. If you return to that first substantive article, you will see that a large second part of the article deals with the concept of rights, and in that turn of thought I prominently discuss the Declaration of Independence.
I’m sorry Kyle did not follow the argument, which caused him repeatedly to submit comments that I did not think appropriate for extending the discussion. Those rejections, then, seemed to have caused him to complain that I censored him because he had different opinions. No, he was not censored for differing. His remarks were rejected for being not pertinent.
Kyle says he read and interpreted what I say. But it seems he did not interpret correctly. Just because you have an interpretation, does not meant you understand the writer’s intent. My whole discussion of objectivity in this response to Jack depends on the reader figuring out the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. Objectivity is something shareable. Subjectivity is not. Your interpretation is subjective, and if it doesn’t match the objective meaning of the text or help the public discussion about the objective meaning, it is simply objectively wrong, and of no public interest (though obviously, we all love our subjective takes on things).
Kyle says that he understands that publication (making things public) is a loss of control. That is not what I was saying. It’s another example of misreading, i.e., misinterpretation. When I say publication is letting go, “letting go” means letting go of subjectivity, transforming what you say to something objective. A commentator has total control of what he or she ways objectively by crafting their words, thinking before concluding, reasoning, citing references for facts, getting facts objectively correct, etc. If you don’t do that, your comment is not very suited to the objective, public debate. Kyle says that people’s interpretations are their own. No, people’s interpretations are their own until they are published. Then those interpretations are public objects. That is why for me to refute what I publish of Kyle’s submissions is not a personal attack (as he has accused me of doing) but a refutation of an objective, impersonal statement or claim. I’d do it whoever made that claim or statement. That is the world of public discussion which is impersonal, objective, and made of shareable thought structures, ideas, and facts.
As for Kyle’s clamor about treatment and cure (made three times in various unpublished complaints), it seems to me really inappropriate for being 1) an old personal grudge from a public dispute we had about Ivermectin several years ago in the Sierra County Sun and 2) simply wrong. Kyle objects to my saying that Ivermectin was not considered a cure for Covid. He claims he never said that it was a cure but that it was a treatment, and by confusing medical terms, I show my ignorance about anything medical. First, I meant what I said. Ivermectin is not recognized as a cure. See one of the latest surveys of studies: M.S. Marcolina, et als., “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Ivermectin for Treatment of Covid-19,” https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-022-07589-8. I’m not a medical expert, but I report what the experts say. Second, while Ivermectin is used in the many dozens of trials in the past few years as a possible treatment for Covid, it is not a generally acceptable treatment because there seems no probability that it leads to a cure, and I think in the medical world and outside that world, we don’t want a treatment that doesn’t have a chance of curing. Third, in “Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary,” “cure” is defined as “1) the course of treatment of any disease, or of a special case, 2) the successful treatment of a disease or wound, 3) a system of treating diseases, 4) a medicine effective in treating a disease.” I repeat: Ivermectin is not a cure (or treatment) for Covid. Please, don’t think otherwise.
“Conspiracy is usually a better explanation and closer to the truth than incompetence and fraud in most human activity.” — Mark Twain
Thank you Max for publishing my last comment. Responding to your articles was pretty much my last ditch attempt to begin conversations with the writers of the Sun’s articles. Previous comments on articles were rejected without any explanation or dialogue. One was a non-political comment about goats being used for environmental restoration. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to be allowed to have this conversation with you. Hard to stay within the created boundaries if we do not know where they are.
Growing up in a military family, my natural childhood resistance became a guiding premise throughout my life – Question Authority. I feel that much of the conflict these days is based on those who still believe that there are ‘experts’ and that ‘true science’ is still being followed. I think that Dr. Fauci made this a very clear when he decreed that “I am science”. It has become very clear these days that scientific results are often determined by money and not morality.
I am going to go out on a limb here and respond to your response to Kyle about Ivermectin. In a previous comment you referenced the American Cancer Society which is certainly part of the agreed upon narrative. Can one actually believe these days that the pharmaceutical industrial complex has any desire at all to cure cancer? Curing diseases is not a good business model.
The discovery of Ivermectin 1975 was a great boon to the world as a treatment for parasites. It’s off label use for other medical symptoms has clearly threatened the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. When it became a topic for a response to Covid, the money rushed to science to ‘prove’ that it was ineffective. We have learned that roughly $10+ million from the FTX scam went to a study that showed this. The word went out from TPTB, reputable ‘experts’ jumped on the bandwagon, broadcast by the mainstream media that horse paste was ineffective and probably dangerous. So fear, being a coinage of manipulation – achieved its goal.
It is the same with other cures as defined in Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary . Vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc were also shown to be highly effective at reducing and minimizing Covid (what ever it is) dangers. Remember when vitamin D was in everything? Why do you think it was removed by Rockefeller medicine? A study was performed in Chicago that showed that vitamin D supplements for people with dark skin primarily African-Americans would reduce the annual death rate locally by more than 50,000. How many times did you hear it recommended?
We are in the midst of what is being called “the great poisoning” – water, air, food etc.. Our immune systems are gradually being destroyed by these changes. There have been numerous other studies by professionals that have shown Ivermectin to be effective.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/health/ivermectin-is-safe-and-effective-the-evidence_4944960.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-12-28&src_cmp=mb-2022-12-28&utm_medium=email&est=FxRGAjaaljd0ItRMZmnnMFOwR3Bv%2FfX2BjInbgfoU%2FAseyNF4L8hta%2FdLdYfTA9L
So who do you believe?
My personal experience and theory is that the horse paste is extremely effective partly because it reduces the parasitic load on the body allowing our immune systems to focus on the primary threats. I know people who have cured their cancers, doctors who have prescribed it and it is an inexpensive response to sickness. It is cheap and has no negative effect. It is also a good defense from the shedding of Spike protein toxins. I have been using it for a couple of years.
If what I say is ‘misinformation’, so be it! Horse,water, drink. Turn off your television, question the New York Times and the Atlantic (MSnews) and research that which does not support ones cognitive bias. Meet the world and each moment in it with curiosity – not certainty.
Let me say first that I don’t think the comments and responses are a dialogue (two people). I did originally treat them as an open conversation; however, my thinking has evolved. I now think that this platform should be a discussion, public, and thus objective and de-personalized, and definitely not a bulletin board of opinions.
Jack brings up some very big issues, one of which I address in the body of “Assaying Entropy.” Some of these are off-base since they don’t deal with the subjects of my essays, but some can be used to further elaboration of what I am talking about in the series. I begin with the only really specific issue Jack brings up: the link to an article on Ivermectin.
About the article, Jack asks who do we believe. Though he means the question rhetorically, I want to answer that question as real because I think it relates to my discussion about thinking limitations. My answer is in two parts, don’t trust the messenger and don’t trust the message.
The article is published in Epoch Times. Epoch Times is associated with Falun Gong, a Chinese, now American religious cult with very strict beliefs and self-control practices, which is expressly anti-science, anti-medicine, espouses racial segregation in afterlife, and very evangelical (that is, into propaganda and advertising). I would seriously question what their editorial policy would be in publishing on medical science.
The article’s author is Coleen Huber, an Arizona doctor of Naturopathy, who filed an apparent SLAPP (Strategic Law Suit Against Public Participation) against another Naturopath for calling her a quack and lost in a German court. Since Naturopathy is a kind of commercialized branding of a bunch of popular (read, profitable) alternative practices, some sound, some demonstrably not sound, I don’t know that her training qualifies her to speak with understanding about either the mechanism of Ivermectin or the details of medical trials. But a look at her public activities, her website, and her writings shows her to be into self-branding and clever at creating non-profit organizations for self-benefit. Since, this article is excerpted from her self-branding book, I take what she says with great suspicion.
The article itself shows why this suspicion is justified. It cites numbers in its opening paragraphs without citation, giving the impression that she is their source. Many paragraphs later we are given the citation but not in reference to those numbers, only to some specific probability of error. This may be just very sloppy practice, but sloppiness is the issue. She later illustrates Ivermectin’s mechanism with an incomprehensible and unexplained diagram, which in the original study was intended to show a hypothesis on which the experimenters were going to do future work. Furthermore, this diagram was not about how Ivermectin might work in the human body but how it works in test tubes. I assume that the diagram demonstrates the author’s commitment to a bit of razzle-dazzle. No, I don’t trust this article as a report of the medical debate over Ivermectin.
And, it is a debate among practitioners, and that means to me Ivermectin has not been successfully demonstrated to be a cure for Covid. The technical arguments for Ivermectin as a cure are not found in self-serving articles such as this one. They are found in the combative website https://c19ivm.org/meta.html. This is the source of Huber’s numbers. These numbers are composite, pooled numbers derived from many different studies which use different medications, given at different dosages, at different stages of Covid, and almost all with very few patients. So, if you have, say, 100 different studies with an average of 10 patients in each getting Ivermectin in some form and no one dies in any of the studies from Covid can you really say that Ivermectin prevented Covid deaths rather than that statistically one would not expect any of a random group of 10 people to die from Covid within the time periods when they were watched? This is a ridiculous example, but it shows the problem with pooling. The researchers of this website are perfectly conscious of the problem, and try to deal with it in many ways, but the problem remains.
My example is ridiculous because I am not qualified to meddle in the debate on the technical level. Few of us are. But we are or should be qualified to trust or not trust reports about technical issues.
Jack’s acceptance of this article ignores his fundamental opposition to capitalistic power because the article demonstrates not an opposition to that power but an exercise of it. Has he forgotten Herbert Marcuse’s teaching that the system is the system by virtue of its absorption of opposition? Alternative medicine is big business. Someone earlier in this discussion said it: we are the enemy. That is a collective and not individual view.
Kyle’s comment demonstrates the cultural problem that I am trying to address in this series of essays. Here is an individual who says he does not understand what I say but at the same time discusses what I presumably said. What aspect of our culture produces that conundrum?
Kyle thinks that I said there is no treatment for Covid. Since, I never said that, his interpretation of what I did say (that Ivermectin was not a cure and therefore a not a rational treatment) simply acts out one of our normal erroneous illogical causes of fast thinking. However, that does not explain how he can at the same time say that he doesn’t follow the discussion and attribute to me his false understanding.
It seems to me that Kyle is showing us an example of an overblown sense of individuality and the resulting inability to imagine himself as a part of a collective which uses a shared language (not a personal, idiosyncratic, self-invented language) whose use publicly depends on interpreting objectively and correctly what is more or less intended or more or less objectively said in that language. Instead, Kyle thinks that all that matters is his interpretation, his subjective take, and it doesn’t matter at all what is objectively out there in the text, that is, these words in this order. Not only is what he reads just his interpretation, but he feels that having an interpretation gives him the right to broadcast it.
I will be looking in a later essay at the teaching of subjectivity in our schools since the 1970s as one of the possible cultural factors in the loss of a sense of a shared world, which can only be assumed to be objective in order to be shareable. We have to all be able to see and recognize a quarter as the same quarter if we are to talk about it. If you insist that from your point of viewing the quarter is a circle, and someone else insists that from his or her point of viewing the quarter is really a rectangle, there can be no discussion. An assumed objectivity (a collective idea in so far as it depends on a commonality of viewing) is what I keep harping on and what the culture has dismissed.