After half a million views, an outpouring of emotional positive responses, no complaints about veracity & 100 likes for every dislike, @pandata19’s BizNews presentation, "The Ugly Truth about the COVID-19 Lockdowns" was deplatformed by YouTube. 1/4 odysee.com/@PANDA:3b/Time…
Censoring speech, let alone true speech, is evil, and YouTube has gone Stalinist. We must fight this darkness. George Washington: “Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light.” Please help us to get this message out there. 2/4
In addition to censoring @BizNewsCOM's channel, YouTube saw fit to remove @pandata19's interview of the great Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, hero of the Swine Flu scandal of 2009, which had been up since December. This was one of my favourites. 3/4 odysee.com/@PANDA:3b/pand…
The pattern here is that true words are the ones that must go. The narrative of frauds like Fauci, Drosten & Tedros is false, & the standard that YouTube & co have set is that their narrative must not be contradicted. We must rise up against this encroaching darkness. 4/4
And with that the right to privacy is obliterated by blindly algorithmic application of “Sustainable Development Goal” 16.9. Are you getting the picture? Do you see how iniquitous this is? Eventually all your freedoms will be taken away and nothing will be left of your life. 🧵
As with the “covid” mandates there is no cost-benefit analysis, let alone any consideration of the deleterious cpnsequences. Just a rule and its blunt application. Even your right to life will be destroyed in this fashion. Especially that one, actually.
Because protecting biodiversity is also a goal, and, tragically, you aren’t diverse enough. Nah, just kidding. Your right to life will be taken away in stealthier fashion. Inexorably, by an ever tightening noose of constraints & mandates with which you will be forced to comply.
I can’t quite pinpoint the pathology of thought going on here, but it’s severe and, if his testimony regarding the opinions of “AI” thought leaders is accurate, then it’s pretty darn widespread too. 🧵
We’re no closer now than we were 1,000 years ago to having an algorithm that codes for creativity, by which I mean, following David Deutsch, the generation of novel general explanations for the workings of reality.
Averaging over the totality of human expressions will never deliver that. Adding more data, better averaging algorithms or faster chips won’t help any more than a faster pocket calculator will help you do more accurate multiplication.
THE PROBLEM WITH CENTRALISATION
Text and slides from my November 2023 presentation to at the Romanian Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. /1
1. Complexity theory and the epistemology of centralisation
A constant source of wonder & curiosity for me is how complex our world is: ecologies, society, immune systems, the banking system, social order, climate—all of them are staggering both in their complexity & in the infinite potential that complexity implies for knowledge growth to fill the void of ignorance. /2
In complex systems there is no algorithm that you can run to get to a "right answer"—some reliable prediction of the outcomes that will flow from a shock to the system, or some forecast of how the system will evolve over time. The notion that such systems can be summarised by parsimonious models, and that such models can be used as tools to control them is entirely illusory. Utilitarians want to perform a calculation delivering an answer that maximises utility, or the general good, or public health, or whatever objective they have decided to obsess about at any particular juncture. But they’re mistaken. When we're dealing with complex systems and trying to solve problems in complex dimensions, the only route that can take us forward is the system of trial and error, also known as evolution.
Evolution is a process of creative conjecture and criticism. Ideas experimented with on the margin, implemented in a gradual and piecemeal fashion and tested by their real world results can slowly cause a complex system to evolve in a way that promotes human flourishing. A necessary condition for this is freedom, which top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches do not entail. And all of this is central to the very notion of the scientific method.
In the biological world, innovation takes place at the level of sexual blending of genomes, or less importantly, mutation, and the criticism takes place in the real world—by way of what is sometimes called a fitness test. Other domains of knowledge are no different. Deduction, design and linear thinking play no role. And the illusion that they do is at the heart of utilitarianism. This puts the utilitarian worldview squarely at odds with the very fabric of reality. /3
I laid out my views on whether there was a pandemic below. Short version—under a sensible definition of the term, there wasn’t one. I’ve not seen direct rebuttal of this, but it seems to be at the heart of the fracas. /2
Separately, the argument for the stability of long RNA viruses seems to hinge on a sort of group selection assumption. Group selection arguments come in various forms, ranging from dubious and contentious to batshit crazy. /3
Cape Town, my home, is a gorgeous city. In addition to the standard lockdown nonsense, South Africa's added extreme duration and a plethora of absurdities, such as bans on selling open-toed shoes and hot chickens.
THREAD
As elsewhere, small businesses were targeted while large ones were privileged. The City's restaurant trade, long a mark of pride, was gutted. But, testifying to the power of decentralised economies, it has come roaring back, and not by way of proliferation of boring chains.
While Europe's hospitality industry has never recovered its former glory, Cape Town is now comfortably exceeding its past standards. I take my hat off to the proprietors who made it through, and the ones who learnt lessons and started afresh.
The most important interview of the Covid era? Wolfgang @wodarg talks with @jjcouey. There is a personal aspect to this, which I document below for those who are interested, but don't allow that to distract from listening to this sweeping assessment. /1 twitch.tv/videos/2037237…
I don't recall how it occurred, but in late 2020, when I was 9 months into railing against Covid malarkey, someone connected me with Dr Wodarg. I knew the WHO had long been captured, and that he'd fought against a fake pandemic & its vaccine sham. /2 pandata.org/wolfgang-wodar…
We found common ground on so much. The problem with centralisation, the virtues of subsidiarity, a shared sense of the obvious fraud that was being perpetrated. Most of all I knew I was speaking with a real human and a deep thinker. /3