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Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Jul 10

If you were PRO-CHOICE, you would allow the 8.5 month old unborn a choice.

If you were PRO-PALESTINIAN, you would demand the elimination of its genocidal and brutal unelected oppressor, Hamas.

If you were FEMINIST, you would ensure biological men are not in women's sports and spaces.

If you were PRO-CHILDREN, you would not allow them to "consent" to permanent body-altering elective procedures.

If you were for FREE SPEECH, you wouldn't have supported the censorship of your opposition.

If you were for BODILY AUTONOMY, you wouldn't have pushed for mandatory masks and vaccines.

If you were PRO ENVIRONMENT, you would not give CO2 infinite weight and thereby abandon preserving wildlife and reducing pollution.

If you were PRO EDUCATION, you wouldn't have kept children out of school for months and years over a cold they had zero risk from.

If you valued THE POOR, you wouldn't incessantly battle the greatest boon to lower classes, the free market, as well as implementing other massively harmful interventions such as lockdowns, which disproportionately hurt the poor.

If you valued VOTER RIGHTS, you would ensure every vote is made via a citizen in person inside a voting booth; anything else threatens to undermine our voting rights.

If you valued SCIENCE, you would not make the mistake of presuming that your chosen "experts" are "The Science," when science, like free expression, works because of endless unfettered disagreements and discussion.

If you valued CIVIL LIBERTIES, you would for once actually value civil liberties, rather than claiming they must be "balanced" in order to give Y to group X.

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1786454481174921385

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https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1751063549860872213

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1751063549860872213

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Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Jun 25

I’m not here to make friends. That’s why I am egalitarian in who I go after, including social media silverbacks like Tucker Carlson, Neil Oliver, Matt Walsh — all who I targeted today — and so many others over the last several years.

The freedom leadership was shown in early 2020 to be worse than worthless, yet all those worthless unprincipled leaders are still here today, with more sway than ever.

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1613998585988714505

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Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Feb 22

COVID IS BIG FOOT [thread]

1/

What do Big Foot, ghosts and UFOs (or UAPs) — on the one hand — and climate change and Covid — on the other hand — have in common?

Surely very little, right?

The former, UFO-like stuff, are the illusory observations by fringe observers of questionable reliability.

The latter, such as Climate Change and Covid, are deemed to be serious threats to the world, and the arguments for that are made by some of the smartest and most educated scientists and intellectuals on Earth.

These two classes of beliefs are, however, much more similar than they at first appear.

——

ALTOGETHER NOVEL

First, they’re all about some completely new thing, heretofore not known to exist. The hypothesis in each case is, “This thing no one used to think exists actually exists!”

They are therefore inherently exciting, mysterious, and mystical, at the border of the known and unknown.

This is obvious for Big Foot, Loch Ness, ghosts and UFOs. That’s what fun about them: If the observations are right, there’s a whole new entity to add to the list of players in the universe!

How about Covid? If you remember, it was “altogether novel.” We heard that a hundred times per hour in February and March of 2020.

Climate change, too, is about the entirely new climate forces fossil fuels are claimed to have brought upon us.

If it’s entirely novel, that might imply we know absolutely nothing about it, and so all bets are off! All information we might possess about other things simply doesn’t help whatsoever in making sense of this new thing. That would mean our prior probability distributions on the many possible properties of the new thing would be flat. And that means that we basically throw out all common sense about the thing, something I talked about early on at Twitter.

But it’s worse than that, as we’ll see…

2/

BUT KINDA LIKE THIS

I said above that the hypothesis form they all share is, “This thing no one used to think exists actually exists!”

But that’s not quite right. It’s more specific than that. It’s not merely that some unknown thing might exist.

It’s that a very particular kind of unknown thing exists.

Big Foot isn’t just some monster, but an in-between-apes-and-humans creature. Loch Ness is the one dinosaur species that didn’t die out tens of millions of years ago (setting aside the birds, etc.). Ghosts are wispy, semi-transparent, usually humanoid apparitions with the power to go through walls and kinda sorta move things. UFOs can go really fast, don’t seem to have propulsion, can change direction arbitrarily quickly, can dive through oceans, seem utterly smooth and composite, and so on.

The narratives for each have a bit of give. They’re certainly broader than my above brief pointers in their general direction. But they stay within certain rough bounds, and we all kinda know them. If you write a Big Foot story but it’s a humanoid two-headed reptile then, nope, it ain’t Big Foot. A ghost story with hard metallic robots coming out of the toilet isn’t a ghost story.

Now, for Covid, notice that it wasn’t simply altogether novel. Instead, right away the narrative about Covid attributed to it hosts of fairly specific expected properties:

(a) its infection fatality rate (IFR) is super high

(b) there are few asymptomatics (and so IFR will be roughly the very high early CFR values)

(c) transmission is unprecedentedly high

(d) asymptomatics can spread it

(e) it’s disproportionately risky for the young

(f) no one is safe, comorbidities or no

(g) it will hit the entire population (and so let’s multiply CFR by total population and see the total expected deaths)

(h) immunity doesn’t apply

(i) herd immunity can’t happen

(j) it leaves you with chronic health issues

(k) seasonality does not apply (i.e., the epidemic doesn’t have a tendency to come, and go, at a typical time of year, like almost all other viruses do)

(l) it goes away only via intervention policies (lockdowns, masks, etc.)

(m) all variation in epidemic severity is due to intervention policy

(n) a vaccine will be easy to build soon, and super effective

…and what sums most of them up fairly nicely is, “Covid is expected to be like the viruses found in the most dystopian horror flicks about pandemics.” (Along of course with “and only our greatest expert minds and the power of the state can possibly save us.”)

And, for Climate Change, it’s usually not merely that the climate will change. No, the narrative is filled with a certain suite of devastating and apocalyptic changes: some places becoming deserts, some forever flooded, some experiencing permanent deathly winter, and a surfeit of natural disasters such as hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. The narrative of climate change is definitely not, say, that the world will be a little warmer and greener.

So, these aren’t mere hypotheses about unknowns. They’re hypotheses about a construct within an existing narrative.

3/

DISPROPORTIONATELY DANGEROUS

And, these ideas aren’t merely fairly specific things we already have long-lived narratives about. Rather, as is clear from running through them above, each of these is really dangerous. They’re monsters or deadly threats. That was part of each of the narratives.

Big Foot and Loch Ness are literal monsters. Ghosts are clearly dangerous — there’s a whole ghost story industry of books and movies scaring the shit out of their audiences. And UFOs are dangerous both personally at the kidnap-and-anal-probing level, and societally because they’re millions of years beyond the power of our military.

Covid, if you recall, wasn’t merely “altogether novel.” That phrase was invariably followed by “and disproportionately dangerous.” The infection fatality rate was originally said to be several percent, and the public actually thought the infection fatality rate was ten times higher than that (38% in one poll of the Australian public, and the average U.S. respondent thought 9% of the population was already dead by Covid by summer 2020). (Note that I’m not suggesting Covid doesn’t exist. The issue is the suite of properties it was claimed to possess.)

And climate change is obviously touted as the ultimate slow-motion apocalyptic disaster, which is why for decades anyone driving a Hummer was obviously somehow involved in genocide.

All these things concern deadly other-worldly chimeras writ large. They’re not at all simply hypotheses about the arrival of some thus far unknown thing. They’re each more akin to a mythical creature, or a mythical cataclysm more akin to the Great Flood or Armageddon.

Read 7 tweets

Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Aug 20, 2023

The president supported violating civil liberties en masse, and the following aren’t excuses:

- “if he hadn’t supported lockdowns they would have crucified him”

- “it was supposed to be for just two weeks”

- “no one knew much”

- “he was duped”

loofwired.com/p/four-videos-…

loofwired.com/p/just-two-wee…

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Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Aug 10, 2023

Sam Harris making the ethically incorrect claim that our civil liberties depend on data.

Our freedom does not depend on the IFR.

Our freedom does not depend on whether a vaccine is sterilizing.

A high IFR virus would NOT justify tyranny.

loofwired.com/p/were-at-risk…

Our civil liberties aren’t empirical, but absolute. Four videos from my Moment series on why freedom is especially FOR the perceived emergencies.

loofwired.com/p/four-videos-…

Read 13 tweets

Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Jul 21, 2023

— FREE EXPRESSION —
— the thread from hell —

The world has long lost its memory of the importance of free expression. But over the last three years of Covid the world has rapidly acted on its ignorance. The average person agitated for censorship of Covid “misinformation,” and governments proudly took the lead.

I was one of the millions censored. I am part of the first First Amendment lawsuit against the U.S. government. I started a research institute devoted to understanding and fighting for free expression. I have a new book on the origins and importance of human expression.

And… I have a video series — the Science Moment — that has a hundred videos on the many complex and counterintuitive dimensions of free expression.

Free expression is NOT simple. There is a strong intuition that the state (or other centralized fact checkers) should simply only allow true speech. Why not?

Answering that requires understanding how truth is actually found, and how decentralized networks can be insanely powerful.

In this series of Science Moment videos I cover a lot of ground, and — if you stick with the whole series — you will come away with a whole new appreciation for the richness of free expression.

Keep coming back to this thread, as it may take some time for the videos to get uploaded. You can also find the “censorship playlist” at YouTube (), but here at Twitter I want the videos themselves, not links to elsewhere.

Here we go!