Thread by @ConceptualJames

One of the most important lessons I've ever learned came from the skeptic community, and it's this: scientists are almost always completely useless, or worse than useless, at detecting and unmasking deception. We must be cautious, as we've learned, with deference to scientists.🧵

Understanding why scientists are frequently worse than useless, often a positive liability, in matters of deception is a matter of understanding what scientists do: they work to understand and give explanations to phenomena observed in reality.

The trouble with scientists is that they very frequently (though not always) take the observed phenomena at face value. They might eventually get there and realize deception is a part of it, but it tends to take them a long time, during which the deception continues.

I learned this watching a video of an Indonesian magic man who could allegedly use his magical body energy (qi or whatever) to do all kinds of fantastical things, including lighting light bulbs and doing electroshock acupuncture therapy to people, which might have helped them.

Scientists surrounded the guy, studying the phenomenon, taking all kinds of measurements, doing all kinds of tests, etc., on the amount of energy and whatnot, trying to plausibly connect it to the action he was taking by moving his abdomen in a particular way and left baffled.

There are entire books written about things like this, by the way, some by scientists taking up more and less plausible lines about the phenomena they think they're studying. In this case, a stage magician (who works in deception) realized the guy had a battery in his buttcrack.

Because of the high humidity or whatever other conditions, the guy could sometimes work up enough current to get certain things to work, I guess across his skin or whatever, IDK. The point was, the sham was easily seen through not by scientists but by a stage magician.

The reason for the discrepancy is that stage magicians work in deception while scientists tend to (but don't always!) take the observed phenomena at face value and try to work out how it works on the deceptive terms given to them. Thus the scientists get fooled and make it worse.

Scientists would, I think, eventually get to the bottom of it, so no shade against them for that, but it's very important to remember that their first tendency isn't to suspect deception but to explain the phenomena as they present themselves, which fails with deceptions.

The lesson I learned is to always be more skeptical about something that seems a little too good to be true or rather unbelievable, seemingly defying what we already know with high certainty (e.g., through common sense) about reality and its workings.

It's definitely the case that much that occurs in reality is non-intuitive, and the sciences have been great at uncovering and explaining many such phenomena, but a very healthy skepticism is almost always warranted around highly non-intuitive or bizarre phenomena.

This is particularly relevant today, though kind of tangentially, because we occupy a political warfare environment filled with propaganda and deliberate deception, including what I call "telling the truth, falsely," in which truths are told in an intentionally misleading way.

Furthermore, much of the behavior we see online is not at all organic. It's paid for. It's bots. It's foreign influence. If you take these phenomena at face value and try to explain them, like believing Woke or Woke Right is "just happening" organically, you miss everything.

Woke is and was funded. Woke is and was funded in a coordinated attack against our society. It did not bubble out of the ground, though homegrown Woke Marxists are part of it, for sure. It got funded and structured into existence in a deliberate attack. Woke Right is the same.

If you run around saying "oh, well these people lacked something like religion and are looking for an outlet," "and it's social media these days!" you're missing the key variable (the battery in the buttcrack): that it's only a big thing because someone is paying $$$ to make it.

Most historical currents are not in fact organic movements, in all likelihood. Most historical currents are carefully orchestrated, if rather wild and unpredictable, operations funded by big money and power brokers who want to achieve certain ends in the world. Ex: WWI & WWII.

If your analysis doesn't include this more skeptical, cynical element, your analysis is like "science" explaining how the magic man can generate current using his dantien in his abdomen even though that's not what's going on at all to really produce the results we see.