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Mark Changizi - LooFWIRED.com Mag Profile picture
Mark Changizi - LooFWIRED.com Mag
@MarkChangizi
Philosopher-Scientist, https://t.co/Bm8ym5R3id — Inventor of the world’s only Vein Finder Glasses and Colorblindness Glasses that work, https://t.co/5EtNMrrO4n
Mr. Ted Silberstein Profile picture The Mind Boggles Profile picture karl Jackson Profile picture 3 subscribed
Feb 22 • 7 tweets • 8 min read
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.
Aug 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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-…
Aug 10, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
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…
Jul 21, 2023 • 86 tweets • 41 min read
— 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!
Image Moment 54 — Nov 23, 2020
Gossip is the cure for censorship.

Jul 17, 2023 • 23 tweets • 9 min read
1/ On March 10, 2020, when I first spoke out against Covid irrationality, I had not appreciated how radical (and risky to my career) my common sense stance was.
2/ But fast forward a couple days, and the culture had noticeably transitioned. A phase change had occurred, and most of the populace had become zombies.
May 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
They fired, banished and denied medical treatment to the unvaccinated, even though (1) the vax didn’t slow transmission, (2) it wouldn’t make epidemiological sense to urge the unvaccinated to cluster even if it did, (3) almost everyone had already gotten and recovered from Covid… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… (1) The vax didn’t slow transmission.

May 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
🚨
Freedom of Information Request to Scottish Government reveals that…

“Over a three-year period in Scotland, there were zero deaths from ‘the Covid–19 virus’ amongst the employment sectors most in contact with the public (including doctors, nurses, shop workers, police, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
May 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Apr 14, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
ME: Even Pol Pot was well-intentioned, and there is no greater evil.

THEM: WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING POL POT! HE’S EVIL!!!!
Apr 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Excerpts from "The Power of the Powerless" - Vaclav Havel, 1978

1/ TOTALITARIANISM MUST BE UNDERSTOOD HOLISTICALLY
“Here, by the way, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2/ NO DIABOLICAL MASTER PLANNER
“The fact that human beings have created, and daily create, this self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity is not therefore the result of some incomprehensible misunderstanding of history, nor is it… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Apr 12, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Apr 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
DALL-E created this image of a paramedic and nurse wearing VINO OPTICS Vein Finder Glasses.

These people don’t exist, but our tech most certainly does. #veinfinder
Apr 2, 2023 • 57 tweets • 14 min read
Lest we forget just how totalitarian things got with Covid, please leave in the comments example where individuals, groups or companies went beyond what was mandated to “help save us from Covid.” I’ll start with a couple of the most obvious:

~ Masking outdoors: Billions of people wore masks outdoors, despite it not being mandated.

~ Snitches: Millions of people went out of their way to enforce the mask mandates, despite not having any responsibility for doing so.
Mar 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
— Early viewing of Moment 359 —

Societal level evil is always done in the name of, and has the intent to, “help” human life.

It’s simply vacuously true that they think they’re doing good.

But they’re in fact not, and they’re evil.

People with a such a high “regard” for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mar 22, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Why does it matter that I insist that it was not a Plandemic?

It matters because it is one of many MANY impossibilities in the claim that this was all due to a Plandemic.

And, most of all, it matters because if one just believes this is all due to evil FreeX.group… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mar 22, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The Plandemic-ers have become — for more than two years — a righteous cult of their own.

I have devoted three years of my life trying to explain and prevent the dangerous totalitarian situation we found ourselves in with Covid.

But because as a scientist I know it’s not a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Playlist on culpability at the societal level. youtube.com/playlist?list=…
Mar 21, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
🛎️ Perceived Emergencies 🔔
🛎️ Do Not Justify 🔔
🛎️ Violating Civil Liberties 🔔

1/ There will be a next perceived emergency. If it looks sufficiently different than what we just experienced w/ Covid, most won’t generalize from their experience at all. 2/ For example, I have found that individuals in my Iranian community are no more likely to have seen the totalitarian flavor of what transpired for Covid, despite themselves fleeing something similar.
Mar 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 7 min read
🔥🎦 SCIENCE MOMENT 357 🎦🔥

The Precautionary Principle’s cousin, the Culpability Principle.

This is the principle that should guide us to uncover the full richness of their crimes-against-humanity interventions.

@tracybeanz 
@naomirwolf 
@VigilantFox 
@KanekoaTheGreat 
@jeffreytucker 
@kylenabecker 
@DrJBhattacharya 
@MichaelPSenger  
@TheChiefNerd 
@RealJoelSmalley 
@RWMaloneMD 
@Jikkyleaks 
@RealJermWarfare
Mar 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Who’s controlling these complex behaviors by starlings?

LOCKDOWNERS: Controlled by smart Public Flock Bird Officials

PLANDEMIC-ERS: Controlled by Public Flock Officials, but THEY are being controlled by Klaus the Crow and friends THEM: But humans aren’t starlings!

ME: Yeah, we’re individually much more complex, and collectively much MUCH more complex.

THEM:

ME: So stop thinking you can understand societal level events simply in terms of someone in charge.
Mar 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Levels of culpability for pushing the interventions.

1. Elected leaders
2. Government officials
3. Public health experts
4. Public intellectuals
5. Journalists
6. Academics
7. Public intellectuals who kept silent
8. Academics who kept silent
9. Regular folk
10. Regular folk… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mar 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Most people wouldn’t recognize the arrival of tyranny even if it

1/ banned church services

2/ shut down their business

3/ forced them to stay home

4/ stopped schooling their kids

5/ lost them their job cuz “inessential”

6/ kept sick family from seeing their loved ones

7/… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Why they don’t believe they violated anyone’s civil liberties.