Is mRNA Research Tail-Wagging Dog-Ma?
— Chaplains & Medics vs. Priests & Doctors: Courage vs. Compliance
As a young lieutenant newly arrived on a submarine tender, I went to the bridge to observe the ship's maneuvering out of port (a quarterly event.) The submarine squadron commander, an admiral, was riding as well. The 22,000-ton ship, with a large freeboard, got caught by a strong cross-wind and was being pushed onto a submarine moored behind the tender. The Officer Of the Deck (OOD) and the civilian pilot seemed perplexed and unable to adjust the ship's course, and just before events became in extremis, the admiral's deep voice ordered "All Back Full!"
The ship shook and the stern started to rotate away from the submarine's bow. A brief intervention, since the backing bell was not left on for long, prevented a collision alongside the pier. After that the OOD and pilot were able to guide the ship out to the channel. [Years later I would use a similar maneuver on my submarine.]
Twenty-five years after this event, in charge of an inspecting team onboard another surface ship, with my boss, an admiral onboard, that vessel lost propulsion in a channel. As the ship veered course and headed towards the breakwater, I started to intervene, — the admiral stopped me and calmy watched as events unfolded. Just moments before the bow reached large boulders, propulsion was restored (my team had intervened in the engine-room, shifting from inspecting to assisting in order to recover the plant.) Another Deus et machina where seniors with more experience intervened just in time.
The last two years of pseudoscience and psychological panic have caused me to ponder and left me wondering why there was no intervention from those in leadership positions, — the priests, rabbis, pastors and the doctors, medical practitioners. In wartime, when bullets are flying and the only certainty of the battlefield is death, chaplains and medics run out to succor and assist the wounded and dying. What is it that brings out that unfazed courage or the cowed compliance we've experienced?
At first sight it might appear that it's a question of science, — of the validity of correlation and causation. But then again, why didn't doctors question the singular narrative of vaccine safety and effectiveness, why the mass compliance?
"[Carl] Sagan realize[d] that pseudoscience and fallacious arguments abound. He believe[d] an informed, scientifically minded public [was] necessary to prevent 'becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.' Suckers are born from both accidental poor reasoning and from deliberate fraud." —Chad E Brack, 11.11.2019 Thoughts on Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit, Brackforce - quintessential mediocrity
Here's Carl Sagan's Baloney (B.S.) Detection Kit (#BDK):
· Independent confirmation of the “facts.”
· Substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
· Arguments from authority carry little weight —in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
· Spin more than one hypothesis. Think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests to systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being correct.
· Don't get overly attached to a hypothesis. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Why do you like the idea? Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
· Quantify. Attach some measure, some numerical quantity to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. There are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
· Every link in the chain of argument must work (including the premise) — not just most of them
· Occam’s Razor — faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.
· Can the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, be falsified? Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much and are incapable of disproof. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
Are our #BDK (B.S.) meters pegged or broken?
• Independent confirmation? no
• Substantive debate? no
• Enthroning authority? yes
• More than 1 hypothesis? no
• Attachment to 1 hypothesis? yes
• Quantification? False PCR data
• Solid links in argument chain? Chimeric virus
• Hypothesis falsification? Trial data sealed for 75 years
The covid narrative fails all 9 of Carl Sagan's B.S. detection premises! "The amount of energy necessary to refute [male bovine fecal matter] is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it," — (2013) Alberto Brandolini.
As far as deliberate fraud, yes (please see, Katherine Eban (31 Mar 2022), “This Shouldn’t Happen”: Inside the Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak Controversy", Vanity Fair.) The virus was chimeric and the cover-up extensive. But what about the poor reasoning that turned most of the world into suckers? Why did that fail us?
Let's try another angle: physical science, where causality applies. "A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines. .... When confronted with the doctored results, Thomas told investigators, "Yeah, that looks bad," the Justice Department said. She suggested that in some cases she changed the tests to passing grades because she thought it was "stupid" that the Navy required the tests to be conducted at negative-100 degrees Fahrenheit." — 9.11.2021, Metallurgist Elaine Thomas pleads guilty to fraud after falsifying steel-test results for Navy submarines— Tests were intended to show steel would not fail in submarines' collisions or in certain 'wartime scenarios'
Clearly Ms. Thomas did not understand what the brittle-fracture tests she was certifying were meant to prove, but at least tests were being conducted (although the US Navy was apparently not doing quality control checks to verify their veracity) and documented.
Generally, in engineering "the [service] duty depends on application, but falls into one of two categories: that within the ‘design intent’ and that associated with (postulated) ‘accident’ events. Both must be addressed in safety justifications." In the case of submarines, battle shock, surfacing under arctic ice, collisions, etc. are all plausible accidents that require stringent adherence to metallurgical standards. — John Knott (2015) Brittle fracture in structural steels: different perspectives at different size scales, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Wait a minute here, isn't that what just happened with the mRNA emergency use injection authorization with insufficient data and the lack of studies on adverse effects? The premise was an "innocuous" functioning mechanism of an experimental vaccine without a thoughtful examination of adverse events? Everything was assumed to go right.
The real fault is not just circular logic or of statistical correlation and causality, — it is a failing of the heart: not everything can be quantified or should be assigned a number. The cruelty of socially distancing loved ones from a dying person or masking children and injecting them with an experimental gene therapy ... the failure lies in our hearts
. We have several thousand years of history that shows us that humans are non-rational creatures and we know that heuristics and biases allow our brains to function solving major problems when quick decisions are needed. But brains function poorly when there’s:
1. Information overload
2. Noisy signals
3. Fast reaction requirements
4. Choosing salient memories
Problem 1: Too much information. We have no choice but to filter almost all of it out with a few simple tricks to pick out the bits most likely to be useful in some way.
Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.
We don’t see everything. Some of the information we filter out is actually useful and important.
Problem 2: Not enough meaning. The world is very confusing, we see a tiny sliver of it & need to make sense of it to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world.
Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.
Our search for meaning can conjure illusions. We sometimes imagine details that were filled in by our assumptions, and construct meaning and stories that aren’t really there.
Problem 3: Need to act fast. Constrained by time and information, yet can’t let that paralyze us. With every piece of new information, we need to assess our ability to affect the situation, apply it to decisions, simulate the future to predict what might happen, & act on our new insight.
Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.
Quick decisions can be seriously flawed. Some of the quick reactions and decisions we jump to are unfair, self-serving, and counter-productive.
Problem 4: What should we remember? We can only afford to keep around the bits that are most likely to prove useful in the future. We make constant bets and trade-offs around what we try to remember and what we forget. E.g., we prefer generalizations over specifics because they take up less space. When there are lots of irreducible details, we pick out a few standout items to save and discard the rest.
This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.
Our memory reinforces errors. Some of the stuff we remember for later just makes all of the above systems more biased, and more damaging to our thought processes.
Table of excerpts from Buster Benson, 1.9.2016, Cognitive bias cheat sheet, — An organized list of cognitive biases because thinking is hard.
Fallible human perception and decision making is further distorted and amplified in fits of xenophobia that turn into men into a mass of savages with stampeding rampages that bring us endless wars, genocides, purges, pogroms. Are not leaders just as susceptible as the masses of falling into hysteria and then running off towards the cliffs? Herein lies our danger, —that we have abrogated informed consent and individual choice in the belief that complex decisions can only be decided by authorities. But, we come back to Carl Sagan's #BDK (B.S.) detectors.
Where are the stops to this madness? Where are the chaplains and medics that calm fears and heal wounds when the storm is raging? I would argue that this is rephrasing the question with only one answer: government. But the answer lies in our own individual hearts.
Once upon a time in America there were men who overcame fear and went into the firing live to aid and comfort the wounded and dying. It seems we have turned our backs on the human element and chosen a sterile life from hospital birth to hospice death. In the meantime, I'll snuggle on my tin-foil-paranoia hat and shrug at our collective madness, a.k.a., Conspiracy Realism, because, —yes, ma! Our current narratives are wagging dog tail.
p.s. I wrote this 1 May 2022 and IMHO almost a year later the ideas still seem relevant
Is mRNA Research Tail-Wagging Dog-Ma?
Funny how things turn out. A 30 year Bubblehead Nuke goes on to become an advocate for the sane practice of medicine & science....another retires as a SWO LDO with 19½ years of his 26 at sea on 7 ships and becomes an asphalt/road construction inspector. Stay busy and stay healthy, Sir.
I love the "as we see it" influenza clipping. Where do you find this stuff?
FYI I wrote a piece with some historical background the 1918 pandemic:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/how-flu-is-an-electrical-illness
The picture with the 4 chaplains is also heart-warming and not seen enough. Thanks for spreading the love Captain Malagon.