Today this publication hit a milestone I never imagined could happen—it passed 100,000 subscribers. I am a big believer in the Golden Rule (treat others as you would want to be treated) and since I started writing this publication two and a half years ago, one of my principal goals has been to create a newsletter I would want to read (which is why I can only produce two emails a week).

One of my central reasons for doing that was that I realized that even though the internet was getting “bigger” each year, it was actually getting much harder to find the information I was looking for and the overall quality of information now is so much worse. This is to the point that I do not think it would be possible for me to know a lot of what I know if I had not used the internet from its infancy in the 1990s (or to know how to find what I’m looking for now and how to sort fact from fiction online).

As best as I can tell, this transformation was due to three things (that we also see in many other facets of life): Forever Strong: A New,... Lyon, Dr. Gabrielle Best Price: $11.66 Buy New $12.57 (as of 06:37 UTC - Details)

•A recognition by the ruling class (and their corporatocracy) that the internet threatened their power and that it hence was essential to curate (censor) what information it showed people.

•An ideological capture of Silicon Valley.

•The frequent tendency for successful institutions and societies to become complacent from their success and then degrade (e.g., what’s happening now), a topic I have previously written about in detail and something that was recently highlighted by Elon Musk.

The purpose of this month’s open thread in turn will be to expand upon those points and share some of the strategies I’ve found for navigating this tangled web of half-truths.

Note: I started making monthly open threads because as the publication grew, while I wanted to respond, it was simply not possible for me to respond to everyone who reached out to me. Because of that, I wanted to have a monthly place where people could ask me whatever they wanted to inquire about so I could direct my resources toward prioritizing responding to everyone on that thread.

Overcoming Misinformation

As you start studying “the truth,” it becomes clear how incredibly malleable that construct is and how easy it is to twist or rearrange things to suit their sponsor’s message. For example, a large portion of modern scientific research revolves around this because the public (and much of the scientific community) is unaware of the common ways to rig a scientific publication.

Note: this helps to explain one of the most uncomfortable facts in research today—most experiments (80-89% of them) cannot be replicated. For example, Pfizer’s vaccine trials were overtly fraudulent and as a result once their vaccines hit the market, they were nowhere near the promised “safe and 95% effective.”

Overall, I believe one of the most effective approaches to navigating the current information landscape we have is to:

1. Determine a source’s biases.
2. Assess to what degree the currently presented information agrees with or opposes the source’s bias.
3. Rank the information as follows:
   •If it agrees with the source’s bias, it is likely wrong or distorted.
   •If it neither agrees nor disagrees with the bias (e.g., it’s a very neutral topic) and the source appears to make the effort to be credible, it’s likely generally correct.
   •If it disagrees with the source’s bias, it is likely correct and worth seriously considering.
4. Develop some type of intuition that lets you know where to look for what you need (e.g., when I look at a large body of information, I often am drawn to one part of it—people in other fields such as stock traders also told me this allowed them to become highly successful in their endeavors).

For example, I often take published medical studies (especially published in highly ideological journals such as JAMA) with a grain of salt because I know those journal’s historical tendency to publish content that supports the pharmaceutical industry regardless of how at odds with reality it is. For instance, whenever I see an email notification about a JAMA publication on a politically charged topic, I can normally predict most of what the article will say and make a good guess at the lies that will arrive at that conclusion.

To illustrate, JAMA (and other top journals) published numerous studies “debunking” the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 that were widely paraded across the media, yet each of those studies had serious issues that both indicated the study had been set up to fail and simultaneously it was often possible to see the study had lied about its own results (e.g., the results contradict the conclusion). Likewise, in some cases, this was so absurd during the pandemic that leading medical journals published overtly (and obviously) fabricated data the journals only retracted once the public pointed out their clear oversight.

Note: as I detailed in a recent article, there is a long history of promising medical therapies with a large body of evidence behind them (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation, IV vitamin C for sepsis, or various cancer treatments) that compete with the medical industry then being buried by a single unscrupulous “research” study. Additionally, something many people do not understand is that a large number of valid scientific publications exist which are in journals not indexed by Pubmed (the primary resource most people use to locate scientific evidence), which in turn leads to academics and doctors believing “no evidence” exists as their approach to researching a topic often is to search for it in Pubmed (e.g., a study was completed which showed COVID vaccine shedding was a real thing, but despite months of work, the authors have not been able to get a journal indexed by Pubmed to publish it).

Conversely, there are also many cases where I feel a topic I am interested in is relatively non-politicized and you can hence rely upon the easily available published data on it. Likewise, I consider Wikipedia to be incredibly biased, but I simultaneously find it very useful for distillations of complex (but non-controversial) scientific topics. Finally, I know that if a study that goes against the existing medical orthodoxies is published in a prestigious journal, it is guaranteed that it was subject to an immense degree of scrutiny (and there was probably a large battle fought to get it published) and since it stood up to that scrutiny there is likely compelling evidence underlying it.

All of this hence requires a truthseeker to strike a very challenging balance—on one hand, you need to actively consider the biases of your source, but simultaneously,you need to remain open-minded towards everything you see and not erroneously filter critical information, even if what you see directly disagrees with your biases or you disagree with the bias of the presenter.

Archetypal Gestalts

Whenever you observe groups, you will often observe people defaulting to mimicking the behaviors of the group so that they can fit in and be accepted. In time, this often evolves to there being a very characteristic linguistic style and set of behaviors that emerges—which in many cases seems to be prioritized over the actual substance of what the group is about (e.g., I meet many people who claim to align with “the science” who copy the same phrases and chains of logic prominent scientists like Anthony Fauci use but simultaneously don’t understand any of the scientific points they are discussing). Dr. Mercola Joint Form... Buy New $52.97 ($0.59 / Count) (as of 07:59 UTC - Details)

Many examples of this mimicry occur. For example, I know numerous men who came out of the closet and then rapidly adopted an identical lispy and flamboyant style of speech, while in the New Age field, I’ve noticed the underlying thread they all share in common is a very distinctive style of speech which emphasizes a profound jubilation over a variety of inconsequential things they encounter. What’s remarkable about this mimicry is that you can often provide non-sensical examples of it that are fully embraced by the group (e.g., I periodically send my New Age friends random nonsense created by a New Age language generator which matches the cadence of the New Age field and frequently receive accolades from my friends). Likewise, in academia, it’s been repeatedly shown that if one produces incoherent nonsense that is written in the postmodernist style, it will often make it to publication (and likewise I’ve had a lot of fun over the years with essays from a nonsensical postmodernist language generator many take as being legitimate scholarly writings).

In turn, I’ve noticed that in some groups, this repetition or desire to belong to the group will magnify, and before long reinforce itself into cult-like behaviors that seem completely insane to an outside observer—a process which is particularly likely to happen if a nefarious individual deliberately manipulates the group to create this behavior (e.g., a shrewd marketing team, a talented dictator, or a sociopathic cult leader).

Note: the above was excerpted from a recent article where I attempted to explain the Democrats fanatical devotion to the COVID-19 vaccines in spite of the fact many of them were being severely injured by the vaccines they promoted.

Whenever I read someone’s writings, I now just “hear” their voice, and often can immediately identify what biases are creeping into their state of mind and influencing their writing. I believe gaining this skill (while simultaneously remaining open minded) is one of the most important ways of being able to accurately evaluate information. At the same time, that’s hard to do, so I’d like to share one of the things that led me to be able to do that—becoming better and better at recognizing each of the archetypal patterns (mass formations) of different subsections of people.

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