I'm sorry if my first response was too acerbic, I just get so stressed by this stuff because I have strained relationships with people who have fallen down this rabbit hole, and when I look through their post history and watch them descend into this illogical and angry world view, riddled with inconsistencies and conspiracies and proven-false claims being parroted as obvious truths, my entire neck cramps up. The confidence of their delivery can make you question your own world view, but nothing they claim holds up to the slightest scrutiny. So, I quietly look up the story, shake my head in disbelief, say nothing to avoid further damaging the relationship, and move on.
And the day before you made this thread, a family member posted the exact same story about the EKG regulations changing. A little kernel of a fact (the regulation had been updated) wrapped in a rotten cabbage of conjecture (that they had "quietly" made the change because too many pilots were getting grounded--because the vaccine messed up their hearts, that the vaccine they mandated is killing pilots--and so the FAA somehow wants
more pilots with a high risk of sudden cardiac failure at the helm). Do you see how even in describing the position, there are inconsistencies and conflicting interests? What's more newsworthy, a pilot having a heart attack at home while he was grounded for his EKG, or a pilot dying in mid-air over the Atlantic? Which would you prefer, as the regulatory agency?
That's because it's all just fanfiction, a fantasy projected onto the abstraction of outgroups.
I think the world is a big scary place and our human brains are made to cooperate in small social groups where we know and trust everyone, and people in other outgroups are immediately not to be trusted. Our tendency towards tribal affiliations has carried into various aspects of our personal identities: nationality, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic caste, where we grew up and where we've lived, our work and hobbies, and now our political affiliation, and where we land on an ever-growing list of topics.
Rather than living in a small tribe where everyone is more or less on the same page, we share the planet with 7+ billion cousins, most of whom only exist in abstraction. Our brains are barely able to contemplate our own individual sentience and complexity, we can't possibly fathom the lives of others; we can either imagine an individual person in a certain circumstance, usually by imagining ourselves if we were in that situation... or an abstracted tribe, where the individuals are reduced down to a simplified idea of a person. When you zoom out enough the faces give way to the crowd and you lose sight of the trees in the forest, like half a million q-tips painted to look like the audience in Star Wars:
We are absolutely adrift in a diverse world of constant change and conflict, threats and opportunities, and now we can go online and form countless tribal associations with people who share our perspectives one way or the other. We build echo chambers which function like social mixers, where we try to impress one another with how much we know, and synthesize arguments hashed together from the information we can recall. When we do finally interact with the other side, it's like we're inhabiting different realities, speaking different languages, because we'd each gotten lost in our own fanfictions. We then make in-jokes or dogwhistles we can reference with each other or use in arguments, to signal our affiliation through our choice of words. Those things then become red flags (because when more than a few people know something, it's not a secret anymore), and the "other" side will start discounting or make efforts to de-platform people who speak that way; we then assert that
they are affiliated with tribes that
everyone knows are bad. Driving wedges, and violating our rights to express ourselves.
And in that throbbing mass of voices called the internet, there are jokesters and trolls, there are people who have multiple accounts, there are people wielding armies of bots to boost untrue or unpopular opinions, there are grifters, and there are a lot of people pretending to understand what's really going on. These people generally are motivated by their own profit and have found a way to make a fortune from this divisiveness. They've found that saying certain things will gain them attention, a following, clout, and money, so they say those things like pulling the arm of a slot machine.
But there are also honest people who are making a good faith effort to pursue the truth. There are people publishing research--actual research, so we can have data properly analyzed to help us make sense of things and find trends, so we can make accurate predictions and measure their accuracy, adjust our models, and act accordingly to stop disaster and to save lives.
It takes very little effort to make something up and assert it as fact, and an order of magnitude more effort to prove or disprove it (this is called Brandolini's Law AKA the BS asymmetry principle). A bad faith actor can churn out lies rapidly, and before facts can be checked it's irrelevant because that was already five lies ago.
So remember:
anything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. When something seems plausible to you you're more likely to accept it as true because it reinforces your world-view. Then when we see something that is contrary to that image of reality, we immediately come up with reasons to discount it. Healthy skepticism is good, but knee-jerk rejection shuts down discussion. Watch for that immediate reaction when you're reading posts online. Take a good look at yourself when you find yourself commenting or resharing a post that angered or excited you.
So let's look at the data and see if the analysis holds up. Data science isn't perfect or infallible, but it's a helpful tool for us to understand what's happening. And then we can try on a narrative... if that story were true, would we be seeing this dataset, or does it suggest something else?
The truth is a mess because the world is a mess, but in the same way, our brains want to make things simple for us, so we're attracted to black and white/good vs evil narratives. It's comforting to think that there are just good guys and bad guys, and of course we're one of the good guys. But then we take our goodness and forge it into a hammer so we can beat our enemies bloody with our righteous rightness.
This is your work. Do you mind if I post your findings and give you at JREF the credit. I'd be honored to do so.
You are welcome to quote me but maybe don't credit me directly; I am not sure I want to invite further attention or debate to myself. While I get a little obsessive over getting the details right, my facts straight, and my thoughts salient while writing these posts, I don't really take much pleasure in these topics. My neck and shoulders cramp up because this topic feels important, and the compulsion to address inconsistencies and word myself carefully can create a lot of anxiety. As much as I'd love to drive more traffic to this amazing forum, I don't want to get dogpiled by people who see me as being in on some kind of conspiracy just for comprehending publicly available information.
