current mood: internet conspiracies

Note: Written in response to an email from a friend that was a link to an psychiatrist’s website with ‘theories’ about COVID-19.

There are plenty of things wrong with the world today.  Much of it comes down to a principal-agent problem.

5G?  Let the first two towers be outside corporate HQ and the CEO’s house. 

Vaccine?  Let someone else dose all the children at the Pharma company.

COVID?  Let Kelly Brogan MD put 20% of the revenues she gets from clicks on her site toward independent research.

The problem I have with much of the content that comes around from various friends and family is that it’s all designed to fire your amygdala.  Kelly Brogan uses a form of the Gish Gallop to create a compelling mosaic, but correlation does not equal causation.  For example, do you think the institutional investors that bought pandemic bonds in 2017 for the high interest they paid were happy when they went to $0?  The world is messy, markets require that people have opposing views, and having actual skin in the game is the only way you’ll see true colors. 

Internet evangelists have little to no skin in the game; they are able to explain away failures and offer vague sentiments that are open to interpretation, or start discussions that trigger the amygdala while only offering vague prognostications that can be reinterpreted in the future or simply forgotten as the onslaught of rhetoric continues. 

Rather than continuing to ‘do our own research’ on the internet, we should be offline, outside, interacting with other people and trying to offer localized, real world solutions to the problems of health that we face. 

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