From Zachary Emmanuel on Countere.com (June 16, 2022):
There are many moments one could call the definitive end of the 60s—the resignation of Nixon, the Manson murders, Altamont—but one last leprous gasp was heard from the decade’s corpse in February of 2022, when 76-year-old Canadian citizen Neil Young removed his music from Spotify in protest over The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rogan’s transgression? Interviewing Dr. Robert Malone, a renowned pioneer in mRNA vaccine technology and horse farmer, about his concerns over mRNA vaccine technology. The hippie movement is diseased and dead.
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What sources or institutions can we trust?
As a scientist, I'm trained not to trust anything.
In the medical world, my intellectual home is pathology. Pathology is essentially the quality control discipline for the entire medical care system. That's the nature of an autopsy—not just to ascertain the truth of an individual and their death, but to provide quality assurance for hospitals in the entire medical system. We're trained in pattern recognition, we detect and discern signal from noise, we’re trained to do this in the medical world.
As a scientist, I was rigorously trained to question everything, including myself. [I use] the intellectual structure called The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses [pdf]. The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses was originally published in Science Magazine in the late 1800s. So these are fundamental philosophies of medicine and clinical research that I'm speaking of.
The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses addresses the problem that exists for scientists, which is that we have a tendency to use a system of scientific questioning that we call hypothesis-driven research. The problem with hypothesis-driven research as a tool to discern truth is that it suffers from what's called “strong inference”—the tendency of a scientist to say, “I know the answer, I have a hypothesis, it’s my hypothesis, and I take ownership of it.”
What happens when you do that is that you will bend truth and reality and information to conform with your hypothesis. I don't normally discuss The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. I'm speaking about this because I know that your magazine [Countere] thinks about these kinds of underlying philosophical issues.
I've been trained to approach the world as a cluster of information. That information is divided into three compartments. One is, there's the Known, the things that we can all agree on: the Earth is generally round, it orbits the sun, gravity exists. These have been divisive at various times in human history, but now we're pretty convinced those are solid truths.
Then, there’s the world of Knowable but Unknown. If we apply the Scientific Method—which is increasingly a new priesthood, but that's another problem—if we rigorously apply the Scientific Method to this world of Knowable but Unknown things, we can gradually pull truth out of that information cloud and place it into the world of the Known.
Then, there's a third compartment of information. This is the Unknown Unknowable. And that's basically the world of faith. That's the intellectual space of things which we are not able to directly perceive or measure, which may or may not exist. And we can't really apply the Scientific Method to this thought space. We can't get data to test hypotheses. This is the world of philosophers and theologians.
I've been trained on the first compartment, the Known. Then there’s this middle compartment of stuff that’s Knowable but Unknown, and that’s the world I’ve always lived in, first as a young academic and then as a scientist and pathologist.
I had thought that I didn't have to apply that kind of intellectual rigor to the world of politics or public policy or economics. I thought that that was all being adequately handled by other experts that were similarly objective. Now we learned that absolutely not the case, and all of us are forced into becoming citizen-scientists-philosophers, whether or not we're trained.
I didn't choose to be one of the “Leaders of the Resistance,” to use a Star Wars metaphor. But having been placed in that position through circumstance—because I was early in speaking out about certain things, and I had a background that enabled me to legitimately question what was going on—I now find myself with the burden of responsibility of that leadership, and it's one that I don't take lightly. Feeling that responsibility results in some self-editing, some self-censorship. There are things that I observed, for instance, about the World Economic Forum that are so far beyond what average people can accept that I have to self-censor. Otherwise, I'll be labeled as a crazy person. [read more]

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