I Want to Believe: Pt. 1

(In viruses)

An “epistemic revolt” has underlain the public’s response to The Pandemic™ from the start, and appears to be intensifying anew: “There is no virus. Viruses, in fact, aren’t even real.”

And indeed, if the only “proof” of the virus comes from the same experts who routinely obscure the truth about the Covid vaccines, what answer is there to those who question the virus itself? Let us take a journey into doubt and discovery.

Two Divided by Three

Minding your epidemiologically-approved business one day, and you’re kidnapped by The Demonic Aliens. “Hey, at least it’s not jury duty,” the old man in the seat next to you quips. You’re not sure what that means. After what seems like an unreasonable amount of time in the waiting-room, The Demonic Aliens emerge from a panel in the floor and right away they are bringing the drama, yelling in demon-voice and prodding you with their painful glowing demon-sticks. Well, this Yelp review just went from a “two” to a “one,” you can tell them that!¹ Not that you do tell them. You go where they seem to want you to go. At least it’s not Jurridooty.

A game-show stage, shortly. Your challenge is to “pick a door.” Ah, but before they reveal what’s behind your own choice, the models reveal one of the doors you did not pick: It has, what else, a goat. Care to switch? The Demonic Alien audience, behind the spotlights, strongly clamors that you should switch; your odds will go up to 2/3.² But not wanting cool Demonic Aliens to think you’re a normie, you stick to your guns. The models open the door. Bam!, it’s your “lucky day.” You just earned yourself a brand spanking new ‘72 Chevy Vega Kammback wagon. The audience applauds.

It’s now the second “challenge,” and you are a bit… well… confused.

You’ve been seated at a sturdy metal table with two buzzers, one labeled “True” and one “False.” Above your head is a giant plastic cage full of sharp, heavy demon-weapons, with a remote-controlled trap-release at the bottom. There’s dried and not-dried blood all over the floor and the table (your chair, meanwhile, is presumably single-use). The big sign over the timer with the blinking lightbulbs reads out in clunky letters, “Faith in Science.”

The models flip an oversized card, revealing the following message:

The Universe was created by “The Big Bang.”

Well…?

Just before the timer elapses, you slam an unsure palm on the buzzer for [Censored by Demonic Alien Media Relations Code 2/3§120325] - correct! A cheerful ding and a cool plus-.00012860082 Globecoin to the pot is your reward.

Well, glad that one’s done -

The Demonic Alien audience lets out a laugh as you begin to stand up. You wince; the models smile and flip another card, with the timer already running:

The Tyrannosaurus-rex was real.

The models have ten cards to show you, all told.

You do not return home. No one does.³

⁴

Tyrannosapiens

The Virus Truthers “get it.” We’ve all been swindled, hoodwinked. The entire world theatrically “shut down” based on the masturbatory fantasies of a gaggle of secular clerics warning about a thousand mathematically modeled Armageddons that never arrived, and we haven’t been free from their spell since. And who are they to dish out taboo after taboo in the first place - every one of which is based on an invisible being which only they, themselves, can “perceive”?

Cast off the illusion, the Virus Truthers insist: The only “virus” is the mental virus of belief in viruses.

This, itself, has become its own sort of mental virus. Like the rituals and mythologies of the Believers in the Experts, like any set of laws, like any religion, the missionaries of Virus Trutherism, aka Host Theory absolutism, are only propagating a set of concepts that was propagated to them.⁵ A meme, in other words. The infection of the comment threads in “Covid-vaccine skeptical Substack” by Virus Trutherism was only a matter of time (if you haven’t yet been accosted by a Truther, count your blessings).

Should they be listened to? Do they offer the path to epistemic, spiritual, and practical freedom from our expert overlords? Does The Pandemic™ - every tragic, grotesque, absurd bit of it - all go away if we just stop “believing” in the virus itself?

Before theorizing why the answer is “No,” let’s start by acknowledging the obvious: Something is diseased about the way experts, in the modern world of man, literally control the lives of their alleged fellow-citizens.

source: Geoffrey Fairchild (CC BY 2.0). “Sue.”

Believing in Science, even when doing so is essentially a positive act of epistemic helplessness, is easy when there isn’t an actual cost associated with it - or if the cost is disguised as empowerment. So what, for instance, if you all you have ever “seen” of the “Big Bang” are computer-generated animations? That’s good enough to know you don’t need to bother bogging down once a week with any of That God Stuff, and can get back to remembering what it is you meant to scroll back to a minute ago.

As the central gimmick of The Pandemic™ has been to add to both the acute and permanent costs of believing in a thing that cannot be seen, a revolt against that belief is understandable. After all, it wouldn’t actually be reasonable to believe in the Big Bang, dinosaurs, etc. - if every one of those beliefs required you to risk your life or surrender your right to live life.

In (normal) practice, Science’s burden on our self-determination and safety is a cycle between high energy-investment leading to exhaustion and entropy, and repeat.⁶ Nothing about this can be made universal. “Belief” and “doubt” in Science are energy-states within the endless negotiation between individual perception and societal convention, their contours determined more by the forces of convenience and fear than by intellectual sharpness.

Confusing universal negotiation for universal capitulation, only creates an inauthentic “ideal” of Belief that no one can actually practice.⁷ “Science,” in the end, is just other humans, and humans cheat and lie. Meanwhile the assorted fields of Science are rife with claims that cannot be substantiated by everyday observation, cannot be cross-checked by other fields, and thus can only be verified by the same humans who make them. We all know that the textbooks are wrong about at least some of this stuff; and while Science can dazzle us with the nuclear bombs and GPS directions, it can’t very well hide the shoddier bits. And there are lots of them. They put all those fake bones in the museums for good reason.⁸

And yes, when it comes to the “museum” of viruses - the recorded history of their influence and ongoing banishment from human life - our curators seem just as wedded to such “benevolent deceptions.” They tell you an injection can make your child immune to measles For Good Reason.

In fact so much fantasy is seeped into the mythology of the triumphs of vaccination that it is tempting, for anyone who begins to look into the subject, to place a bet that not one of those triumphs is based on reality - “false” buzzers all the way. Here, the truth is more like the dinosaurs in your local museum: A tooth or two is “real;” the other 93.34% is a reconstruction. And yet that reconstruction is wielded as the pretext for conferring god-like powers to those who assembled it.

Something is wrong, there. If Science confers to its scholars the right to guard the gates between life and death - which is to say, if the scholars confer that right to themselves - then modern society is no more ennobling or liberating to the lay “free citizen” than the kingdom of the Pharaoh was to a slave.

But at least the slave could address the “interlocutors of the gods” in the flesh.

source: Fritz Geller-Grimm. (CC BY-SA 2.5) Also “Sue.”

Naturally, the artificial, cultish, and spiritually perverted political and cultural⁹ constructs which the curators of the Pandemic™ have assigned to belief in viruses do not make forgoing the belief necessary. One may instead refute the “assignment” directly,¹⁰ for it is what is artificial, cultish, and spiritually perverted.

But it is appropriate to acknowledge that opting out of the belief may be regarded as an effective “immune response” against a disease - the constructs assigned to the belief - which skirts a direct refutation of that assignment. A Rawlsian game of Original Position easily demonstrates the robust performance of disbelief in this respect: If your primary aim is to avoid the injection, and you can choose to be born into a person who, in 2021, will or will not believe in the virus, which choice is more likely to satisfy your aim?

Naturally, Rawls’ game is illustrative but idiotic. What’s really at stake here is authenticity and action. If the entire world suddenly became so afraid of water that no one went outside when it rained, you could decide not to “believe” in water. You’ll be right that the danger is a psychotic mass illusion - but you will still regret wearing flip-flops outside. When the madness of others has led you to having slimy flip-flops, you have inflicted a higher cost on yourself than that incurred by simply retaining common sense. You have entered an unsustainable, high-energy position of belief. You will come back down eventually.

Just as there are limits to how far a “Believer” in Science can act on third-hand assertions of reality, there are limits to how far a nonbeliever can act on first-hand assertions of void. Shrugging off warnings and rejecting coercive mandates fits within those limits; attempting to “convince” others of your (non) belief exceeds them.

In attempting to do so, the nonbelievers position themselves immediately into logical quicksand.

Heretic, online: Have any of you ever “seen” a virus? How do you know they are real?

Townsfolk, online: None of us have ever “seen” you, either. How do we know you are real?

And here the entire “argument” is unraveled and resolved.

We know viruses are real, even though we can’t see them, because they speak to us.

Continued in Pt. 2.

1. You know it will not matter. No matter how many millions of 1-star reviews The Demonic Aliens and their associated globalgovcorp facilities receive, the displayed “average rating” never goes below 4.5 stars.

2. The Monty Hall problem refers to the assertion that in a scenario where you have been asked to select one of three doors for a prize, and the host opens one of the unchosen doors to reveal a lack of the prize, you should take the opportunity to change your selection to the remaining door. As formulated in 1990:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

The problem with our “Monty,” the asserted answer supposes, is that he is going to show you a “non-car” door regardless of whether you picked the door with the car or not: He will never show you the car.

Contestants will have only originally picked the door with the car 1/3 of the time. Conversely, Monty will have two “non-car” doors to choose from only 1/3 of the time. The remaining 2/3 of the time, Monty only has one “non-car non-choice” door to pick from, and the second “non-choice door” must contain the car.

In other words, Monty is showing you by exclusion “which door would be right if you are wrong,” and you are wrong 2/3 of the time.

Except that the question above did not state that the host must apply his knowledge to select the “non-car” door. In any scenario where Monty is allowed to randomly open the door with the car half the time, your selecting the wrong door (as happens in 2/3 of plays) does not force him to isolate to the correct door. The question, again, states that the host knows what is behind the doors, but not that he must select a non-car door.

The original version of the problem, devised by Steve Selvin and published as a letter to The American Statistician in 1975, explicitly ascribed to “Monty” that prohibition (emphasis added):

Certainly Monte Hall [a weirdly unprompted reversion to Hall’s unused correct spelling] knows which box is the winner and, therefore, would not open the box containing the keys to the car.

Selvin, a professor of statistics in the Berkeley school of Public Health, evidently sent Hall a copy of the printed letter.

Hall, who before entering Showbiz had been a pre-med twice denied entry to med school due to quotas against Jews, wrote back a sardonic critique which made clear his prior awareness of the odds at play and that the real game show did not allow guests to exploit these odds. Yes, it was true that their chosen box would only be correct 1/3 of the time (the 1/2 probability is only true if Hall is free to show the car), but contestants were not allowed to switch boxes. Showing an empty box was a gimmick; the odds remained 1/3 from start to finish. Being shown which of the other two boxes had the 2/3 chance of being correct was not exploitable under the show’s terms; Selvin’s cute hypothetical was just that.

source: Liz Selvin (twitter).

The Monty Hall problem was revived in 1990, when a reader submitted a truncated version to IQ record-holder Marilyn vos Savant, columnist at Parade. It was printed, followed by Savant’s answer, in the formulation originally quoted above: “Suppose you're on a game show…” But here the problem was not a deviation from the TV show’s design, but from Selvin’s design - either the re-writer was unaware of the necessity of prohibiting the host from showing the car, or the editors excerpted that portion by mistake.

Savant, whether herself aware of the then-obscure Selvin version of the problem or not, correctly reinserted the prohibition into her asserted answer. This sparked an uproar from readers, including many in The Science, as her answer was incorrect to the question as posed - at least without construing the host’s knowledge of door contents to require action based on that knowledge. Savant was, in essence, both wrong - she had not answered the question - and right - her answer was true under its own terms. To make matters worse, her justification was bewildering gibberish:

Here’s a good [sic] way to visualize what happened. Suppose there are a million doors [why not a trillion!], and you pick door #1. Then the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens them all except door #777,777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you?

It is easy to see why responses were not charitable. Example comments included, “You blew it, and you blew it big!” (Scott Smith, University of Florida), and, “You are the goat!” (Glenn Calkins, Western State College). Savant defended her position. Millions of hours of debate and mathematical proof would go on to be applied to the controversy. Savant was eventually acknowledged as “correct” without also acknowledging that the question omits the prohibition required for the answer to be correct. That confusion still seems to linger: Switching is asserted to be advantageous without the prohibition being stated, and anyone who can’t understand why is an idiot (because switching is demonstrably correct when the unstated prohibition is applied). As if, “if the question said it happened” and “it must happen” are interchangeable, “because host knowledge.” Really? What if the host gets paid in “rounds finished per hour”? “Here’s the door with the car, you buffoon; now get off of my stage.”

Thus, simulations which “prove” that the question leads to the asserted answer must prohibit Monty from opening the door with the car:

source: Erzbischof (CC BY-SA 3.0). Monty never opens purple.

Experiments demonstrating the “disadvantage” of the human preference for not switching must do the same.

In real life, “did choose” is not “must choose,” and thus happens less frequently, absent external force. In 1/3 of games, an “omniscient, but random” Monty would simply show the car:

Free Monty: If (knowing, but random) Monty only shows a car-negative door half of the time when “choice” is car-negative, and all of the time when “choice” is car-positive, staying wins as often as switching.

Without the prohibition, arriving at the status of “Monty shows a goat” does indeed change the player-knowable odds from 1/3 to 1/2, and there is no advantage between switching or not.

3. However, Amazon®️ Prime-subscribed family members will have the option of having your remains delivered to a nearby Amazon®️ Locker for pickup.

4. (index link anchor)

5. And which order and/or assign perceived coherence to human action.

6. The give-and-take of hurricane evacuation warning adherence and defiance, as a perennial example.

7. See https://store.crooked.com/products/science-always-wins-crewneck-sweatshirt

Wins what?

8. See Pratte, Bob. “Displayed Museum Fossils Are Fake for a Good Reason.” (2014, December 28.) Press-Enterprise.

9. Including all epidemiological and pharmaceutical responses, down to the Covid vaccines, as elements of politics and culture.

10. To do so is obviously the primary mission of this journal.