True but as for evidence of the theory, we don’t need to look far, switch out the object to be fixated about (the virus) for (orange man bad) the claim is no amount of facts can be used to reason with a person, so fixated on Trump being defeated and Biden being the solution, what happened when Hunters laptop turned up.
A reasonable person would first ask “did they check the digital certificates of the emails” because they are good, it’s next to impossible to forge and would be a good indicator of authenticity. So they checked out but wasn’t at all persuasive to those that were fixated on getting rid of Trump, what else?
The owner of the shop wasn’t some political figure and had given the laptop to the FBI six months earlier.
The FBI confirmed it had the laptop and it was indeed Hunter Bidens
The shop owner had a receipt with Hunter Bidens signature on it.
Hunter Bidens own lawyer called up the store to ask for the computer back when the story broke (oh c’mon, how much proof do you need)
A recipient to one email went on tv to say “yes, those were real emails, I was on the receiving end, blah blah blah”
The shop is like 2km from Joe Bidens house, very likely the nearest Apple shop.
Hunter Biden wasn’t denying those were his emails, he even went on tv and said “they could be mine” his story was he might have been hacked or something.
The point here is NOTHING, no amount of proof will convince those who are fixated on something that is at the center of a mass formation psyhcosis and needs to be dealt with, instead they will believe ANYTHING, some 50 random guys write a letter saying it’s Russian disinformation, yup, they will believe that.
Facts no longer matter, they will believe anything they are told in order to keep the delusion or to further the solution.
A massive part of the problem - which perhaps Desmet has overlooked - is what I’m calling the Reuterization of science. Once upon a time science looked something like this:
Observe the facts as objectively as you possibly can
Create a theory that appears to explain the facts
Try to destroy your theory by looking for new facts
If your theory falls down, fix it or find a new one
Wash, rinse, repeat
There’s a shadow of this process in medical practice, which goes something like this:
Examine the patient and ascertain the signs and symptoms
Determine if those signs and symptoms fit a recognizable syndrome
Look for additional facts to see if a differential diagnosis might apply (rather than your initial hypothesis)
Relate the syndrome to a known aetiology (a set of causative agents or processes)
Treat accordingly, and if the treatment fails to hold up in view of the treatment results, then re-evaluate your hypothesis
Nowadays, science looks something like this:
Locate a scientist who proposes a hypothesis you don’t like
Declare that the hypothesis is wrong because the scientist is smelly and has funny hair
Find some other scientists who will tell you you’re right.
This has completely polluted the public debate. It just occurred to me that @tempogain got upset back there because he’s worked backwards from a theory that he doesn’t like: he sees “no evidence” for the proposed aetiology, therefore the syndrome itself doesn’t exist. This sort of thing pops up occasionally on fact-checking websites too. It’s absolutely toxic, because it ensures not only that scientists with something to say are locked out of the debate, it primes the general public to accept false information put out by journalists and politicians because the very basis of critical thought has been replaced.
What a laugh. You’re just twisting words to mean whatever you want them to mean, and whatever suits your long-ago predetermined conclusion, as usual. Tag someone else please.
I originally tried to engage you in a productive discussion, as politely as I could, with some scientific background. You responded very rudely indeed to my attempt, and as far as I’m able to ascertain that happened because you were unwilling to put aside the particular train of thought that you’d followed and try the scientific method.
You have no idea what politeness or rudeness even mean, I think. You can’t accept someone disagreeing with you. Oh wait, how could I forget? You’re always right. That makes things a lot simpler for you, I’m sure.
I agree with you it’s not new. But an interesting question would be (from the above article) why would Google start scrambling to first hide and then link to an obscure video that tries to discredit something which most people already know, in a general sense anyway, if not from studying phycology themselves?
Presumably they see this as something for the antivaxxers to rally around. It’s a slogan that people can latch onto, like “15 days to stop the spread” or “stop the steal.”
a) It’s happened on a global scale
b) It some countries at least, it has been deliberately engineered (although possibly without the politicians quite understanding what the outcome looks like)
c) It seems to have got completely out of hand, sucking its originators down the same sinkhole.
Because it’s quite infrequent and (by its nature) hard to study objectively, it hasn’t been very well characterised. Desmet isn’t the first to propose an aetiology - if you use a different search engine you’ll find that there are a few published papers on it - but he seems to have been the first to spell it out in layman’s language.
It’s distinct from tribalism though. That’s just an ingroup/outgroup thing, which is self-limiting, not entirely irrational, and (arguably) beneficial to the survival of the species. The term “psychosis” implies a dangerously dysfunctional situation which threatens the survival of the species, or at least threatens the wellbeing of large number of individuals.
a) Fair point that technology has allowed it to be on a global scale.
b) Hasn’t it always been deliberately engineered? Possibly ergot induced mass delusions and witch hunts weren’t.
c) I agree with this. Dying with/of is a classic example. That came back to bite them.
I still think it is basically tribal, though. Peoples have regularly gone through periods of psychosis. These periods might have threatened the survival of a tribe, but might also have helped the species.
Sometimes, sometimes not. The tulip-bulb mania was sort of engineered. The Cultural Revolution definitely was. Some of the weirder ones (eg., “dancing mania”) probably weren’t. I suppose what I meant was that, while (eg.) the Cultural Revolution might have been deliberate, the methods used were a bit ad-hoc. Mao just hit on the right methods because he was an evil, scheming bastard who seemed to instinctively grok how human minds work. In this case it was engineered in the more modern sense, using methods derived from theoretical work, with definite goals in mind. The Nazis came close to doing that, but mind control “technology” was in its infancy - they still basically relied on the intuition of people like Goebbels to get things done.
I suppose there’s a whole ragged debate there on the topic of “what is normal?”. I can see your point that it might occasionally be productive (in the long run) for a species to go through a massive catastrophic upheaval, but humans seem unique in their ability to go collectively nuts. I honestly can’t see anything good coming out of this.
I agree with @finley on this because things like the Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment don’t work because they are tribal. If there were a 50/50 split in that experiment, the results would be as expected, 99% can see reality.
They work because only one thought process is allowed, a totalitarian state of being where the media is in lockstep with the politicians, all the politicians.
In such circumstance, then you can create Mass formation psychosis in its most virulent form.
We look at certain others and believe that they are tribal. But I imagine that we are tribal too, in a mass produced scale. I wouldn’t assume that ‘tribal’ is wrong, but I’d definitely be aware of it. The danger in some ways is forgetting that we are tribal. Trying to get above it but I believe allusions that has been achieved are slowly falling apart. Like the world is going slowly backwards
FWIW I don’t think I’m always right, and I dunno why tg was getting so upset. I’m probably right more often than not about things that I work on professionally, or that I’ve studied extensively; or at least I’m probably right more often than people who haven’t. But if I get into a sparring match, with, say, @yyy, then, whatever my opinions might be, he’s pretty much guaranteed to be right 100% more often than I am about matters of law, because that’s what he does. Likewise with anyone else who has equivalent expertise in a subject I know nothing about.
