The Grumpy Economist: Understanding the Left
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Huh, this is an interesting take. White flight, property value falling to be grabbed up for cents on the dollar, awaiting the next round of gentrification. Why not, seems like a good motive. Property value is always the main motive in today’s world.
My home town used to house a large factory in communist times. 10-15 thousand employees, producing agricultural machinery and equipment. And not the shitty communist kind of equipment, I have a bunch of clients that swear by the stuff produced here. The company survived the initial rounds of grabization following the entry into the capitalist world, but was liquidated shortly after the 2008 crisis, just years before Croatia joined the EU, when a huge market would have opened up for agricultural machinery. The most remarkable thing was, it was liquidated because of debts to the state. I never could quite figure out why this had happened until about a couple of months ago, when it was announced that the former factory area (the best kind, a few blocks from the city center) was going to be turned into a large scale apartment complex. I guess a select group of people made a significant amount of money.
If you were to follow property during the whole COVID thing, just imagine how many similar cases you would dig up.
Very important interview!
Alex talks to Dr Mike Yeadon about the thinking which guides SAGE, the government's scientific advisory body, and how it is fundamentally at odds with reality, resulting in more and more absurd diktats that will have zero effect on overall Covid morbidity, yet will hamstring society of years to come.
Dr Mike Yeadon is the former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco Pharma Ltd. He has appeared in various news outlets and has most recently been raising awareness of the issue of false positives in Covid PCR testing, including penning Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics for Lockdown Sceptics.
Episode 21 - Dr Mike Yeadon - Alex McCarron | Podcast on Spotify
This entire Covid+Political situation of the last 7 months got me thinking about conventional wisdom and our perception of reality.
Many people discovered Starting Strength after seeing Dan Duane's "Everything You Know About Fitness Is A Lie" article almost 10 years ago. And even most of those who are unaware of that specific piece still know that the general approach espoused by SS is radically different than all of the white coats and highly credentialed exercise science experts and even medical doctors have been saying about fitness and working out for the past 50+ years. But everyone here has also experienced how superior it is to what all those people have said.
This is what's commonly known as a Red Pill. That the reality that you've been told by Everyone, including the experts, for your whole life about this topic is just not true. You probably doubted this at first, and were only convinced by your personal experience with how well it works, or how well it worked for someone you know. Most people wouldn't be convinced on the superior analysis alone, because Muh Experts.
So we have a small, but slowly growing, group of people who have taken one small red pill in the limited realm of the fitness industry. I would expect that this would open those same people up to this possibility across a variety of fields and knowledge areas. But we don't always find that's the case. Even for me, it took me a while after I'd discovered SS and seen its superiority with my own eyes, to start applying the same skeptical and critical eye to other things. Why?
Against the Red Pill we have the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
We compartmentalize things so tightly, that even a brilliant Nobel prize winning physicist like Murray Gellmann wasn't immune to just accepting, uncritically, the pronouncements of the conventional wisdom in areas outside his own expertise, even after seeing how badly those same people mangled things he knew enough about to spot.Quote:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Why is this? My friend Michael Malice likes to say: "You take the red pill, but you don't take the whole bottle." And there's wisdom to this. We have probably all encountered someone who was once a seemingly normal, well-adjusted person who at some later point believes every crazy idea as long as it doesn't come from a mainstream source. Some of these ideas may even be self-contradictory, but this person now has a sort of Gell-Mann Amnesia of his own. And we know not everything is some nefarious conspiracy: planes do fly; miraculous surgeries that would've been unthinkable even 100 years ago do fix people (I've had a couple myself); we can talk to people in real time with no essentially no delay over a video conference call from 10,000 miles away - in other words, not everything is a conspiracy and a lie.
I wonder if we have some sort of natural defense mechanism against this sort of thing, which biases us against being skeptical and critical in general, even after we've found something that indicates that skepticism and a critical eye are warranted. We intrinsically know we don't want to "take the whole bottle" so to speak, because that can lead us to crazytown. So even after we've seen convincing evidence that the respectable credentialed experts and the conventional wisdom are way off base on a particular topic, we will be completely credulous about the credentialed experts and the conventional wisdom on other topics.
It would take a pretty rare person to be able to apply the same skeptical and critical eye to everything, without falling into the trap of taking the whole bottle. To be able to judiciously apply that skepticism without writing off all of science and technology and everything as fake and a manipulated scam.
And maybe that's why we've seen such a small amount of good, logical analysis and pushback against this insanity.
Don't come to Jackson. We're still under one because we have a young, Democratic mayor who has gleefully imposed any and every restriction he's desired including a ban on open carry that a judge had to explain to him he couldn't actually do. (Never did figure out how banning open carry has anything to do with the virus.) There's not a grocery store in town I can shop at without donning my Handmaid's Tale style muzzle. (Funny how the left always brings up that show in comparisons but it's them doing the muzzling.) Gatherings are still limited, I have to do all my bank business through the window, and my friend who was a real comfort to me after my husband died just had to move because the restrictions are making it difficult to make a living. She's not the only one. Nobody is doing the business they were. The rules say everyone 2 years and up has to wear a mask when out in public or risk fines. Businesses are supposed to enforce this shit or they get fines or shut down. It's nuts. You ever tried to keep a mask on a 3 year old? I hear Oxford's just as bad but I haven't been up there lately. Now that it's this ridiculous and my business has crumbled in the 10 months this fool has been making up rules I may have to go. Which is a shame because my family has been in this house, this neighborhood since the 60's and all that's gonna replace me is another out of town big company landlord who's gonna charge an arm and a leg to rent to a bunch of college kids who aren't invested in the community and further displace the local folk the Democrats claim to care about. It's all gotten worse. We didn't used to have people up under bridges at the interstate, for example- now we do. Whole sections of the city can't keep a grocery store. Crimes up. Water's fucked up. All under this mayor. The way it is with the state being red but Jackson being blue you see a definitive line between policies and their effects. I wish every Democrat was forced to live here under it for a while so they can see how what they spout turns to shit in practice.
This is a profound post perhaps worthy of an article.
In my case, an already open mind (redpill'd mind, as people say now) allowed me to try SS instead of moving forward with advice of a neurosurgeon to take a drill to my spine / neck. A very careful approach to SS worked and I got the use of my hand back without surgery. My brother, on the other hand, is a huge believer in the (chosen) experts. His spine is now fully supported by a titanium cage.
Post of the week? Excellent insight, Wolf. For some time now I have been frustrated by how wary some highly intelligent, critical thinking people are of any opinion that strays from the mainstream, but couldn't quite put my finger on the problem as you did there.