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.
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.