People are hanging onto justifications and justification systems like they would ice-floats in the arctic.  Some people think they are on solid ground.  Others know this is "good enough for now." 

Some of us are learning how to swim

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 5:28 PM Waldemar Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Jason: 

Thank you for your kind words and for sharing that vlog.  I was able to access it before it was again removed.

Lene:

Thank you for you observations.  I am in complete agreement of you assessments.  

Joe:

I understand your conundrum.  How do we evaluate the information provided and separate it from all the horse-feathers flying around.

I have been able to do a little research about Dr Markovits - of whom I had not been aware.
Dr Markovits is well spoken and clearly fervent about her perceptions - but her contentions defy reason.
Dr Markovits is labelled an anti-vaxxer, though this is something she denies.
Yet, she also propounds the old trope tying MMR and autism - a theory long since demoted to the ash bin.
In addition, I am particularly skeptical of those who claim that they “know” what is going on and everyone else is being deluded.
Granted, there are time when that is true - but the times and people are few and far between - for instance, Einstein.
Upon listening carefully to Dr Markovits’ words I cannot find a consistent story, except for her suffering.
The contentions she shares are not accompanied by data - we are to accept her word, instead.
Being well spoken is useful but does not displace evidence.
I find her claims to be inconsistent with established data, incoherent in terms of a believable scientific event or events, and spectacularly oriented towards her needs, rather towards data.
Her claim that the use of animal cells to culture viruses for vaccines is acknowledged.
Her claim that this tactic exposes human to the viral diseases of the animals used flies in the face of experience.
The claim is one of the reasons why developing a vaccine for humans takes so long.
The phase I testing’s purpose is to demonstrate that the vaccine does not do that!
A little bit of fact + a lot of conjecture and paranoia sells well to some.

I’m watching carefully for coherence, consistency, and objectivity when I try to wade through the nCoV-2/COVID-19 data.
Then, I compare what seems to be reliable with what I know and what is happening.
People are getting sick, and dying, from a a virus which has been “hidden” to us humans, though present in nature.
We haven’t faced such a situation for a long time - no wonder we seem to flounder at times.

Why such paranoia persists is an interesting psychological feature of mankind.

When I read Lene’s words:

There is an entire 'subculture' out there that believes what I gather to be the following narrative: Bill Gates created the virus in order to sell governments a chip that can be implanted in all of us and keep us under constant surveillance. This is predicted in the Bible that says something about a mark on the hand (the chip) and a mark on the forehead (masks). The WHO is in on this and is run by communists who want to destroy the economy and keep everybody locked up in their homes. The WHO is also the main source of misinformation. There is also something about a socialist world government and losing the right to guns mixed up in the story.

I have to wonder: “What the hell?”
Then, I remember, oh yeah, we’re dealing with Homo sapiens.
Our capacity for imagining conspiracies - not to be overlooked.
I wonder what chromosomes, genes, and brain networks are involved in that.

Be wise, be safe, be healthy, and (for now) be home!

Best regards,

Waldemar

Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
(Perseveret et Percipiunt)
503.631.8044

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)

On May 7, 2020, at 4:50 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear Joe,
 
  Thanks for this heartfelt reflection. I will offer some brief remarks in response. I see this as a key issue and something of deep interest to the TOK Society’s mission and ethos.  
 
  First, the video was removed, so I did not get a chance to watch it. As such, I cannot form an opinion.
 
  Second, I would describe the experience you are sharing here as a perfectly understandable crisis in sense-making. Anyone who has not had a crisis in sense-making is not paying attention (or worse). There is so much that we want to know and even need to know that we cannot know.
 
  Third, central to the TOK Society’s overall mission is to foster ways of being that enable us to see the world in a way that affords greater sense making. This is, of course, what the Tree of Knowledge attempts to. It offers a novel descriptive metaphysical language system for organizing our modern naturalistic scientific justification systems. By putting on these glasses, we can sift through much noise and start to home in on the important behavioral frequencies across the various dimensions and levels of analysis. The idea of why we need an Enlightenment 2.0 Now (riffing off Pinker) is that our sense making ecology is being overwhelmed and we lack the schema necessary. The ToK attempts to fill the conceptual gaps that modernity left empty. 
 
  Fourth, individuals are hopeless in trying to make sense of the kind of phenomena we need to make sense of in the 21st Century. As such, we need collective intelligence systems operating on good faith to enable to have data-information-knowledge-wisdom ecologies that afford us high quality living in a sustainable, resilient, and anti-fragile way.
 
  Fifth, the folks over at Rebel Wisdom are asking these kind of questions in earnest. Indeed, I would say that the last four or so videos have been focused on exactly the genre of the question you are raising here:
 
See also Jordan Hall’s reflections on The Stoa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPcQ6igOTZ4
 
Sixth, we are stepping into a liminal space, a time between worlds, to use Zak S’s phrase. We must give up the idea that we know. We must embark on a new sensemaking journey, with sense making systems that are up to the task and our commitment to being good faith actors attempting to enhance dignity and well-being with integrity. As such, there are no easy answers. The best we can do is cultivate the right knowledge systems with the right attitudes and do what we can toward cleaning up the information ecology and moving toward valued states of being.
 
Best,
Gregg
 
 
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Joseph Michalski
Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2020 2:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: FAQ with Waldemar in Blog form
 
Greetings ToK Society Colleagues:
 
First, please feel free to ignore this lengthy message entirely if you're not interested. I'm writing this in the wee hours of the morning after being troubled by the odd convergence of reviewing Jason's post precisely at the same time that my wife came up and told me "OMG, did I send you that link? I just finished watching that video because my friend said I had to see this right away!"). So, I decided to dive in. But, I confess, I'm a bit confused. Hence my lengthy post here.
 
I am trained as a sociologist -- a weak science at best, if anyone else truly knows my field. But I'm trained as a scientist nevertheless, even though I don't think any other sociologists in my own department would use that word to describe themselves! So, that means I strive to understand the links between theory, methodology, and evidence in whatever I investigate. The end result is that I tend to be quite "conservative" in making "causal" claims about human social behavior, since we typically lack rigor and experimental controls in most sociological studies, even when we are committed to doing "real science" (and, believe me, many sociologists are hyper-critical of anything claiming to be "scientific" and/or are explicitly ideological rather than scientific in their pursuits). My main point is that the "royal we" of sociologists are not especially insightful in terms of identifying the mechanisms that lead to behavioral consequences. That's perhaps the main reason I became enamored of the ToK approach. Plus, I have always read widely across all disciplines, partly from frustrations with my own field's limited explanatory capacity, which includes too the limitations of my own work. I've been "searching" for a more unified understanding of all facets of "behavior" in the universe. My apologies for such self-indulgence, but I mention all of this to set the stage for my query of this list. For despite my status as a "full professor" and despite being an "ABD" in a cognate field from the University of Toronto, I'm confused by the total range of COVID-19 info currently being circulated. 
 
Can someone perhaps distill for me and the list the key info being circulated? From a ToK perspective, we are dealing with biological behavior (the stuff Waldemar mainly addresses), the psychological behavior (e.g., issues ranging from widespread fear to cognitive biases and conspiracy theories - and whatever triggers our brains to "think" certain ways) to the cultural issues surrounding justifications and our embeddedness in cultural systems that promote certain worldviews (i.e., we are all "socially located" and thus inevitably "influenced" by the social "vorces" to which we are subjected, including this listserv!). Thus we can see that there are many moving parts. But we are at an unprecedented moment, certainly in my lifetime. The last several weeks have seen a change literally in how we conduct our daily lives, and millions of people have lost their jobs. Our university, of course, ended up shutting down and we're anticipating the loss of many students and millions of dollars, jeopardizing our fiscal future as well. At the same time, I'm supportive of the notion that if we rally around these issues together, we can protect our collective health and secure a more optimistic future. But that requires that our key actors are "acting in good faith" and that we are basing decisions on the "best science" too. So, here's the problem. I was born in the early '60s and thus grew up in the '60s and '70s, where we first started to question that our government might not be telling the truth in all matters of importance. That didn't mean we all became "conspiracy theorists," but, not surprisingly, my own discipline (sociology) shifted to more anti-establishment and "critical" approaches to understanding the production of truth and knowledge. The long and the short of these developments? 
 
We realized, I think with some reasonable degree of insight and skepticism, that there might indeed be some truth to the notion that scientific research and the production of knowledge more generally might be tied at least in some respects to certain financial and political interests. More benignly, we at least came to establish the subfield of the sociology of science to examine those social forces the might affect the production of knowledge and truth claims, without denying the possibility of some forms of "objectivity" or "brute facts" altogether. And this is where we could have and should have been working much more closely with the psychologists! But, alas, we were too arrogant and too territorial -- and we have remained siloed and rather alienated from each other as a result, though I'm sure the psychologists have been probably equally arrogant and dismissive too of sociologists (well, at least people like Jordan Petersen despise sociology because apparently we're ALL Marxists and post-modernists, and there's nothing of value to be found within those paradigms in his view). All of which brings me back to COVID-19 and the "conspiracy theorists" and "deep state" folks. How is a reasonable person, genuinely curious and open-minded in the pursuit of knowledge, supposed to make sense out of these two antithetical positions:
 
Position A: The "Plandemic" theory being touted here and spreading, ahem, "virally":
 
Position B: These are all crackpots, anti-vax, pseudo-scientists, like Mikovits:
 
I've just spent two hours trying to understand these sharply contrasting perspectives and, despite (because of?) my education, I cannot discern what the science is "really" telling us about the causal mechanisms involved in the spread of viruses. I have a limited knowledge of virology. How can I possibly or credibly assess the veracity of what I'm "being told" or what the "best science" truly says about the causal mechanisms associated with the virus and immune responses? Mikovits apparently had some early career success with her doctoral work re: HIV:  "...recent studies (have shown) patients in which plasma virus is reduced to undetectable levels following highly active triple drug antiretroviral therapy, but soon after cessation of therapy high viral titers are again detected, suggesting long lived reservoirs of latent virus exist. Therefore, we have focused our efforts on examining infectivity of HIV-1 and HTLV-1 and defining cytokines and other cellular mechanisms involved in maintaining a balance between human retroviral expression and latency." Her subsequent work, however, did not appear to achieve the same standards of success. Her own Science article has been retracted, especially after other researchers failed to replicate her work. More recently, Mikovits has "questioned whether the use of animal tissue in medical research were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases, such as autism and chronic fatigue syndrome." Is that even possible or, if not, as she seems to imply, intentional? 
 
I also am concerned from a psychological perspective about the strength of the possible cognitive biases involved as people defend their positions with such extremism (but nor do I want to concede that it's all "relative" and purely a matter of how one sees the world). More to the point, the scientist in me recoils when I see such monolithic pronouncements or all-encompassing "explanations" that lack nuance or discussions or careful consideration of alternative voices and a careful review of the evidence. In short, why should I or anyone else simply listen to "Mikovits" (Position A), whom I'd never heard of previously, or "Orac" (Position B), whom I'd never heard of previously? For that matter, I've certainly heard of Bill Gates, but should I trust him either in regard to his pronouncements about COVID-19 or vaccination? I mean, I like Microsoft platforms well enough, but that's a rather different field. More generally, how does one assess the degree of "mis-information" and "dis-information" that regularly spreads on the internet? Equally problematic: how can one possibly trust the political leadership that may not always be driven by "the public interest"? I've only recently watched the Ken Burns Vietnam war documentary, where I was struck by a number of observations, but perhaps none more than the Vietnam vet Karl Marlantes (U.S. Marines) quoted on camera: “My bitterness about the political powers at the time was, first of all, the lying. I mean, I can understand the policy error that is incredibly, incredibly painful and kills a lot of people out of a mistake if they made that with noble hearts. That was, you know, when Eisenhower and Kennedy were trying to figure things out. And you read that, you know, McNamara knew by ’65, that was three years before I was there, that the war was unwinnable? That’s what makes me mad. Making a mistake, people can do that. But covering up mistakes. Then,you’re killing people for your own ego – and that makes me mad.” 
 
I hate to think we are being directly misled on matters as serious as COVID-19, but we surely must ask which groups stand to benefit for the dissemination of which types of information. Yet if we are reduced to asking only that question, then that doesn't really help us understand the medical issues involved or even the policy implications that might follow. I'd welcome anyone and everyone's insights to help us develop a more coherent view of what's happening from a medical and population health standpoint, as well as in constructing the most accurate and helpful "narrative" or "justifications" that we might offer moving forward. I mean, God knows I just put my own "life" and "family" at risk earlier today (yesterday now!) spending hours helping a guy currently dealing with a drug addiction move into a wretched apartment in the most "dangerous" part of my own city -- where there was no "social distancing" or masks, or much of anything else one sees in "polite" or "educated" society. What's the rate of infectious disease in that part of town? We know it's relatively high, since we opened up the first "safe injection site" just blocks from where I was working today. In any event, I'm almost 60 and I came home and literally shed tears at the misery I had just spent several hours witnessing, even though I was "helping" one poor soul. For whatever the reasons or the underlying causes, we are literally dealing with life and death issues here. I, for one, would benefit from any additional insights folks on this list could offer to make sense out of what we're really facing here. Peace and health, -Joe
 
 
 
 

Dr. Joseph H. Michalski

King’s University College at Western University

266 Epworth Avenue, DL-201

London, Ontario, Canada  N6A 2M3

Tel: (519) 433-3491

Email: [log in to unmask]

______________________

eiπ + 1 = 0
 
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Lene Rachel Andersen - Nordic Bildung / Fremvirke <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2020 11:41 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: FAQ with Waldemar in Blog form
 

There is an entire 'subculture' out there that believes what I gather to be the following narrative: Bill Gates created the virus in order to sell governments a chip that can be implanted in all of us and keep us under constant surveillance. This is predicted in the Bible that says something about a mark on the hand (the chip) and a mark on the forehead (masks). The WHO is in on this and is run by communists who want to destroy the economy and keep everybody locked up in their homes. The WHO is also the main source of misinformation. There is also something about a socialist world government and losing the right to guns mixed up in the story.

I am a member of a Jordan B. Peterson support group on Facebook where I have gathered the bits and pieces, but I have not pursued all the details.

If anybody knows Jordan B. Peterson and has access to him, and if he still believes in science and government institutions - and if he is in good heath - please tell him that he could save many lives by making a video explaining why people should pay attention to government health information.

/ Lene

On 07-05-2020 04:04, nysa71 wrote:
Hi Waldemar,

Yes, that FAQ was very helpful, and I made sure to share it on my Facebook timeline.

However, something that seems disturbing just came to my attention. It would seem there's some new "conspiracy theory" video on the virus that's being spread around social media. YouTube has taken it down once, but it keeps popping up. Phrases like "Big Pharma" and "The Deep State" get mentioned, and that, of course, sets off some red flags for me. 

Since this pandemic is bad enough, this kind of nonsense is the last thing we need. 

I just wanted to bring this to your attention. Perhaps your expertise is needed to address this, as well. We don't need any more misinformation out there. There's enough of that already.

Plandemic Documentary The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid 19
 
<image001.jpg>

Plandemic Documentary The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid 19

Reminder: This documentary is a reupload. I did not make this. Please share and download this video. it will mos...

Again, thanks Waldemar & Gregg,
Jason Bessey
 
 
 
On Tuesday, May 5, 2020, 02:48:39 PM EDT, Cole Butler <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
 
 
Thank you Gregg and Waldemar. This is very useful. I've shared it with my facebook friends.
 
Best,

Cole Butler
TPAC Project Coordinator
University of Maryland
2103W, Cole Field House | College Park, MD 20742
tel 301.405.6163
 
 
On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 1:28 PM Joseph Michalski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Thanks Waldemar. I've shared this with my family as well! All the best, -joe
 

Dr. Joseph H. Michalski

King’s University College at Western University

266 Epworth Avenue, DL-201

London, Ontario, Canada  N6A 2M3

Tel: (519) 433-3491

Email: [log in to unmask]

______________________

eiπ + 1 = 0
 
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 2:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: FAQ with Waldemar in Blog form
 

Hi Waldemar,

  Thanks for the latest.

 

  They made your blog an essential read, so it is now on the homepage of Psych Today. Thanks and congrats!

 

Best,
Gregg

 

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Waldemar Schmidt
Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 1:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: FAQ with Waldemar in Blog form

 

As mentioned in the blog, humility and skepticism is in order when dealing with nCoV-2 and COVID-19.

 

nCoV-2 has mutated - the mutation is termed D614G - and it appears more infectious than the original.

 

We have so much to learn about this virus.

 

 

The time for mitigation may not yet be over!

 

Please, all be safe, be wise, be home, and be healthy!

 

Best regards,

 

Waldemar

 

Waldemar A Schmidt, PhD, MD
(Perseveret et Percipiunt)
503.631.8044

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. (A Einstein)

 

On May 5, 2020, at 7:20 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

Hi List,

  Waldemar was kind enough to walk me through some basic biology of the virus and we put our discuss up as an FAQ in blog form:

 

Hope folks are doing ok these days. Fingers crossed the next month does not see a major resurgence in the spread of the disease.


Best,
Gregg

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