The Great Vanishing of Information

August's Open Thread

A Midwestern Doctor

Aug 08, 2024

∙ Paid

Today this publication hit a milestone I never imagined could happen—it passed 100,000 subscribers. I am a big believer in the Golden Rule (treat others as you would want to be treated) and since I started writing this publication two and a half years ago, one of my principal goals has been to create a newsletter I would want to read (which is why I can only produce two emails a week).

One of my central reasons for doing that was that I realized that even though the internet was getting “bigger” each year, it was actually getting much harder to find the information I was looking for and the overall quality of information now is so much worse. This is to the point that I do not think it would be possible for me to know a lot of what I know if I had not used the internet from its infancy in the 1990s (or to know how to find what I’m looking for now and how to sort fact from fiction online).

As best as I can tell, this transformation was due to three things (that we also see in many other facets of life):

•A recognition by the ruling class (and their corporatocracy) that the internet threatened their power and that it hence was essential to curate (censor) what information it showed people.

•An ideological capture of Silicon Valley.

•The frequent tendency for successful institutions and societies to become complacent from their success and then degrade (e.g., what’s happening now), a topic I have previously written about in detail and something that was recently highlighted by Elon Musk.

The purpose of this month’s open thread in turn will be to expand upon those points and share some of the strategies I’ve found for navigating this tangled web of half-truths.

Note: I started making monthly open threads because as the publication grew, while I wanted to respond, it was simply not possible for me to respond to everyone who reached out to me. Because of that, I wanted to have a monthly place where people could ask me whatever they wanted to inquire about so I could direct my resources toward prioritizing responding to everyone on that thread.

The Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. To see how others have benefitted from this newsletter, click here.

Overcoming Misinformation

As you start studying “the truth,” it becomes clear how incredibly malleable that construct is and how easy it is to twist or rearrange things to suit their sponsor’s message. For example, a large portion of modern scientific research revolves around this because the public (and much of the scientific community) is unaware of the common ways to rig a scientific publication.

Note: this helps to explain one of the most uncomfortable facts in research today—most experiments (80-89% of them) cannot be replicated. For example, Pfizer’s vaccine trials were overtly fraudulent and as a result once their vaccines hit the market, they were nowhere near the promised “safe and 95% effective.”

Overall, I believe one of the most effective approaches to navigating the current information landscape we have is to:

1. Determine a source’s biases.

2. Assess to what degree the currently presented information agrees with or opposes the source’s bias.

3. Rank the information as follows:
   •If it agrees with the source’s bias, it is likely wrong or distorted.
   •If it neither agrees nor disagrees with the bias (e.g., it’s a very neutral topic) and the source appears to make the effort to be credible, it’s likely generally correct.
   •If it disagrees with the source’s bias, it is likely correct and worth seriously considering.

4. Develop some type of intuition that lets you know where to look for what you need (e.g., when I look at a large body of information, I often am drawn to one part of it—people in other fields such as stock traders also told me this allowed them to become highly successful in their endeavors).

For example, I often take published medical studies (especially published in highly ideological journals such as JAMA) with a grain of salt because I know those journal’s historical tendency to publish content that supports the pharmaceutical industry regardless of how at odds with reality it is. For instance, whenever I see an email notification about a JAMA publication on a politically charged topic, I can normally predict most of what the article will say and make a good guess at the lies that will arrive at that conclusion.

To illustrate, JAMA (and other top journals) published numerous studies “debunking” the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 that were widely paraded across the media, yet each of those studies had serious issues that both indicated the study had been set up to fail and simultaneously it was often possible to see the study had lied about its own results (e.g., the results contradict the conclusion). Likewise, in some cases, this was so absurd during the pandemic that leading medical journals published overtly (and obviously) fabricated data the journals only retracted once the public pointed out their clear oversight.

Note: as I detailed in a recent article, there is a long history of promising medical therapies with a large body of evidence behind them (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation, IV vitamin C for sepsis, or various cancer treatments) that compete with the medical industry then being buried by a single unscrupulous “research” study. Additionally, something many people do not understand is that a large number of valid scientific publications exist which are in journals not indexed by Pubmed (the primary resource most people use to locate scientific evidence), which in turn leads to academics and doctors believing “no evidence” exists as their approach to researching a topic often is to search for it in Pubmed (e.g., a study was completed which showed COVID vaccine shedding was a real thing, but despite months of work, the authors have not been able to get a journal indexed by Pubmed to publish it).

Conversely, there are also many cases where I feel a topic I am interested in is relatively non-politicized and you can hence rely upon the easily available published data on it. Likewise, I consider Wikipedia to be incredibly biased, but I simultaneously find it very useful for distillations of complex (but non-controversial) scientific topics. Finally, I know that if a study that goes against the existing medical orthodoxies is published in a prestigious journal, it is guaranteed that it was subject to an immense degree of scrutiny (and there was probably a large battle fought to get it published) and since it stood up to that scrutiny there is likely compelling evidence underlying it.

All of this hence requires a truthseeker to strike a very challenging balance—on one hand, you need to actively consider the biases of your source, but simultaneously,you need to remain open-minded towards everything you see and not erroneously filter critical information, even if what you see directly disagrees with your biases or you disagree with the bias of the presenter.

Archetypal Gestalts

Whenever you observe groups, you will often observe people defaulting to mimicking the behaviors of the group so that they can fit in and be accepted. In time, this often evolves to there being a very characteristic linguistic style and set of behaviors that emerges—which in many cases seems to be prioritized over the actual substance of what the group is about (e.g., I meet many people who claim to align with “the science” who copy the same phrases and chains of logic prominent scientists like Anthony Fauci use but simultaneously don’t understand any of the scientific points they are discussing).

Many examples of this mimicry occur. For example, I know numerous men who came out of the closet and then rapidly adopted an identical lispy and flamboyant style of speech, while in the New Age field, I’ve noticed the underlying thread they all share in common is a very distinctive style of speech which emphasizes a profound jubilation over a variety of inconsequential things they encounter. What’s remarkable about this mimicry is that you can often provide non-sensical examples of it that are fully embraced by the group (e.g., I periodically send my New Age friends random nonsense created by a New Age language generator which matches the cadence of the New Age field and frequently receive accolades from my friends). Likewise, in academia, it’s been repeatedly shown that if one produces incoherent nonsense that is written in the postmodernist style, it will often make it to publication (and likewise I’ve had a lot of fun over the years with essays from a nonsensical postmodernist language generator many take as being legitimate scholarly writings).

In turn, I’ve noticed that in some groups, this repetition or desire to belong to the group will magnify, and before long reinforce itself into cult-like behaviors that seem completely insane to an outside observer—a process which is particularly likely to happen if a nefarious individual deliberately manipulates the group to create this behavior (e.g., a shrewd marketing team, a talented dictator, or a sociopathic cult leader).

Note: the above was excerpted from a recent article where I attempted to explain the Democrats fanatical devotion to the COVID-19 vaccines in spite of the fact many of them were being severely injured by the vaccines they promoted.

Whenever I read someone’s writings, I now just “hear” their voice, and often can immediately identify what biases are creeping into their state of mind and influencing their writing. I believe gaining this skill (while simultaneously remaining open minded) is one of the most important ways of being able to accurately evaluate information. At the same time, that’s hard to do, so I’d like to share one of the things that led me to be able to do that—becoming better and better at recognizing each of the archetypal patterns (mass formations) of different subsections of people.

The Woke Mind Virus

Over the years, I’ve heard various terms (many of which are fairly offensive but sometimes quite accurate) to describe the tendency for institutions to become so politically correct, that in the name of political correctness, their functionality is critically undermined and they stop being able to uphold their basic responsibilities.

Elon Musk for example recently popularized the term “the woke mind virus” to describe the process, and since many proponents of doing this (e.g., Kamala Harris) also use the term “woke,” I will use it here.

Note: one reason I dislike using the term “woke” because I simultaneously like to use the term awake to describe free thinking individuals who see what’s in front of them.

For years, and especially over the last decade, I’ve noticed numerous sources of information I used to find fairly useful, get ideologically captured by “wokeism” and transition to becoming nearly impossible for me to find what I’m looking for within them. Generally speaking, this dovetails with a general corporate push for more censorship of inconvenient topics (e.g., the misdeeds of big Pharma) which in turn has led me to view the current DEI (diversity equity and inclusion) push as a combination of:

•A self-perpetuating mass formation around wokeism.

•A smoke screen being used to distract the populace from the serious misdeeds of large institutions (e.g., if token “social justice” initiatives are promoted by a predatory corporation its customers will typically ignore the gross human rights violations it commits oversees—a tactic that was previously pioneered by egregious polluters who would greenwash away their culpability with token efforts that somehow might combat climate change). For instance in medicine, after the COVID-19 debacle, one of the most common messages I heard from the medical community (e.g., for how to revamp medical education) essentially was that the immense shortcoming of the COVID-19 response (which made many permanently lose their trust in medicine) were due to a lack of DEI in medical education, not say the suppression of off-patent treatments for the virus and the mandating of deadly and ineffective vaccines. Likewise, the CDC has given far more attention to racism being a public health crisis than the “unexplained” epidemic of excess deaths that swept the country after the COVID vaccines were introduced.

•A backdoor way to implement undemocratic policies (as anything that opposes the corporate bottom line can now be labeled as “antiwoke” at which point a group of ideologues in the woke mass formation are happy to erase it from history regardless of how unethical doing so is). Traditionally, I was used to seeing this tactic used by an authoritarian government (e.g., China during the Cultural Revolution), but now it seems to have been repurposed by the corporatocracy (e.g., Peter Hotez, who is continually propped up by the corporate media, constantly tries to associate any criticism of vaccines with hate speech and calls for governments around the world to neutralize the industry’s critics).

Note: I initially suspected DEI would be used as a way to covertly and then overtly censor individuals who threatened corporate interests. This was because in 2017, I saw a variety of “alt-right” groups be banned by Silicon Valley (including having their payment processor accounts revoked) after the Charlottesville Rally, as before long, the alt-right label was expanded to cover “conspiracy theorists” like Alex Jones. At the time this happened, I told my natural health friends who supported this crackdown on hate speech that if they let it stand, their businesses would be targeted in a few years.

Not long after, I saw people in the vaccine safety movement get canceled under similar reasons (e.g., one person who had a large mailing list he’d worked for years to build to share health freedom information had his account [and all the vital information he’d collected in it] be abruptly pulled by Mailchimp for “violating their terms of service” which essentially is why I’ve advised a lot of people to avoid that service). In turn, because the censorship of hate speech had rapidly become so normalized within Silicon Valley, by the time COVID-19 happened, every large platform rapidly deleted any counter-narrative posts about the subject (e.g., its lab origins, off-patent treatments for the disease, or personal reports of vaccine injuries) for “community safety.”

To illustrate how rapidly this new form of censorship has proliferated—recently Twitter (𝕏) sued an advertising conglomerate that had been using woke justifications (e.g., 𝕏 was creating an “unsafe” environment) to have the major advertisers collectively boycott the platform (and others free speech ones like Rumble). Given that many of the objections to 𝕏 were due to things like it promoting content critical of vaccines or the current wars, justifying this anti-trust activity on woke grounds provided a perfect cover for their actual motivations.

Likewise, consider this identical statement from Kamala Harris’s VP (who throughout COVID enacted authoritarian policies like encouraging neighbors to report anyone who violated his unscientific social distancing mandates).

Search Result Censorship

In my eyes, one of the most common playbooks used by the ruling class is to identify a life essential resource everyone is using, introduce a new and “better” version of it, and widely promote that new option until the old one is completely displaced, and then once a market monopoly is established, tighten the screws until the replacement is far worse than what proceeded it, but there is no longer any real alternative to it (e.g., this has happened in agriculture, education, transportation, medicine, and most recently, social media).

In the case of Google, it initially was an excellent search engine, but once it gained a market monopoly, it began hiding “undesirable content” (e.g., I’ve found it often impossible to find a medical story I remembered reading a few years ago through Google and I now instead need to use a different search engine). Fortunately, a Federal court recently ruled it was illegal for Google to bury its competitors within its search results. Likewise, more and more people have become aware that Google will alter search results in real time to suppress unwanted narratives (e.g., this happened throughout COVID-19 and recently many examples have surfaced of Google redirecting searches for Trump or his VP to Harris’s campaign).

Note: one thing I find remarkable is how often internet behemoths come to prominence because they support free speech and then begin mass-censoring once they become larger (due to attracting corporate funding as the financial value of their censorship is recognized by those industries) at which point, the platform then gradually dies and is replaced by a new one that supports free speech. In turn, I am sincerely hoping this does not also happen with Substack and we are forced to migrate again (fortunately however, to make authors feel secure with this platform Substack set itself up in a way that made it very easy for authors to migrate from it).

A key part of this monopolization of information has been to have specific websites elevated to the “highly credible” status and then manually censoring them. For example, Reddit rose to popularity because it provided a way for internet intellectuals to bounce ideas off each other and the best ones to rise to the top with its algorithm. However, as it became more popular, it got taken over by “woke” moderators and corporate advertising campaigns which in coordination with the moderators (along with thousands of bots [fake programmed accounts]) buried any undesirable content (e.g., criticisms of vaccines). This is a shame since a group of like-minded users were very good at upvoting the most pertinent information, and as a result, I now use Reddit alternatives that were made from the most useful subreddits on the website to source some of the information I present here.

One of the most consequential examples of this happened to Wikipedia, a “non-profit” attempt by thousands of dedicated volunteers (e.g., there are many editors who have put tens of thousands of hours of work into the website) around the world to objectively catalog and concisely synthesize the world’s information, which in turn has been massively boosted by Google treating it as the authoritative source for many questions enquiring minds wish to learn about.

Wikipedia’s pre-eminent status as the authoritative source for information in turn has led to many groups (e.g., government intelligence services or PR firms working for corporate clients) wanting to aggressively censor or distort the information on it (e.g., every now and then you’ll see a controversial edit be publicized because it comes from an IP tied to a government office). As best as I can tell, this shift began when in 2017, a “nonprofit” was established to ensure Wikipedia’s “nonprofit” mission to make the world’s information available to everyone could be funded into perpetuity. This foundation in turn received hundreds of millions from large groups with a vested interest in ensuring Wikipedia promoted their narratives (e.g., Google heavily funded it, thereby allowing Wikipedia as a “trusted” third-party to promote their interests—a tactic commonly utilized in the PR field).

This in turn kicked into overdrive during the George Floyd protests, where “seeking to fight racism” the foundation that owned Wikipedia enacted a woke policy that began firing senior editors (e.g., those people who spent tens of thousands of hours trying to make Wikipedia’s content be objective) and people who questioned the shifts in Wikipedia so they could be replaced with people of other ethnicities who could effectively represent the diverse views of the country. This in turn recently came to the public’s attention after one senior (and very dedicated) editor was kicked out for questioning the ethics of Wikipedia's new management.

Note: I’ve seen the same pattern in many other areas. For example, I know a few people who’ve worked with BBC (England’s leading new service) for decades who shared that due to the push for DEI (which until recently was termed BAME there), many of the senior journalists who were the best journalists were kicked out and replaced with ethnic minorities who, being new to the field, were not as experienced but simultaneously very ideologically driven. Because of this the quality of BBC journalism has greatly declined and in recent years they’ve made remarkable mistakes (e.g., the BBC was taken by complete surprise by England voting in 2016 to withdraw from the European Union). Likewise, in 2021 after the Floyd protests, 94% of new jobs at top US corporations were given to ethnic minorities.

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Where Can We Find Information Now?

What I find noteworthy about this new form of woke censorship is that while it’s now quite overt, it was building in the background for a long time (e.g., I stopped using Reddit for most things about ten years ago because it was censoring them from the platform). Likewise, with a lot of sites like Wikipedia, I view them as not “the truth” but rather “a concise presentation of the existing orthodoxy’s perspective on a subject,” so on politicized issues its only value is to show the prevailing narrative, whereas on more neutral scientific issues (e.g., physiology or a pharmaceutical mechanism of action), it’s still a good starting point for something I want to learn about (and likewise to link to as it concisely represents a concept topic some readers may want to learn mor about).

This in turn highlights why information literacy is so challenging in this era—you are often forced to consider each idea being presented and independently assess it on its merits.

Note: this highlights a key reason why I spend so much time sourcing my claims. By virtue of being anonymous, I have a lot more freedom to avoid the biases an audience would project onto me, but simultaneously, to “earn” the trust I have, I have to continually show it (e.g., with clear references). Likewise, one of the things I’ve found immensely frustrating is studying an idea someone puts forward, digging up the reference which underlies the crux of their argument, and then discovering the reference does not support it—so I feel I’m obligated to prevent each of you from having to go through that.

Fortunately, natural systems always equilibrate, and despite a massive effort on every front to censor all “unsafe” content online, the demand for it has rapidly increased. This I in turn believe is best shown by how popular 𝕏 has become (as it provides more accurate and more up to date news than the mass media—hence allowing it to take more and more of their audience) and the fact that in the last month its derailed numerous government narratives being promoted throughout the mass media (including countries outside of the United States—for example, it just became the most downloaded news app in England).

Nonetheless, while 𝕏 is excellent for having a more honest account of the currently trending topics, it’s not geared towards unearthing lost information. In the last part of this month’s open thread (which exists for you to ask me any unanswered questions that have come up), I would like to share some of my best resources I’ve found for unearthing the Forgotten Sides of Medicine (or anything else I’m looking for such as an article image), along with another song from the gifted and anonymous composer (many of you have expressed your appreciation for) that I frequently listen as I am searching for those lost pieces of information.