[You can see many many posts on this topic (I published more than 150 articles at this site) here:

Greg Lukianoff:

In my career defending academic freedom and free speech, I never saw anything become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground.

…

Not only do things not add up. What’s is truly bizarre is to watch so many people of power and influence do 180 degree flips on dozens of prominent issues over the past six years without feeling any need to justify their change of opinion. No new facts are being offered on issues that affect millions or tens of millions of us and, further, the corporate media pretends that nothing interesting is happening. Weinstein:

I think we Americans have to have a conversation with ourself about not only how broken our system is and what it is resulting in us doing, but how does it actually work? What is it that is actually driving us to do what we do? And you know, we can see parts of it. We can see lobbying. It’s the loophole in our system where the system is pay-for-play, that is used day in and day out by corporations to get us to do things that are bad for our health, bad for our long term financial well-being bad in every regard. But obviously our adversaries abroad will have noticed that we have a pay-for-play system, and if they aren’t taking advantage of it, that would be surprising. I would like to know why they would have missed the opportunity.

So presumably they are, and that also applies to our allies. Unfortunately, that is to say, anytime somebody has an interest that is in conflict with the …

I’m Justin Hart — father of nine, data analyst, author of Gone Viral. I spent six years tracking COVID data professionally and ran one of the most-cited COVID data platforms during the pandemic. I’m not a crank, and this isn’t a rant. It’s an itemized bill.

The List

Here’s the short list of everything these institutions got wrong during Covid:

• • Origin of the disease — wrong
  • Transmission — wrong
  • Asymptomatic spread — wrong
  • PCR testing — wrong
  • Fatality rate — wrong
  • Lockdowns — wrong
  • Community triggers — wrong
  • Business closures — wrong
  • School closures — wrong
  • Quarantining the healthy — wrong
  • Impact on youth — wrong
  • Hospital overload — wrong
  • Plexiglass barriers — wrong
  • Social distancing — wrong
  • Outdoor spread — wrong
  • Masks — wrong
  • Variant impact — wrong
  • Natural immunity — wrong
  • Vaccine efficacy — wrong
  • Vaccine injury — wrong

Twenty items. Every one sourced. Every one with real consequences for real people.

That’s not a crisis of public trust. That’s a record of institutional failure.…

The human mind is a remarkable piece of biological engineering. It’s capable of an astonishing range of feats like inventing calculus, composing rock operas, and putting spacecraft on other planets. But it’s also capable of an equally astonishing range of predictable reasoning errors. Psychologists call these cognitive biases, and they’re as common as the common cold.

In this post, I’ll outline 20 major biases that distort our judgments about evidence, ourselves, and the world. Once you learn about them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere: in politics, in the news, on social media – and occasionally even in your own thinking. (Mostly, though, in other people’s.)

And if you enjoyed these summaries of these cognitive biases, you’ll probably also enjoy this related article by Steve Stewart-Williams: One Bias to Rule Them AllAll cognitive biases = one of a handful of fundamental beliefs + confirmation bias.

Excerpt:

Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years, from hindsight bias to ingroup-outgroup bias to the fundamental attribution error. They’ve even proposed a bias bias: a tendency to overestimate the impact of cognitive biases on (other) people’s thinking. Inventing and cataloging biases seems to be one of psychologists’ favorite pastimes.

But a fascinating recent paper by Aileen Oeberst and Roland Imhoff argues that all our cognitive biases boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs, coupled with just one “ultimate” bias. The fundamental beliefs include such ideas as

Kenny Carmody:

Three of the most disturbing psychological experiments in modern history placed in a Venn diagram with COVID policy sitting precisely at their intersection.

Carmody’s analysis on X is spot on:

Most people know the Milgram experiment. Ordinary people administering what they believed were lethal electric shocks to strangers because an authority figure in a white coat told them to continue. We wrote about this. COVID replicated it at planetary scale, the doctors, the neighbours, the employers, the family members who enforced mandates with a zeal that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with institutional obedience.

But the other two are equally important and far less discussed.

The Asch Conformity Experiment demonstrated something even more fundamental. Solomon Asch showed in the 1950s that a significant majority of people will deny the evidence of their own eyes will give an answer they know to be factually wrong, simply because everyone else in the room is giving that answer. Not because they were threatened. Not because they were paid. Because the social pressure of the group was sufficient to override direct sensory experience.

This is what masking a healthy population, cancelling Christmas, and demanding that people treat their neighbours as biological threats actually accomplished. It was not about any of those things specifically. It was about training an entire population to override their own perception and defer to the group consensus, however absurd that consensus became.

And then the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 study abandoned