Musings

3/1/2025: We’ve heard of private equity firms acquiring a company, and then firing employees and/or selling assets until the company folds, but them still recouping their money through other means while the company itself is eventually gone and the employees without a job. Well, that’s what’s happening to the government by the person voted into office, and his business friends.

3/6/2025: DOGE -> Destroyers of Governmental Essentials?

3/12/2025: Social media opened up a bunch of information transfer / transmission lines between people. Of all of the types of information that are transmitted, the ones that potentially rise to dominance will be those deemed important, combinatorially, between the sender and the receiver. For some information, this makes sense, such as critical news updates that affect a large population of receivers. But information can be wrong, through a combination of intentional (purposeful lies) and unintentional errors (poorly worded, or biased listening) effects during transmission. Such “thought viruses” are, as it replicates for its own benefit, destroying society as a side-effect. People simultaneously hold countless numbers of thoughts in their head, and there can be cross-interactions between thoughts, including thought viruses about different subjects, for them to potentially intermingle and become a thought virus bigger than it was by itself.

The cure is to restructure our society such that we overemphasize and give more weight to truth, but that requires collective action that seems impossible unless in the most desperate of times. Unlike current biomedicine, there are no vaccines for these “thought viruses”, and ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic -related anti-science thought viruses are literally now trying to get rid of actual vaccines (the ones that save actual lives).

So we’re in the middle of multiple simultaneous population-wide thought virus pandemics, that have been unacknowledged (at least, at anywhere near the population level), and it’s unclear whether the whole body of the human race can 1) respond to it as a whole (and eradicate it; sadly, this is highly unlikely), 2) society remains intact and we respond to it with enough force that it only resides in little pockets of humanity, but can re-emerge and spread when pressure dampens (ie. nazi-ism; sadly, this is the best case scenario, which really sucks), 3) destroy society, but not all of the people (ie. authoritarian rule over the globe; I think we are already witnessing symptoms associated with this), or 4) destroy all people (ie. nuclear war, global warming literally turning the planet completely uninhabitable). Sadly, there are a lot of very miserable gradations between 3 and 4 which likely seem to be where we are headed.

[I’ve been preparing an “intro to virology” lecture, but of course the mind wanders]