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Of course, I sent "Paul Wilson" a message on X after publishing this piece. I wrote:

"In the article I postulate that you are actually an AI bot. Are you capable of switching platforms and leaving a comment, just to prove that you are a living and breathing human? I am very curious. And yes, I did link in your sealion article so I hope it gives it some exposure."

His response:

"No, I won't be commenting. It speaks for itself. 😉"

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It's ironic that he said that. After I read the exchange, I thought the same thing: res ipsa loquitur. I left out his passive aggressive emoji.

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The guy you had the exchange with countered everything you said with an accusation towards you rather than respond to what you're saying. He's the one that needs to be psychoanalzyed! Fantastic article!

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I just finished listening and yes, very synthetic wasn't he. If we don't get a grip on this world, we'd have missed a great opportunity. Actually that bot was as dumb and two planks. He was attacking the person and never the issue. And there was a constant childish pigheadedness that was incongruent with natural interaction. But the bots are still learning...

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Classic DARVO

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I’m surprised you didn’t mention that past editors of the Lancet and BMJ have stated that at least 50 % of peer reviewed articles are total nonsense and clearly subject to corporate capture.

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I am sure that he/it would have responded with another psychological term for that.

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I'll say. Amusing for a psychotherapist to waffle on about being scientific, when his field is in the midst of a massive replication crisis. Most of the "clever" little labels he gave you sound made up. He seems to believe by putting human conversation into groups of psycobabblogical traits that are highly subjective he has "figured you out".

He seems not to understand that you could just as easily do a cartoon called the dolphin, flesh out the conversation you just had with a bunch of psychological theory artached and label him a dolphin.

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Science means arguing the case on its merits, and arguing on the merits is exactly what they are trying to avoid by calling anyone who disagrees with them, “anti-science”.

A real scientist said, “Science is not a set of beliefs. Scientists don’t believe anything… You always have to be ready to have your favorite theory proven wrong, and if you’re not, you shouldn’t be doing science”.

The unstated implication is that vaccines are so obviously and universally safe that the only reason even to study their safety would be an anti-science bias which, incidentally, is common among fanatics of the Far Right.

With history literally at our fingertips in the information age, how does anyone still believe in “settled science”? 

Science can’t BE settled. That’s what makes it SCIENCE. It’s an investigative tool. Any scientists who claims their answer is the correct answer is a shit scientist. At best, they have evidence to support a theory, but it’s STILL a theory. Consume scientific conclusions at your own risk.

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A classic authoritarian follower. I've found, over the years, that people like him are also deeply poisoned with resentment. They look for opportunities to take it out on others—safely, of course.

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I am actually quite sincere. I think this was an AI bot. I just linked up this essay on my thread with him on X. I really hope he/it leaves a comment here!

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I don't know enough about A.I bot behaviour to know how it works. But the comments are being curated.

I’d posted a reply a week ago, disputing the premise of a particularly fanciful article in which 'Paul Wilson' posited that the only people questioning "settled science" couldn't possibly be real people, but are coordinated "Wolf Packs". He’d created an entire fantasy fiction around his wolf theme. And later deleted all comments, except for the 1 positive one that jumped in to defend/commend him from early subscriber "Jane” - who I suspect is either an alias, or a manager (having subscribed only to this one solitary account).

His subscriber/following/follower numbers also seem to have ballooned since I looked last week, yet for all those fanboys there's next to zero engagement, and any posts that do show comments come up empty, once loaded.

I agree this is a highly questionable account (& SS seems to be getting flooded with them lately).

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Your attempts at humanizing the interaction were clearly baffling to the bot which made him double and triple down. What a wonderful piece of technology you just have to admit. If only people would go touch some fucking grass we wouldn’t get so caught up in high velocity disinformation.

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Facts. Good to see you here friend.

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I admire your efforts but facts and logic will never be enough. Evidence is not enough. If he is a real person, just like Offit, Hotez and others, you need actual deprogramming for these people. The Psyop has been embedded their entire lives and careers. Only us rebels (my hippie past paid off, I guess) have been able to avoid the programs. He probably is an AI bot, but NZ seemed like it was fully taken in by the cult in the last four years, based on their Covid response, so who knows. My guess is he is a person using AI, because he’s lazy.

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I thought Bladerunner was the scariest movie I've ever watched. Nightmarish. That future isn't assured if we figure out the puzzle. It would render them impotent. There are certain criteria that you can tell if someone is just spouting propaganda - they censor, or walk away from responding. A propagandist when confronted soon loses their footing, and this is why we must always be open to talking. We are all peers anyway so nobody owns what can or cannot be expressed. This is the way we enter "the new world" or the new society that we have to build from the foundations. Any "truth seeker" who censors or forces commenters to pay for making comments, should be highly suspect. As long as the lines to communication are open, stymies the propagandist and weakens them.

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Scary stuff, and thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Dogmatic (human) trolls behave somewhat similarly so it can take time to work out what's going on, and I do believe the 'Believe the Science' movement has people super-ready with irritating defensive and inane rejoinders like this.

This entity still seems very bot-like.

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I must say the scenario is fascinating , and agitating enraging and ridiculous all at once . I had a similar exchange that went on for numerous paragraphs on "Threads" once, until like yourself I realized I was dealing with a program response text generating system clearly cued up and fed the proper data by the supposed owner of the platform. "His" sycophantic followers were waiting in the wings to flash mob any comment or question about the current consensus "$cience" ( appeals to authority ) and it's dogma .. The bot wrote at one point *he is questioning if I am in fact a "real boy" Spooky business if you ask me. The Blade Runner parallel is really good .

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Great exposé Madhava. We have come across others in a similar vein, who just drain your energy and resources.

One thing of note is that Paul doesn't have a recognised published paper. His "papers" are only on his researchgate profile and don't exist in Pubmed. This is a classic example of a narcissist personality, which are generally unsuitable for science and medicine for obvious reasons. Only one of his "papers" (2013) has a co-author, who also only ever wrote one paper. Although it seems to be in a peer reviewed journal it doesn't appear on Pubmed. It is therefore extremely disturbing for this person to pretend to be an expert in anything and treat those he interacts with with such derision as he has treated you and others.

The only good thing to emerge out of this is that this is yet another example of the inexperienced and inadequately competent "practitioners" that were recruited for the mutton crew. It appears that they universally have a terrible track record in publications and are presumably offered a fast track process to a publication (as in the examples of Graham Bottley and Viki Male) as the recompense for the service they provide to attack and harass scientists on social media who don't toe the party bigpharma line.

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I only have a single publicaton (still in preprint) to my name (as a co-author). However it should be reasonably obvious that something fishy is going on with the literature if nearly every paper that challenges the orthodoxy makes news for being "retracted" or having "failed the peer review process". Do these people really believe that all of these researchers are spending endless amount of their precious time concocting faux studies to derail the narrative?

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I had a chat with chatgpt and had it summarize all so called facts which were overthrown with emerging data. Give it a try it's a great argument in cases like this.

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I am very sorry you had that very long thread with someone who was literally abusing you.

"Paul Wilson: Correct - I place weight on the highest quality peer-reviewed evidence published in credible journals. There is nothing flimsy about that as anyone who is actually science literate will tell you.

Me: How do you know these journals haven’t been corrupted by outside influence? Can you detect fraud in published data? Have you ever done that? Or do you rely on others ?

Paul Wilson: The burden of proof is on you since it’s your claim, not mine."

You should have stopped after this exchange. I am glad you realize now that you need to very carefully read responses. I had these kind of conversations a very long time ago. Probably a decade on Facebook, before I realized I was being strung along. I was, like you emotionally so involved, that I did not realize I was being abused.

"I am not seeking your approval" is one of those abusive ways of triggering you. If someone doesn't really care about your approval, they can simply leave, or stop the conversation. But making that statement is aimed at your need to communicate. It literally teases you, belittles you, which of course lets you ramp up your response.

It takes a conscious cognitive effort to look at once emotional response to these kind of statements coming from someone you do not know and for all you know has no direct impact on your life whatsoever. When a complete stranger insults you, what does it matter to you? It has no bearing on your life.

I do not know if I can give you any advise on how to deal with these kind of situations other than to try and step back and take a really close look at what is being offered to you. Be aware of your inner emotional state.

And maybe read these two books, both titled "Propaganda". The one explains how it should be used to control populations and the other how to spot how it is used against populations.

https://archive.org/details/bernays-edward-l.-propaganda-1928-1936_202107/mode/2up

(This is taken from the cover of one edition of Sigmund Freud's nephews book: https://archive.org/details/propaganda-1928-edward-bernays-redsquare and I recommend you read the page where that statement can be found in his book)

https://archive.org/details/propaganda-jacques-ellul/Propaganda-Jacques%20Ellul%20/

I would also love to continue our conversation in the chat. I just read David Chandler's, Ted Walter's and Tony Szamboti's June 2023 paper.

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Thanks for the comment. I actually went into the exchange with a light heart. Very few of people in that camp are willing to go beyond their echo chamber and engage with others outside of leaving insults. I was curious how those folks engineer their logic and whether they had the wherewithal to recognize that they are being dogmatic.

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And now you understand that on Twitter/X as on Facebook and now seemingly on this platform as well, you will encounter bots. The question then becomes: Who plants and controls these bots. The reason should be obvious.

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I agree with you (Ghost) on this being abusive: ""I am not seeking your approval" is one of those abusive ways of triggering you."

But, whether we agree or not, I believe what Madhava has been trying to do here is to provide an opportunity for honest exchange and an opportunity to explain a divergent point of view.

Which obviously didn't work. But I think it was worth trying, for the truth, simply.

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What you were talking with is a shill.

Shills have the following properties:

1) They regurgitate their position endlessly

2) They ignore any contrary evidence

3) They deflect, redirect, or otherwise engage in distraction tactics when cornered

4) They overuse singular sources of information

5) They engage in bad faith discussion tactics: ad hominems, personal attacks, insults, strawman arguments, and more

6) They aim to waste time rather than inform

7) They have a financial conflict of interest <-- (a psychotherapist defending the status quo has a HUGE financial conflict of interest)

8) They have almost no prior reputation or history (read: appears out of nowhere and looks like a sock account)

9) They do not read nor study conflicting sources of information, or if they do, they will attempt to twist and mangle what it actually says

The handling procedure for shills are as follows:

1) Expose their financial conflict of interest and highlight they are a shill

2) Record and expose any ad hominem attempts

3) Encourage other accounts to block and ignore the shill

4) Do not waste any further time with the shill; they earn less than you - their lack of intelligence means their time is worth less than yours.

They're the internet version of cannon fodder for government talking points.

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Oh my... I think most of us thought that the biggest threat of AI would be that it would be more intelligent than us, rendering it difficult for us to tell the difference. I'm now of the mind that people are becoming so programmed and stupid that it's difficult to tell the difference....

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It's all maddening. Like reading the novel "Catch-22."

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Sea lions are amazing mammals anyway

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