39 Comments

Very wise and balanced advice, thank you!

Here's a story from my researches. My daughter has high cholesterol, and she asked me ten years ago whether she should worry about it. (She was 28.) I spent two weeks reading the literature, and wrote up the results in my blog. https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2014/05/14/cholesterol-a-medical-controversy-i-background/

What I found was that there were two schools of thought, both published in top-tier journals by professors from the best med schools. One school was that lowering LDL was crucial to lowering risk of cardiovascular events. The other said that LDL had little to do with heart attacks and, if anything, there was a negative correlation between cholesterol in the blood and CV risk.

At the time, I reported to my daughter that there was a basic disagreement among experts, and that I didn't have the background to be able to distinguish where the truth lay. If I were answering the same question today, I would say that this is an asymmetrical debate, since one side is supported by statin drug prescriptions, one of the most profitable lines of pharmaceutical products. I would note that one side has financial motivation to skew their professional judgment, while the other side is probably in an uphill battle just to get their studies into print.

Listen to the experience of Aseem Malhotra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV-Qbbl_e6o

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author

Indeed a conflict of interest should be a warning.

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Jul 8Liked by Madhava Setty

I just finished watching your interview. Ever since I found you via your vaccine conference attendance piece, you are the writer I look forward to most for new articles on substack.

I also had quite a few doctor friends, one a top heart surgeon, and it was indeed astonishing how trusting and self-assured they were and how little they know about the very basics around anything related to Covid, like IFR, ct cycles or absolute vs relative risk, let alone HI threshold/VE formulas, which I fortunately got made aware of by Bartram's article 'The never ending quest for herd immunity', whereafter all the then still missing pieces about their (basically slavishly following the Roy Anderson booster etc.) strategy (linked to in Bartram's piece) fell into place for me.

Even more shocking and telling was and is, that they showed zero curiosity and interest in aquiring that basic knowledge- as with the other topics you mentioned from JFK via moon landings to climate change or the origins of the Ukraine conflict.

Personally, I think I am different than them thanks to my career in equity markets, where you are wrong every day and most times, and toast quickly if you can't take responsibility for these mistakes and refuse to learn from them.

Being introduced to Gustave Lebon's The Crowd was the 2nd important step for my journey and development.

Thank you! Off to ordering your book now!

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author

Thank you for the comment. Coincidentally, the host of that interview also found me through the article on the vaccine conference too.

I am not familiar with The Crowd.

I deal with medical/surgical specialists on a daily basis. They are in a select group. After years of being the authority in a situation I think they have forgotten that their confidence cannot and should not be simply be transposed to another context.

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Jul 8Liked by Madhava Setty

Germany's currently sharpest mind, Prof. Michael Esfeld, in his book Land ohne Mut (Country without courage) has described this current situation as follows: "We live in real existing postmodernism, where power has replaced reason."

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Thank you for protecting intuition from insult, as advertised in your column’s handle. Experts whose power and capital are at stake are disarming laypersons of their better instincts, with fatal consequences these days.

In addition to following good instincts, it’s only rational to evaluate these experts’ interests along with their arguments, and to factor in other tactics they use (e.g., censorship and ridicule of opposition) when we judge professional disputes.

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Good point. It is not possible to know all the prejudices that may be guiding another person's thread of thought. However a conflict of interest and/or the attempt to hide a conflict of interest is a red flag.

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Jul 8Liked by Madhava Setty

Your writing investigates "how we decide what is true." Our conclusions are entirely up to us, yes? I always appreciate your writing and how it asks me to consider how I am viewing the outer world. Intuition is such an incredible gift. May NONE of us take it for granted! Much gratitude and appreciation for your Presence on this planet of ours. Thank you for being here at this critical time in the history of our human species.

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Yes. Our conclusions are entirely up to us. I am also tacitly suggesting that if we can clean up our individual biases and access our intuition we will eventually converge at a universally shared understanding of what is happening, with a sprinkle of uncertainty to keep us flexible.

It's a radical idea.

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An idea shared by many so-called lightworkers around the world! My understanding is that these individuals are encouraging their followers to face the darkness in their inner psyches, clean it up as you say, and proceed to trust their intuition for true guidance.

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Jul 8Liked by Madhava Setty

Nathaniel Bowdich, author of The American Practical Navigator (1799), would seek out the least intelligent member of a ship’s crew and explain navigation to him. Only nce he had been able to articulate on this level would he begin writing. You could argue that all other text is elitism.

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Hmmm

Actions and results, speak louder then words.

Indubitably those actions and results spread like wild fire by word of mouth is so powerful, it's underestimated by those with the power of money, the control of public/private institutions.

I would say the group suppressed by the power structure promoting the new financial system and culture, has something to hide.

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If you read Gavin de Becker or Paul Ekman you might conclude that the mystical “intuition” is simply our unconscious mind reading and interpreting—at a very fast pace—subtle clues in the world around us—body language, facial expressions, vocal intonation, syntax, etc.

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Some of that happens and registers, no doubt. However in that model there isn’t any space for contextualizing what is apprehended. Subtle clues can point to deception but here we are talking about people who believe in what they are saying.

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Are we?

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Why do they believe what they’re saying? If what they’re saying is untrue (jabs will stop the pandemic), then their belief is based on lies. Either they haven’t done their research, or they have ulterior motives. In either situation he will give off unconscious clues.

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They believe that the jabs will stop the pandemic for the first reason you give. They haven't done their research. And for them research means something completely different. To them it means listening to multiple sources of information: The Times, WaPo, NPR and to drive it all home, a visit to the CDC's website.

There are those with ulterior motives, but they are far fewer than most realize imo. I was at the World Vaccine Congress last year. The vast majority of attendees were scientists and epidemiologists who simply have been caught up in herd mentality.

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Right—my argument is that if someone enthusiastically supports, say, the jab, without doing his research, our “intuition” is able to pick up on nonverbal cues projected unconsciously by him—he will not have confidence in his argument because he knows he hasn’t done his homework. I find this interpretation far more elegant than just calling it “intuition” and treating as something mystical.

If you ever make it up to Midcoast Maine, I’d love to buy you a coffee and continue this discussion!

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founding

Andy, what I appreciate is your desire to sit down with someone who has opposing views and actually dialogue about it over a warm (or cold) beverage. Bravo!

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Reality is merciful? I don’t think the baby giraffe being eaten alive by hyenas would agree!

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And yet the baby giraffes soul moves on and the hyenas do not starve.

My point is that if we don’t have a way to see through lies that are manufactured by those who are smarter than us we would be destined to live at their will and whim.

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I don’t think a religious argument (“the soul moves on”) works in this context. Aren’t we talking about rules of logic?

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True. That's my opinion. However one must acknowledge that there is no proof of a soul's existence or non-existence. Everyone is free to choose how they approach this fundamental question. My experience in the OR supports my hypothesis, but there is no reason for anyone to believe me.

Nevertheless, the fact that the hyenas didn't starve is evidence that reality is not completely unmerciful.

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As a full-on carnivore, I often question “God’s” model of the world, which requires murder, murder, murder. Why can’t lions eat sweet potatoes? Why can’t I thrive on them? Maybe if I progress to a higher realm of the samsara I will understand this, but from my current perspective, the world (“reality”) is a brutal, unforgiving place.

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My opinion is that the life we are living is a tiny chapter in an infinite book. We haven't gotten to the end. Neither can we remember the chapters we have experienced. However I feel that some part of us endures through the cycles and it is through that that we apprehend our present experience.

This gives us a way to accept that people will respond to challenges differently. Fundamentally it comes down to deciding how to regard every experience we are given. Is it a test? Is it a punishment or a reward? Was it predetermined? Is it a lesson? Everybody is free to choose. There is no certainty. That's why it's so intriguing.

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founding

Thanks Andy. As a newly-converted carnivore—this diet is healing me like no other—I too grapple (and marvel) at the paradox of this dimension where life and death are so inextricably linked. And Madhava I hope you share in the substack about some of your glimpses of soul in the operating room!

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Well, I have been witness to some inexplicable things. The most inexplicable thing is around the mechanism of anesthetic gases. That combined with NDEs in the OR and information suggesting that we reincarnate all point to the fact that we are consciousness itself and it is non-local.

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Maybe you could do a substack on this?

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There is an unfortunate and enormous difference between Einstein and Tagore: Tagore was heir to one of the world's great dark market fortunes. His grandfather was an opium intermediary to satisfy the Chinese after the First Opium War. The drugs did not stop---the flow increased. While Tagore

The Tagore family was brutal, and there is good reason to wonder whether Rabindranath was playing a role as a poet for the British Empire. He personally destroyed all of his grandfather's records in order to keep curious historians from have the pieces to put together. He was thrust into the English arts sphere, specifically around occultists such as Theosophist William Butler Yeats (a colleague of Aleister Crowley's who practiced Thelema), and the question has been asked historically whether Yeats wrote some of Tagore's work. Theosophy might be best described as the order, founded by a fraud and a fraud lawyer, to engineer global [frauds] magical spells. Many "lifetime actors" are associated with their work, and with respect to India, they had control over nearly everyone reorganizing the subcontinent in a way that allows the British Empire to continue to profit off opium without paying for an army (also, the newly created child market).

https://embed.kumu.io/c6c7ac3da72114a23f9cbbe5fa582210

Tagore's work, in totality, is a promotion of the concept of a United Nations one world government: The "one world" where the "mind is without fear" as his friends in The British Empire arranged a world of forever wars and terrorism. When you lay out his works, there is almost nothing that would not usher fed up, traumatized humans into a flower New Age cult to worship the New World Order. And it all served to provide a disturbingly unquestioned mask for the British Empire's swapped out presence in India.

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/theosophy-and-the-faked-independence

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Perhaps the first thing to do with experts disagree is look into their backgrounds to see if one or the other of them has conflicts of interest, or perverse incentives.

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Jul 7·edited Jul 7Author

Agreed. That would be helpful but not definitive.

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It certainly take a good leap in the sorting of priorities. When an empire has killed a quarter of a billion people, roughly, in organizing the world into a cybernetic machine that it can surveil for total control, debates over the possibly unresolvable hypotheses that seek to read godly understanding of consciousness or a theory of everything serve as a sideshow distraction. In these case, we are only talking about a discussion of hypotheses because there are no experiments that tackle the competing models, else it would no longer be much of a debate.

Here we are decades later, and the world is still under the thumb of empire, and illicit markets are more profitable and influential than ever. And the propaganda machinery is churning at peak efficiency (and those involved haven't figured out that they'll simply be discarded when their job is done, and people face the United Nations as their savior).

Sometimes agreeing to disagree is a cheap magic trick in service of a larger one. Making the Hegelian machinery respectable only reifies the notion that only the people promoted on the magic boxes we consume our media out of are the ones equipped to guide us.

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I am not asserting that Tagore was a good or bad person. Nor am I saying that he knew or did not know he was in service to a much larger agenda, malevolent or not.

The point is that Einstein and Tagore were willing to sit down and talk things over. Neither had any proof to support their hypotheses. I do think it is of interest that theoretical and empirical physics of which he knew little to nothing about, at least in comparison to Einstein, is suggesting that Tagore was on to something.

In any case, this essay was not in support of the British Empire. And therefore I am not taking any great leaps in the sorting of priorities, to paraphrase what you wrote above.

There are, in fact, experiments to tackle these conflicting hypotheses. I suggest you take a look at what Josh offered in his two recent essays. I also think that calling an inquiry into the question of what is primary consciousness or brain is far from a "theory of everything". Yet it does in fact lead us to something far grander than a "sideshow distraction".

Ultimately if human beings came to understand that their physical form will perish but consciousness persists, the leverage that authority has over the will of the individual will be degraded. The fear of dying is what controls us. A fearless people is much harder to control.

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"The point is that Einstein and Tagore were willing to sit down and talk things over."

What I'm trying to point out is that their doing so itself supported the British Empire while it was busy casting the illusion that it no longer existed. Nobody with a reputation worth keeping should ever sit down with the front man for a criminal enterprise who sold out it people. Nothing he says can be trusted, and the only thing of value we can gain is digging into the background to understand why his presence would be promoted.

There are a million people with different views than those of Einstein. Why not pick one who isn't part of a criminal enterprise that killed hundreds of millions of people for profit?

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Here is a great example of Tagore's selling out his own people (and others) to a fraudulent mission. Tagore is given credit for writing the national anthem of India: "Jana Gana Mana,"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jana_Gana_Mana

The title, translated,

Thou Art the Ruler of the Minds of All People

So, you know, bow to Sauron. It's the Indian thing to do?

The first thing wrong with this is that Wikipedia projects the lie because it came from "an acceptable source", but Jana Gana Mana was written at one of the Theosophical Society's lodges, and we know that the original tune was composed by one of their occult magicians, while Alice Bailey was busy promoting the "New World Order" (her words) into the League of Nations (United Nations).

https://madrasmusings.com/Vol%2024%20No%2022/the-national-anthem-the-cousins.html

But this "Anthem of a New World Order, assigned to India," was a largely plagiarized Brahmo hymn. Most Westerners (and Indians for that matter) still do not understand that Brahmo Samaj was, on the surface, Indians who were trained in law by the British. Their hymns are not the Upanishads or the Vedas. They were written to steer Neo-Hinduism toward the notion of global governance---and technically we do not know who wrote them! Probably agents of the British Empire prior to the creation and rapid deployment of the Theosophical Society, which became the new mechanism for idea and literature laundering.

This is the very definition of mass mind control, just as we received from fascist British-Prussian organized textbooks in the U.S. (Penguin Randon House is owned by Bertelsmann, which ran the Nazi propaganda apparatus; MacMillan was leader of the UK, and his textbook empire came to be run by Robert Maxwell while he was managing the PROMIS software that surveilled the U.S. government; Maxwell's Pergamon Press was publisher to the Club of Rome...and...Pergamon?!).

Yeah, we were all fooled in the U.S., too. And Einstein helped with that, but that's a story for another day.

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I had a feeling you would weigh in ;-)

All this may be true. However with regard to inseparability of observer from observed he (along with many mystics through history) was correct. The point here is that neither person scoffed at the idea of talking things over.

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I think that "point" is bait for a world in which billions of people follow the Hegelian dialectic of parasocial leaders. Such a world risks falling into the Matrix. In fact, I believe we're there. And I believe that was precisely the goal.

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