(2021-08-31) Solana Based And Horsepilled

Mike Solana: Based and Horse-Pilled. I do find it genuinely difficult to tell if the world is ending or if the smallness of social media makes it feel like the world is ending, but even by the “everything is burning” standards I’ve come to expect from Twitter it’s been a wild week.

In almost every piece of this, there’s a story to tell of stunning government failure. But the failure isn’t strictly speaking American, or at least not as defined by the broader American people, and therein lies our hope.

One of the strangest aspects of American representative democracy is the citizens of this country are somehow not reflected in their leadership

Our world is a reflection of incentives, and the best America has to offer — our smartest, our bravest, our most creative — are not incentivized to politics. That doesn’t mean our smartest, bravest, and most creative don’t exist

The Anduril team — brilliant, good people building defense technology that has never before existed — reminded me of possibly the greatest departure from the ongoing failure of our government: private industry.

Americans are still doing great things. We can’t lose sight of what’s working, and there is a lot that’s working.

Our media landscape is, of course, not that.

Few things so perfectly sum up the stupidity of our present cultural moment as the ivermectin debate

the FDA doesn’t want Covid-positive patients to dose themselves with ivermectin, which folks across the media have interpreted — apparently without a single Google search — as “ivermectin is a poison horse drug.”

What do we actually know about this scary new drug ivermectin? Oh wait it’s not new at all, and we actually know a lot.

Ivermectin, a modification of the Nobel Prize-winning avermectin, is an FDA-approved drug (though not for Covid), and has been since 1996.

For the most part, the drug has been used as an antiparasitic, perhaps most notably for something called River Blindness, but it’s also used to treat over 20 different viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the Adam and Eve to our present bat plague, which is likely why many people suspect there might be some use in the drug against Covid-19.

The ivermectin conversation has been reduced to “horse drug bad,” which the media yanked directly from our own government:
U.S. FDA @US_FDA: You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it

Is ivermectin toxic? No. Is ivermectin toxic when your doctor refuses to prescribe it so you try to get it on the black market and accidentally dose yourself with enough of the drug to cure a 2,000 pound horse? I mean yeah, that’ll probably kill you.

I do think the ivermectin debate is also, in its way, about vaccines. As our media and government believe it their moral duty to convince us of behavior they believe healthy, rather than to accurately inform us about the world so that we can make personal decisions about our own health, it’s important to consider every Covid-related story in light of what the truth arbiters want. And the truth arbiters want you to get a vaccine. I think you should get a vaccine too, for what it’s worth, but I’m not about to pump propaganda to scare you into doing it

There’s a moral thing here, in the first place. I just think it’s wrong to lie about health-related questions. But there’s also a practical piece. The people telling us what to do are, you know, chronically wrong about pretty much everything.

We know that contracting Covid outside is close to impossible. We know that a vaccinated individual’s chance of dying from Covid is statistically close to zero. We know that incentivizing indoor behavior is extremely unhealthy. So here’s a great idea from the governor of Oregon: let’s force vaccinated individuals to mask outdoors.
What?

Once someone digs into the story for five minutes and realizes they’ve been lied to — about their health — this is the sort of thing that becomes extremely radicalizing. One walks away with the sense the “government is lying to you, man.” Then we clutch our pearls and wonder why people no longer trust “the experts.”

I’m dragged into conversations about misinformation on social media almost every week, and I agree that misinformation is a problem

the problem is not our lack of trust in media and government. Our problem is almost no one in media and government deserves our trust, and in this age of the internet it has never been easier to catch a would-be arbiter of truth in a lie.