Oddbean

Bitcoiners know there are many rabbit holes to go down and much history to cover in order to properly understand how things work. Are there any rabbit holes you have avoided? Any topics you just don’t want to know?

Fair point, sir. Apart from the fact that all conspiracies are psyops carefully curated for centuries, there's truth in every single one of them. Tl;dr Darwin has got it completely backwards. What's fascinating tho is the fact that such truths can be hidden from the overwhelming majority of people for such a long period of time.

Not really, because DNA was officially discovered after Darwin had published his theory. I'm not going into why I believe the Ancient Indians knew about the double helix, because children might be reading notes past their bedtime. Let's leave this for another time, shall we. I'm talking about bait and switch. I'm not saying Darwin was necessarily in on it. He may have truly believed we come from the monkeys and simple cells (something for nothing lol). Considering the context of the 1800s, it was optimal to push a false narrative for the masses in order to build an artificial ecosystem in order to enslave most of them for generations. If one believes they come from the monkeys, they might just well sever their connection with the Divine. The weird part is that the masses acted on their own freewill, probably because ignorance. Ignorance is truly sinful. Therefore, the masses were lured to a false premise. Add an educational system on top of it and you might just pave the way for the dollar based economy of the 1900s. Tl;dr Satoshi deployed something that will most likely act as an equalizer for the ones ready to verify for themselves. Here's something controversial instead of a conclusion. The official narrative doesn't add up at all. Humans don't come from monkeys, rather monkeys come from humans.

I tend to lean towards humans being the product of an alien breeding program 200k years ago. The unanswerable question in my mind is why? If it was to mine gold then what is the greater use of gold? Is monoatomic gold that valuable/useful? Has Bitcoin been deployed to get us to move away from the metal? These are the kinds of rabbit holes I don't find particularly useful in pursuing. 😆 I'm always happy to be enlightened though.

The Germ Theory vs. Terrain Theory stuff, and the idea that viruses don't exist. It's not that I don't want to know, I just haven't been ready to invest the mental energy yet and possibly upend my current beliefs. 🙃

Germ theory is a good one. @Byzantine posted some stuff ages ago and I conceded I couldn’t traverse that rabbit hole. Not sure I understand the science stuff behind it well enough to even dive in.

they have electron microscope images but they didn't isolate a virus and prove it was contagious prior to taking the image so we have no basis to conclude that the thing shown is a contagious virus (probably they are cell breakdown products from the cells they "culture" the "virus" in)

What they present as a virus are just protein cells, there are no electron images of viruses, the magnification is not enough. They Show a protein cell and say usually that the protein cells contain viruses, but no virus image of a virus itself . All CGI.

This is one I've come around on over the past couple years TLDR: Virology is pseuedoscientific and the viruses it finds are the products of the methods used When Germ Theory failed (eg Koch himself failed to develop cholera after drinking a bunch of cholera bacteria) they decided the germ agent must be too small to see even with a microscope The microscope images are from cells that are killed with antibiotics and antifungals, breaking down into a goop of sub-cellular items which are declared to be viruses (without proof) The gene sequences are from basically the same thing - they take a whole bunch of DNA, cut it into tiny bits, and then the computer assembles the tiny bits into the virus Experiments to spread contagious illness have failed, eg healthy volunteers spent time in a Spanish Flu (1918) ward and had sick mucus sprayed into their nose. None took ill. An example of the pseudo-scientific process: Pasteur was not able to induce rabies (a supposed neurological virus) with the saliva of rabid dogs, and could produce similar symptoms only by injecting matter from the rabid dog directly into the brain of healthy dogs. Maybe there are macro-parasites and thus contagion (eg ticks) but I am not aware of any germs which have been shown to cause illness.

3 causes of disease I can conceive: 1) Endogenous - the disease is somehow inside us all the time (eg genetic disorders) 2) Environmental - we are exposed to some sort of harmful condition (eg radiation, toxins, pathogens if any can be shown to exist) For example, paralitic polio was probably caused by the pesticide lead arsenate. 3) Deficiency - we lack some element for ideal health (eg some vitamin/mineral, sunlight, fresh water, etc) I suspect that in the case cold & flu illnesses the body is reacting to cold & diminished sunlight (and thus vitamin D conversion) during the winter months. If flu is caused by a virus, why is it seasonal? Why does the virus care how sunny it is or whether it's 30C or 10C outside?

Another cause: psychosomatic - you observe people having a certain illness and interpret your own difficulties to mirror that illness eg whether rabies "virus" causes you to fear water or to believe you are pregnant with a litter of puppies depends on what culture you're in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_pregnancy_syndrome But I do think there is some root biological condition to cold & flu

When it comes to the Germ Theory vs Terrain Theory, I'm not convinced it has to be one or the other. I tend to think that if we take proper care of our bodies, then the opportunistic germs are not a problem, but that they do exist and can cause problems in a body that isn't working right. That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if sometimes terrain problems (toxic foods, medicine, personal care items, EMF, etc.) get blamed on a virus that either doesn't exist or just doesn't cause the problem. I've read some stuff relating to AIDs that makes me think that HIV isn't the actual cause of AIDs and that it either has very little or nothing to do with it. I'm not positive about it though.

Part of it for me is what can I impact and where do I want to spend my time... I have a high-level mental model of how I think the world works - do I need to research every thing that possibly has or has not happened, or spend time working on the things that I can impact (my family, etc) and adjust my mental model as new information is discovered?

I don't go too deeply down rabbit holes that seem to serve no purpose to explore. The trouble is that you don't know what purpose knowledge will provide until after you've acquired it. Every rabbit hole runs deep & is constantly being extended upon. There's no rabbit hole I've deliberately avoided but eventually I grow tired of them & move on. Bitcoin has so far proven to be the exception to this behaviour & is a good place to launch into other rabbit holes from. I sometimes wonder what rabbit hole am I not aware of? This is probably a better question to ask.