Seeing Truth in the Age of Information Overload

A recurring theme in human society is how often groups hold diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet both are absolutely certain they are entirely correct, and the other is completely wrong. In each instance, this means that at least half of the people involved are wrong and incapable of seeing evidence repeatedly presented to them.

For example, recently, ACIP (the panel that advises the CDC on the vaccine schedule) decided to reevaluate the newborn hepatitis B vaccination because:

•Decades of evidence suggest it causes significant harm (e.g., it targets myelin), yet no formal studies have ever assessed if the harm exists—despite continual requests for them.

•The public justification for newborn mass vaccination is that it serves as a safety net for the roughly one in a million instances where a hepatitis B positive mother is not tested for hepatitis B, infects her child during childbirth, and the partial protection the vaccine provides will prevent the child from going on to develop a lifelong hepatitis B infection. Yet, there is no evidence that thirty years of this policy has reduced hepatitis B.

ACIP hence proposed making newborn vaccination optional for mothers who tested negative for hepatitis B. However, due to the religious fervor around the vaccine, this met widespread resistance, and at the meeting, medical representatives showed they were incapable of conceiving that the vaccine could cause harm because their entire focus was anchored to preventing the (one in a million) case of newborn hepatitis transmission.

Likewise, once ACIP’s completely sane recommendation to stop vaccinating newborns of hepatitis B negative mothers was enacted, it was treated as an existential catastrophe by both the medical profession and the media and the ACIP chair was fired by his Texas hospital (then later reinstated due to our widespread protest against this decision—a fortunate but very unusual outcome).

While much could be said about this, I wanted to highlight that:

• A key theme in Robert Mendelsohn’s 1979 book Confessions of a Medical Heretic was that anyone who challenged medical dogmas was expelled and treated as a heretic (e.g., doctors who tried to save COVID patients from Fauci’s remdesivir protocols were fired and had their licenses targeted).
• Doctors (at least prior to COVID) typically only spoke out against the medical profession at the very ends of their careers to avoid being canceled.
• The largest victims of this cancel culture are patients, as the doctors being excommunicated are typically those patients would most want to see at their most desperate moments—which is a key part of why trust in physicians and hospitals decreased from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024.

Likewise, with most of the vaccines on the CDC schedule, it is quite difficult to clearly determine their relative risks and benefits as a large number of (unlikely) things typically have to line up for a vaccine to provide a benefit, while conversely, a wide range of short and long-term harms exist from vaccination which are rarely recognized. Because of the complexity of this question, it took me months to formulate a rough (unbiased) risk-benefit analysis for each CDC recommended vaccine (as the relative benefit and harm varies greatly from vaccine to vaccine).

Conversely, I found almost all members of the medical field are unaware of most of those datapoints, and instead simplified this incredibly complex picture by filtering it down to things like the belief “all vaccines are safe and effective” and being unable to see anything else. This in essence is why, to cite the hepatitis B vaccine example, most members of the medical field believed it was an existential threat to humanity that ACIP was considering stopping newborn hepatitis B vaccination despite the benefit being virtually non-existent and decades of research and hearings showing frequent harms follow the vaccination.
Note: during the ACIP hepatitis B vaccine hearings, one of the most noteworthy things was that every doctor or nurse who testified showed they simply could not conceive of the possibility that there were any safety issues with the vaccine—again illustrating the power of perceptual filters.

Because of this unshakable faith in the safety and efficacy of vaccination, any attempts to change the schedule hence meet an almost insurmountable resistance from the medical profession. Fortunately, RFK and the Trump administration at last found a way to cut through this morass—by having everyone focus on fighting over keeping the single birth dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine, and then out of the blue, simply cut the mandated vaccine schedule roughly in half (so America’s schedule matched what was done in less corrupt nations) without any warning.

Note: the harm of vaccines is cumulative, so cutting one, let alone half of them greatly reduces the number of injuries which will be caused. For those curious, Sherri Tenpenny (a longtime advocate for vaccine safety) concisely summarized why this historic change is so impactful here.

Early Recognition

Throughout my life, I’ve been able to see what was in front of me while noticing most people couldn’t. In time, I realized that if the crowd followed something, it was likely wrong, yet, even when this was pointed out, most people would continue to seek safety in mirroring their peers (whereas roughly 10% of people instead were self-directed and were much less susceptible to external pressures or the crowd dictating their actions).

This is why I (and many other dissident physicians I’ve spoken to) realized within days of the COVID vaccines hitting the market that they were extremely dangerous (as each day I had multiple people come in with significant reactions to the shot, and within a month I began hearing reports around the country from people who knew of someone dying suddenly from the vaccine). In contrast, I saw colleagues I respected (who were trapped in a near religious jubilation about the “95% effective” vaccine ending the pandemic) be completely unable to acknowledge any of the injuries—even when patients no-showed and their relatives stated they’d died suddenly after vaccination.

Realizing this would never be reported in a “credible source,” I decided to spend the next year documenting all of those reports so I would have something to show skeptical parties, and a year later, since nothing equivalent had been done, in February 2022, I published it on a brand new Substack, it went viral and that’s essentially how I ended up where I am now.

Note: while compiling those cases, I noticed numerous cases strongly suggesting people were getting injured by mRNA vaccine shedding—something that by every known mechanism was impossible. Trusting the early signal, I then spent nearly two years investigating it and with Pierre Kory’s help, was able to build a strong enough case shedding was real (e.g., hundreds of similar reports following a predictable pattern and mechanistic proof) that it is now recognized by many.

This touches upon a critical point—to solve a problem, you must have the ability (and willingness) to see a wide sea of possible data points, then have the intuition to know which ones to focus on. Likewise, you also need to have the courage to act upon what you know is true, even if everyone is telling you not to.

Why Reason?

When navigating controversial topics with high ambiguity, I believe that it is critical to avoid getting attached to any specific interpretation.

Regretfully, I routinely see people in every segment of society arrange data points into a logical chain arriving at a predetermined outcome, despite many logical jumps they make not being rational. Once this happens, they get aggressive in pushing that belief onto others but simultaneously can’t see they are doing it (despite immediately noticing it in those they disagree with).

This touches on a deeper question people rarely ask: “What is your actual basis for seeking to believe something?” I’ve found the most common reasons are: to eliminate discomfort from the world being difficult to understand; to seek comfort belonging to a group; to validate one’s ego; or to gain power over others.

Note: this ties into evolutionary psychology’s view that reasoning evolved primarily for gaining power within social groups. Likewise, research shows that more intelligent people, while excellent at arguing, are much less able to perceive data contradicting their deeply held beliefs.

In my case, I had no interest in those reasons and simply wanted something that could provide a deeper level of fulfillment to my life because I was fed up with how hollow so much of what society fed to me was. I hence decided to construct a functional means of discerning truth that was humble, flexible, and well-designed enough that I would gradually move towards the truth.

Information Overload

One colleague has advanced a compelling theory to explain why a palpable madness seems to be gripping our society: so much information is available now that it has exceeded the processing capacity of the human mind, causing people to destabilize inside, and as the information glut increases, this problem will worsen.

A basic safeguard that the mind has against this is plastering a simplified explanation onto reality or siding with the crowd. Unfortunately, the current demand on the mind is exceeding that buffer—so we are beginning to see a lot of mental “glitches” emerge that many have never previously encountered.

Fortunately, many meditation traditions have recognized this underlying process for millennia and developed methods for cultivating the internal stability needed to bridge that gap—methods that have been invaluable in my personal life, in practicing medicine, and in writing this newsletter; without them, I simply could not have done my life’s work.

Focusing on Value

In many environments, a massive amount of data is present that the conscious mind cannot track. However, the subconscious directs your focus to what has “value” for your conscious mind.

One classic example is the “Cocktail party effect,” where you can be in a room where many conversations blur together, yet somehow zero in on the one conversation where your name was mentioned. One reason put forward as responsible for this is the “reticular activating system.”

Note: it’s debatable if the RAS is ultimately responsible, but I will use it to convey the central points of this essay.

The RAS filtering function has been hypothesized to have evolved so early humans could rapidly detect food and danger in their environment. We no longer face those high stakes, but the RAS persists, now seeking things our culture has habituated us to value—money, products, or potential mates (particularly since dopamine-focused marketing revolves around conditioning the RAS to seek those things out).

In human interactions, recognizing the importance of the RAS is immensely valuable because your words and actions are often far less important than what the other party has been primed to look for. If someone’s initial impression of you is positive, their RAS will filter for things showing your value; if negative, it will filter for signs you should be disregarded (e.g., this is why people trapped in abusive relationships often don’t register the abuse while citing a couple of semi-decent things the abuser did as proof they’re a good person)—a process commonly described as “confirmation bias” (where you only see things that support your pre-existing beliefs).

Note: one of the major problems with media is that multiple parties are always competing for your attention, so media naturally selects for the content which “provides the most value,” something that is typically done by eliciting strong emotional reactions from the audience. Since it is challenging to produce quality content, more and more (especially online due to social media algorithms greatly amplifying sensationalistic but empty content) this has evolved into people routinely directing salacious (“black-pilled”) allegations towards public figures. For example, MAHA has made a variety of historic accomplishments within the H.H.S. I never imagined could be possible that were widely opposed by the Federal bureaucracy (e.g., cutting the vaccine schedule in half) but rather than focus on the broader picture of what’s being done, that media economy has primed people to selectively filter for negativity. Fortunately, there does seem to be a general evolution of consciousness happening with less and less people being drawn to this type of empty content now.

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