Apology Games
Game Theory, Part 2
"I bought into it. I demonized people. I was guilty of everything that I came to understand was not healthy." -Tim Robbins
It's not clear to me what it means, but apologies seem to be the topic of the week.
Let's talk about this…
I cannot in honesty say that I take any apology to heart without first judging the circumstances. And a dishonest apology is a slap in the face. Take it, and you might as well submit yourself to serfdom now. For a dishonorable offense, let the offender wash the feet of those alienated or injured first, or otherwise commit to solving the problems they've created—like the casting of hundreds of millions or more of the world's denizens into food insecurity.
If a tweet goes viral, does starvation? Who set that in motion? Who cheered it on? Who kicks the vaccine injured while they're down, and who ignored them?
Where aren't these questions on everyone's lips?
Dr. Joseph Fraiman
I'm reaching back almost eight months for this one, but I do so in order to compare and contrast.
During a recorded discussion, Dr. Fraiman took the unblinking moment to say that he had been wrong, he learned, he has transformed himself, and he wants to help. When I wrote about that moment that might otherwise have passed by undocumented, he stopped by to comment.
Those who step forward first take the greatest risk. As Bret Weinstein likes to say, "The first through the door gets the shotgun blast." So, straight-forward apologies, rendered early, are not simply taken in good faith by the vast majority of the crowd, but are cheered. Our ranks are growing. Certainly, we may judge the words, tone, and delivery as with all communication, but that's to say that we judge by the human connection, as in, "Welcome back to the tribe."
As time goes on, however, those who might have knowingly sabotaged the Titanic may be looking for lifeboats. So, we might judge apologies from Dr. Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak quite differently from the way we judge apologies from an ER physician, a nurse, a member of an education board, or that person who hugged you for 40 years before making you feel like dirt on Facebook. For each individual, the game theory of trust reformation is clearly different. We might expect somebody like Bill Gates to be "all in" in the poker game of world domination. While some need to humble themselves for their arrogance, others have committed great crimes. Timing, willingness to help push back against the cascade of evils upon us, levels of responsibility or leadership, and a thousand other factors matter. For some, removal from society is important—even if we can be perfectly certain of the sincerity of their confessions.
Tim Robbins
I'm currently less certain as to how much credit to give Tim Robbins.
Is this Tim coming to his senses, or being the first in line to "buy votes" socially before the truth flood pours through the less famous in his industry (which has suffered so many casualties that the memorial pages in the Screen Actors Guild trade magazine is about twice as long as usual)?
On the one hand, I'd grown tired of Tim's vapid virtue signaling through the years. Celebrities like him from whom the American class of skilled TV watchers "learn" are part of the reason Western society is teetering on a dangerous edge. On the other hand, the fact that he talks about the hypocrisy of participating in one set of protests (BLM) while denigrating another, then takes highly influential members of the entertainment industry to task makes me want to give him some credit. I'm generally wary after decades of moral disappointment from the entitled class of the entertainment industry. I think I'll see what forms of penance he offers before making a final judgment, and I don't plan easy forgiveness in my calculus.
Emily Oster
I'm going to want to hear Emily Oster's apology delivered as she stands with Ernest Ramirez, holding his hand. Maybe I just want to know for certain if she's Kunlangeta.
Over at The Atlantic—the magazine that programs the cognitive elite with the latest Overton window software for cocktail party conversation—Emily Oster floated the following:
She sets the conversation up with a story of "plausible" ignorance.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Eugyppius dismantles this nonsense appropriately.
No, reasonable people could see already in March 2020 that SARS-2 posed no measurable threat to children. There was never any honest debate to be had about this.
Emily has no excuse. She is not simply the cognitive elite, but one of their moral leaders—the author of a blog on "evidence-based parenting". She had every opportunity to talk with those of us who were challenging the narrative, from the start, every step of the way. And if she wasn't yet putting the brakes on by April 2020, surely there were reasons to cross the divide and talk with those of us (and there were at least a few dozen) who smelled a rat immediately upon publication of the Surgisphere nonsense that led to international policy changes within hours of its arrival. And nobody should even pretend to be among the cognitive elite if they equated the WHO trial for hydroxychloroquine with anything but a con job.
Here's how her tweeting out her article went over on Twitter:
If you're not familiar with the terminology, when the comments-to-"likes" proportion gets large for a tweet, that's called getting "ratio'd".
The crowd wants her to know that peace won't be brokered by wordsmiths in The Atlantic.
How come?
I'm going to share Eugyppius once more:
Emily looks past the extralegal "governance". We just need…"reminders"?
We got enough reminders, already. Or can we call it like it is? Ritual humiliation.
Trick or treat?
If you don't follow Emily on Twitter, it should be understood that she's been tweeting anything from reckless ignorance to total nonsense for the entirety of the pandemic, and blogging about it to her followers. If you look these tweets up, you'll find it hard to imagine that she wasn't informed of the problems at every step of the way.
So…forgive?
This morning she couldn't tweet cake pictures (birth control?) without getting further ratioed. It's worth noting that she didn't bother to answer the prior day's ratio before moving forward.
Let them eat cake?
Here's her blog post for the day to which that tweet links, with my art on top.
Maybe she was addressing the ratio, after all?
Had she chosen an 18th century artist over a 16th century artist, I'd honestly guess she'd already hired security.
Had she no clue, whatsoever?
That's a little hard to fathom.
Other Thoughts
Vinay Prasad chimes in. But I view him as something like a bumper in a game of Hegelian pinball. He has often played the middle ground in a way that feels a bit like narcissistic fence sitting. Honestly, I think he needs to declare his own apology before commenting on accountability. It's possible that he has, and I missed it, but that's because I got tired of thinking through the eight paragraphs it would take to correct his fence sitting positions.
The very first point in his post is,
The person who heads the National Institutes of Health funding (or any of the Institutes) should not be setting federal policy. Either decide who gets funded, or set policy, you can't do both. It's a problematic dual role. Nobody will want to criticize you because they'll fear retribution with funding.
At times like these, I look to Tolkien: "Fool of a Took! This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking-party. Throw yourself in next time, and then you will be no further nuisance."
Pfuck the NIH. Into oblivion. We don't need to reform the impenetrable Deep State hierarchy that resists all Constitutional authority, and lies about the existential war games it plays, and might even feel the need to crush us once in a while to cover for its sins. We need to throw the damned Ring of Power into a volcano, posthaste. If you're not admitting that the NIH acts primarily and most importantly as a funding arm for the DoD, you're playing at handling reality. That's worse than being an apologist for it all—Vinay acts as a guardian of the Matrix, whether or not he knows it.
Remember the Dollar Bill Auction.
Some of the world's most talented people played into the game for money, status, and power. I want for the tribe to be whole again as much as anyone, and I have some ideas on how to get there. But there is no getting there without a reckoning.
Note that I'm willing to have either Emily or Vinay on for a discussion at Rounding the Earth. I'd be happy to hear their thoughts, if I've mischaracterized any of this.
Addendum: From Margaret Anna Alice:
Addendum 2: From Heather Heying:
Addendum 3: I meant to include this in the article. Oops.
Addendum 4: JLW chimes in on Tim:
Addendum 5: What they did while they lectured at us.
Addendum 6: A Midwestern Doctor’s Take:
Addendum 7: The top comment from the above article hits the nail on the head. This is injecting a software update into the cognitive elite among the set of skilled TV watchers.
Hi Mathew! One of my readers linked me to your post. I wrote on this topic too taking a slightly different approach (I had no idea who this Oster was until today) which seemed to have taken off. Take a look at it if you can! Also I copied the twitter post montage you had here. It was much better than the one I put together.
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/dissecting-the-deceptive-plea-for
I believe Tim Robbins is genuine in his remorse and is gradually emerging from the fog of having being politically and psychologically manipulated. He has been calling out the Screen Actors Guild and defending actors like Clifton Duncan, who lost his acting career over this (see his brilliant Mises Institute talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCH_8KtLeVQ), for months now.
I reached out to Tim to commend him for the humility he displayed in pausing to reflect on his beliefs and behaviors and recalibrating accordingly, recognizing that it was wrong to comply with authoritarianism. This takes bravery, especially in an ideologically conformist industry that has the power to crush him for wrongthink.
He followed me on Twitter, which I take as a sign of his authentic change of heart, and I have extended an invitation to participate in a new interview series focused on the newly awakened. I hope he’ll take me up on the offer as I intend to delve *much* deeper in my attempt to understand the burning question at the heart of all my work: namely, how are ordinary, good-hearted, intelligent people manipulated by propaganda into becoming hateful, hurtful, even genocidal beings?