Idiocracy, Part 2. Poorly functioning laypeople.

 

A foreword that applies to both Part 1 and 2: Both of these are unusually harsh for me. For the vast majority of time I have put severe effort into being objective, analytic, respectful, focused on the topic/evidence, etc. in spite of being regularly countered with abuse of all sorts; toxicity, maliciousness, emotional reactions, logical fallacies, and more. But over the past decade of behaving like that it seems to have had little to no impact/benefit. Where an intelligent person would recognize your expertise & intellect and engage accordingly, idiots simply ignore it and it blows right past them as if it had never occurred. And if you bring attention to their behavior, they throw a fit. Adults with the minds of a spoiled child. Therefore, more recently I have opted instead to straight up describe and call out their behavior for what it is - moronic.

 

I've rarely ever thought of myself as especially intelligent. Instead, I feel like I'm living the movie Idiocracy, where an average person is inserted into a horrifyingly dystopian society filled with extremely poorly functioning individuals. In fact, my health & brain function have been extremely poor over the past 5 years to where I scored "impaired" on a neuropsychological evaluation. This makes it all the more alarming that even despite me functioning at 20-50% I still seem to be significantly more intelligent than the majority of people I interact with and observe.

 

Typically when I write something and first share it I'm significantly anxious that someone intelligent and knowledgeable will come along and rip it apart piece by piece, demonstrating how much of an ignorant idiot I am. Yet time after time it never happens, and instead the only "rebuttals" I get are incredibly unintelligent, broad & baseless dismissals, and all sorts of logical fallacies. And thus my confidence grows, as does my alarm for the state of humanity.

 

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So, per Part 1, if professionals can't be relied upon to be knowledgeable and competent the next logical step is to go directly to laypeople to spread information so they can become informed which gives them appropriate weariness to not just blindly trust, but research themselves and ask appropriate questions, thus allowing them to make informed decisions about things that can have a major impact on their lives and the lives of their children, family, loved ones, and society.

 

Unfortunately, my experience was that the vast majority of laypeople are completely opposed to this entire notion, and vastly more prone to emotional, illogical thinking and decision making.

 

Thus, I concluded that the only solution is to fix people. I've described in the past that this phenomenon is self-perpetuating and exponentially worsening. Thus, if we can't find a way to fix people we will certainly slip into an irreversible abyss.

 

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When I first got the mindset of "FMT is likely the cure I've been seeking, all I have to do is ask some healthy people for their poop, which should be relatively easy" I was warned by another sick person that their results at trying to get stool were extremely poor. Well, I wasn't going to let myself be defeated before I even started, so I brushed that aside, determined that I would succeed where others had failed. After all, according to various psychology reports I had read I have numerous factors going for me: I'm white, male, attractive, fit/thin/not fat, and tall.

 

Unfortunately, even having all of that going for me turned out to not be enough. And I grew gradually more disillusioned and perplexed. I developed severe misanthropic feelings after failing to find a stool donor for more than a year despite asking many extremely healthy people. After years of being so close to death so many times, mostly bedridden with huge amounts of time spent in intense physical and mental agony. Then a bunch of extremely lucky, perfectly healthy people can't even spare their fecal matter to save your life. A pretty much perfect and very effective donor agrees, does one, then goes silent with no reason, despite being very friendly before and after, and knowing my condition was life-threateningly severe.

 

I eventually added in this sentence to the flyer I would hand out: "I have been unable to find someone for over a year. Please consider carefully whether your poop is more valuable than a human life". But it seemed to have no effect. And neither did offering $1000+.

 

Later on I joined a number of FMT Facebook groups populated with thousands of fellow sick people wanting a high quality FMT donor. These are people who should be familiar with, and understanding of, the hardships (described above) that their peers/fellow patients experience due to illness and lack of high quality stool donors. At first, I shared my experiences with them, as well as the hubs of information I had been creating to help both them as well as doctors and researchers.

 

Then an opportunity arose. Someone in the community had the ability to create a website that we could use to find donors. Well, I'm in. If we all pitch in to help we should be able to find a donor relatively soon. I help translate the site to English, hire someone to create a flyer, start going out every day posting up thousands of flyers at gyms, universities, etc..

 

Unfortunately, it turns out that the rest of the thousands of FMT community members were perfectly happy to just sit around and watch two people do all the work. Their behavior was extremely irrationally selfish (due to the fact that they would benefit as well from high quality donors), narcissistic, and sociopathic if not psychopathic. Hundreds of them contact us asking for donors yet virtually no one helps find donors or participates in the project https://archive.ph/WOmDI in very simple, free, community-type ways. Despite there being numerous ways that people can help without giving any money and only a small amount of their time by sharing their input or by the other ways that we listed that are free and not highly time-consuming. Then a doctor/researcher posts a thread to one of the groups (which typically would only have a handful of responses/active users) asking people if they want to opt out of a survey and hundreds of these people just pop up out of the woodwork to opt out. I was so incredibly disgusted and pissed off by the behavior of these people. Fucking leeches. 

 

In addition, dozens of these people were spending tens of thousands on extremely sketchy, secretive, low quality sources of FMT that don't give information on the donors, don't track and report results, and threaten to sue people/patients who report bad outcomes. If even one of those people instead put their money towards helping the project we could have found a much higher quality, fully verifiable donor than what they were all paying for. And everyone would have been better off.

I think a major issue was that these individuals recognized their own low intelligence and incompetence, and thus default to trusting any source of FMT that seems the most official/established, regardless of all the problems and poor results reported. And since our project would have required them to DIY, they didn't trust themselves to be able to review the science I catalogued in my wiki and do a decent job at something which is extremely trivial.

Another example of this idiocy was the way in which the majority were going about FMT in incredibly unintelligent, unscientific, and dangerous ways, as well as continuing to spread low quality, unscientific, erroneous sources of information on FMT & the gut microbiome, despite much higher quality sources being available. For instance, I created a subreddit (/r/FMTClinics) where people could post their experiences so that we could keep track of the efficacy and safety of various options (since those clinics weren't doing so themselves), enabling people to make more informed decisions. Yet almost no one bothered to use it (almost all posts are me sharing other's experiences), and instead opted to just continue to blindly pick whatever source of FMT they felt like. Then later on, a stool supplier gets caught blatantly lying about their donor's medical conditions, plus being openly racist, and the vast majority of the community completely ignores it and carries on as if nothing happened. And only two people (out of hundreds) spoke up about retaliation against one of the people who helped expose them. Some people were even actively helping to spread the supplier's lies. Then some weeks later someone posts that they had a good experience using that supplier and a hundred people come out of the woodwork again to "like" the post. It's astonishing. Then months later, people have continued to use this supplier, not spread the word about the dangers, and to no surprise, continue to be harmed by the product [1][2]. This is astonishing, mind-boggling levels of stupidity, for which there is zero excuse, given that numerous higher quality and significantly less expensive sources are available.

 

During this time thousands of people had also been benefiting from free advice and extensive, time-consuming, high quality, up-to-date information, including many who benefited financially and professionally from both the public and private advice and information I freely gave. Due to the lack of reciprocation I drastically reduced the amount of time I spend answering & helping people. And after doing so, numerous people used promises of "sharing their donor with me" as a way to extract information & advice from me, only to go completely silent afterwards.


I was extremely poor most of my life, and during this time, with $700/mo income from disability, and $500 rent. There was a person in a life-threatening condition who couldn't source or afford any stool. I had recently been in such a situation myself for many months, and luckily got access to a donor that was lifesaving. I could barely afford it myself, yet I spent hundreds of dollars (a huge percentage of my yearly disposable income) to buy and ship this person stool on dry ice instead of using it myself. This person then more or less disappears afterwards without even as much as a "thanks". Sometime later on they managed a "yeah I'm better now".


Over this same time period I had been regularly keeping up to date with the microbiome and FMT research, and sharing hundreds of studies & layperson-friendly articles to the various "sick communities" on Reddit, such as /r/IBS https://archive.ph/9blDL, /r/CFS https://archive.ph/kECLo, /r/IBD https://archive.ph/RAAfB, etc.. The main goal to educate people about this likely cause/solution/treatment/cure so we can all be on the same page and work together to acquire it. These communities combined have tens of thousands of members. Significantly more than the FMT Facebook groups. Yet the behavior & results were the same or worse.

 

I did a Reddit AMA on /r/iama to try to reach the general public with this information about a possible panacea: https://archive.fo/eToDW - I was bludgeoned by the Reddit Mob of Morons. A journal editor came to my defense in the aftermath, and even then the mob stuck to their guns despite being severely wrong about literally everything. Yet they did it with such an incredible amount of confidence and arrogance. The notoriously corrupt reddit mods https://archive.ph/jlSHZ sided with the Mob of Morons and permanently banned me for a nonexistent rule which I didn't even violate.

 

I contacted hundreds of very healthy people directly. One example is a university athlete whose dad needed a kidney transplant. I explained (and cited) the role of the gut microbiome in kidney function and the potential for FMT to negate the need for organ transplants. I was offering $2,000 per month to be a stool donor, and/or $2,500 per donor referral. The result was no reply, and blocked.

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I've seen various political debates in a "swing state" where one of the candidates was clearly far more competent and intelligent than their opponent. I concluded that, due this obvious fact, they would win easily. In each case the opposite happened, and it left me bewildered.

Observing people in other areas of society has shown me this is not a political issue. This is a fundamental issue of people being so poorly functioning that they can't identify competence and intelligence. They cannot identify reputable, high quality sources of information, do not share those sources, etc..

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The average person I observe and interact with online is incredibly stupid. The parenting subs in particular seem to be an alarming demonstration of Idiocracy in action. They're not sending their best, that's for damn sure. In our dystopia where the vast majority of people are poorly functioning idiots, some of the dumbest & unhealthiest ones are the ones creating humanity's future.

 

The most common thing I see is parents saying (and self-congratulating themselves for) there are no cons to anything. Everything to do with creating and raising a child is purely preference. Parental preference of course. As long as the child gets food it doesn't matter what food they get. No one else should care what I do because the person I'm creating is MINE. These fucking narcissist sociopaths can't fathom that anyone could have empathy for a human being that isn't "theirs". Or they absolutely can fathom it, but are simply so selfish that they want to be able to do whatever they want without regards to the wellbeing of the child, and thus lash out and silence anyone who dares to disrupt. 

 

Seeing this type of thing it's no wonder we're experiencing such a major health crisis.

 

For years I've objectively shared various scientific studies & articles on health and the microbiome across numerous subreddits. Naturally these cover topics like the harms of antibiotics and C-sections, benefits of breastfeeding, etc.. The amount of parents that see stuff like this and interpret it as a hostile threat and personal attack is astounding. There are users that go around begging mods of various subs to ban me so that they can protect their fragile minds from being exposed to information and perspectives they don't like. 

I had a similar experience with a moderator of a major science subreddit. This moderator has a biology PhD. They removed a submission saying they won't allow science that has the potential to offend people. This is incredulous. Someone with this attitude towards science should have never been able to get any science degree, let alone a PhD.

I think one cause is that many of these parents are like horses with blinds on. Completely lacking cognitive plasticity. There's only one straight path in front of them, and they freak out if they see any object that might require them to reassess or change course. 

 

In general it seems that a majority of people (including some who generally agree with me and support me) are unable to process new information and adjust their understandings & positions accordingly, and simply continue to regurgitate the same misinformation over and over.

Even on /r/HumanMicrobiome where I've tried to grow a community with strict science/evidence-based rules, 5 years later the average person there seems to be a complete idiot who has learned absolutely nothing.

In Part 1 I gave some examples of severely problematic behavior on science-based subs. And I've experienced the same things on subreddits geared towards intellectual, rational, and ethical subjects. Thankfully, my experiences with much of the user base on those subs has been decent. But the moderators of many turned out to be as corrupt, incompetent, and irrational as any of the lowest functioning individuals, including of the subreddits of the topics theirs is supposed to "counter".

Reddit mods -- IE: random people who "got there first" – control all the content and discussion on a massive global website, and thus have a huge influence over the human ethos. Many of these people are individuals with nothing going for them, and thus they have the time to sit around on their computer doing "free work". Throughout most of human history they would have had very little influence on society, yet now we have huge and important portions of society controlled by some of the lowest functioning individuals. "The clowns are running the circus." This highlights the fact that much of our society is now only as strong as our weakest links. Reddit is incredibly dysfunctional because individuals are incredibly dysfunctional.

And my online experiences reflect what I experience in daily life as well. Fraud and scamming on ebay. Corrupt and unethical behavior by big companies. An employer scamming me. Multiple landlords scamming me and exhibiting fraudulent and incompetent behavior. It's everywhere and affects everything.

There are numerous examples from my life, such as one during a period where I was close to death, going to the ER numerous times. One of my sisters was hysterical about it, in tears, "Oh my god, what can I do to help?!". I was calm and collected, shared articles & studies on the gut microbiome and FMT and her reaction was "Oh, you need poop, oh sorry, you'll just have to die. Poop is icky so I can't talk to any one about that". I felt like she was a toddler playing with a loaded gun in front of me while I was tied up. Dumb people are dangerous. 

In the non-science-based reddit subs there's an active distaste for science, especially when it implies that humans' current behavior is problematic and thus a change in our behavior is warranted. In one of the largest parenting subs I was sharing various layperson-friendly science reports, participating in discussing them, and the result was a permanent ban with no warning or reason. And when I was finally able to get a response it was "we consider 'researcher studies' spam".

 

In /r/BabyBumps I posted a meta analysis about screening for BV https://archive.ph/uSbuW. It gets downvoted, users comment with link on GBS (something completely different) and upvote that link as if it counters what I shared. And even if my article was talking about GBS the users would still be wrong. Another user says the meta analysis is wrong "because I say so" while providing 0 citations, and everyone supports that user. Mod then bans me for completely erroneous and bizarre reason. The argument one user made - that this type of information shouldn't be shared with parents and it should be completely left up to doctors - is wrong due to everything we learned in Part 1.

 

I shared an article to /r/breastfeeding "New technologies claiming to copy human milk reuse old marketing tactics to sell baby formula and undermine breastfeeding". Thread removed, permanent ban https://archive.ph/AyYSh. I thought that was very odd since I'd been submitting similar studies and articles for years https://archive.ph/ziewC with no issues. The mods wouldn't reply, but a user contacted me later and it turns out that one of those people who goes around begging subs to ban me got their way.

 

I noticed that some of the /r/breastfeeding mods were also mods of /r/raisingkids - a parenting sub that is supposed to be one of the highest quality reddit subs - https://archive.li/0OtWH - "Raising Kids is a community for those interested in insightful articles, reddiquette, reading before voting and intelligent respectful discussion on the topic of parenting and raising children". The /r/breastfeeding mods' actions are obviously extremely antithetical to that. But, no response from the /r/raisingkids mods either. That should be surprising, but unfortunately I had already previously experienced the downvoting and censoring https://archive.vn/XkTQh - https://archive.vn/cpYBt of content from the New York Times and Vox that were saying it's safe for kids to go to school (re COVID). As well as the general reddit behavior of tribalism and dogmatism around anything related to COVID https://archive.ph/0Z5Yc. And I know that at least one of the /r/raisingkids mods is a microbiome researcher who follows /r/HumanMicrobiome.

 

In /r/beyondthebump I had been a long time constructively-contributing member and out of the blue received a permanent ban with no reason, seemingly for discussing the notion that the needs of the child should be taken into consideration rather than only the wants of the parent https://archive.ph/pMd1a.

 

I posted a PSA about microplastic pollution to /r/malefashionadvice, got a hostile response, thread removed, and permanent ban: https://archive.ph/sRus8 - https://archive.ph/cpnAF

 

I shared a scientific study to /r/diabetes, and engaged in discussion about the implications of it. Receive hostile, anti-scientific responses, thread removed, permanent ban https://archive.ph/huVaw.

 

I mentioned the reaction to COVID in Part 1 in the context of professionals, but laypeople's behavior was worse https://archive.ph/vZN23. The widespread misinformation, censorship, manipulation, extremely biased coverage, hysteria, tribal mentalities & behavior, unscientific attitudes and approaches, among laypeople, the media, and scientists. Much of it straight out of the books "Manufacturing Consent" and "1984", where the people I generally agree with politically were displaying horrifyingly anti-scientific attitudes (plus irrational, hysterical, etc.) while claiming to indisputably have the science on their side. Doing a 180 and suddenly declaring the authoritarian China as the shining example, while condemning the Nordic countries that behaved much more rationally, non-politically, and scientifically.

 

/r/starcraft: Starcraft is a game that takes a mixture of intellect and physical ability. It is the most demanding game that I know of. You have to both out-think your opponent, as well as physically out-skill them, and it's played at an incredibly fast pace. It seemed to me that due to these inherent qualities of the game it would attract a "higher tier" of person compared to more popular games that are extremely casual in nature. Yet I was very disappointed to discover that even the Starcraft community wasn't much better than the general public. When I would watch a unique tournament where the Starcraft community would gather, I was horrified by how incredibly unhealthy the vast majority of people there were. And my interactions with the /r/starcraft community reflected that well. A couple examples: During an announcement that a junk food company would be sponsoring events I commented that while I very much like this game it is unethical to allow junk food companies to market their products to children/young people, especially when we're already experiencing a massive global health crisis. I was heavily downvoted. Another time, someone in the community announces they're having a 4th child. I make a purely objective reply, with no personal opinion or commentary, linking to 3 pieces that scientifically show/discuss the detrimental impacts of overpopulation. Downvotes, and permanent ban https://archive.ph/keqqf.

 

 

 

In the science-based parenting subs, the majority of users wouldn't know what science was if it ran up to them in broad daylight, yelled as loud as it could 2 inches from their face and then slapped them in the face. It's incredibly alarming at how many "science based" parents are only looking for things that confirm what they want to believe, and actively attack and eschew anything else. People who respond to a scientific citation with "but I don't want to believe that, so I'll re-state my uncited opinion which you debunked with that citation, because my opinion is what matters" https://archive.ph/FOEdf#selection-643.2-643.3.

 

The mod of /r/ScienceBasedParenting created that sub as a haven from the average type of parent, and has to regularly post threads like these https://archive.ph/bYDhE - https://archive.ph/t0BxN - https://archive.ph/v5Vzb, chastising and reminding parents that sharing a study or mentioning what a study or scientific consensus says does not equate to "shaming" or a personal insult. Yet even she, who is pro-abortion, used some very flawed anti-abortion logic in a PM with me when it suited her.

 

/r/ScienceBasedParenting is regularly overrun by toxic anti-science imbeciles despite the moderator's continual, time consuming efforts to teach and reason with people, ban the ones that lack the ability to learn and be reasonable & intelligent, etc.. The mod has to regularly purge and lock entire threads https://archive.ph/sKb30 because the majority of users completely lack the ability to engage in rational, mature, evidence-based, scientific discourse. It's not only pathetic that a majority of parents are behaving this way, it's also extremely disturbing. These are the people determining the future of the human race.

 

The logical and intelligent thing for these parents to do would be to encourage the sharing of this information so that they/we can learn what to do and not to do, and how best to rectify nonideal situations. They should be supporting my efforts to find high quality FMT donors in order to both improve their own health, which gets passed down to their kids, as well as to provide FMT for their kids to try to correct for the low quality gut microbiomes they inherited from their parents, and damaged by various interventions like antibiotics, c-sections, and lack of breastfeeding. I even explained to them that this is what the reaction should be instead of the idiotic hostile one they display.

 

A few specific examples from my years of /r/ScienceBasedParenting history:

 

Malicious and deceitful behavior: https://archive.vn/MGZlC#selection-1573.12-1577.1 - https://archive.vn/ZvEyi

 

Again copy pasting and refusing to address the science: https://archive.vn/Qq7vr

 

Upvoting uncited comments with misinformation and downvoting comments with citations and comments asking for citations: https://web.archive.org/web/20210606221359/https://old.reddit.com/r/ScienceBasedParenting/comments/nthv1a/antibiotics_for_ear_infection/ - https://archive.ph/137kL

 

Continued anti-scientific, emotional, toxic, fallacious behavior towards antibiotic studies: https://archive.vn/FiFVJ - https://archive.ph/3tkvW

 

Heavily cited article gets downvoted. Moronic, unscientific counter-comment upvoted: https://archive.ph/YiLYO

 
Another thread full of ad hominem attacks: https://archive.ph/O46lK

Again: https://archive.ph/OvlsF (a bunch of toxic, anti-scientific comments removed and unfortunately not visible with revedit https://archive.ph/AD1fi)

 

More from /u/LilWiggs3 https://archive.vn/Ty6xw

 

/u/ph4mp573r totally incompetent and suffering from Dunning Kruger. Chooses personal attacks instead of addressing the evidence and arguments: https://archive.vn/fHxIS - https://archive.vn/vMFLg

 
Happily bumbling towards extinction with their eyes blindfolded and fingers in their ears.

For a period of years they regularly attacked me for "only presenting problems, no solutions". At the time I stressed prevention (reducing unnecessary abx use) while volunteering for two years for a project to find high quality stool donors for FMT. I then split off and started up my own project due to a variety of issues with the org I was volunteering for. I wanted to keep prices as low as possible both because I had struggled to not be able to afford FMT for many years, and because I wanted it to be widely available for everyone. Despite all this, users on /r/ScienceBasedParenting switched to dishonestly attacking me for "running my own expensive FMT company" before I even started selling any stool [1][2].

The moderator herself eventually succumbed to her own biases, and started removing my non-rule-breaking content, while attempting to bully me out of the sub by allowing others to freely break numerous rules in emotional and hostile responses to me [1]. And then silenced and permanently banned me when I pointed it out.

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Some years ago I was interested in getting a degree to "officially" get involved in the microbiome research. But after everything I experienced in Part 1 I find the notion to be extremely unappealing. Additionally, I've noticed that no amount of experience, knowledge, or expertise will be enough for some people. They will discredit you if they don't like what you're saying, no matter what. They will find a way.

Historically it's been an evolutionary benefit to watch what the majority is doing and follow that. But now that we've completely overridden natural selection without replacing it with an intelligent and ethical alternative, wherever I see the majority going, I'm running the opposite direction. 

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Some people have made some mild criticisms about my approach, which is generally emotionless, factual, and direct. Yet even trying humor in a tiny community which has been on the bleeding edge of science for decades (cryonics) bore similar results https://archive.ph/oMlr5, despite the fact that I previously attended video conferences with many of them where I summarized the issue in a purely serious and factual manner.

And it even occurs on a sub like /r/collapse, which is dedicated to covering problems and solutions. I'm the only person providing heavily cited analyses and solutions that get to the root cause of the problems. Yet the reception from the community is quite poor, and it even got erroneously removed for clearly bogus reasons by the moderators.

I've had to change my mindset and turn off my empathy in many cases in order to stop losing sleep over being unable to protect idiots from themselves. /r/CFS mods ban me due to their own injured pride, /r/IBS mods enforce a rule that no one can mention anything they're personally involved in, thus creating a "whine only, no solutions" ethos. The result is thousands of CFS and IBS patients not getting information on the likely cause and treatment of their condition. This kind of stuff used to really bother me. Seeing all these threads in /r/CFS and /r/IBS about people going to kill themselves due to their condition, and I'm unable to inform them about this currently available treatment/cure they can help procure.

A tragedy that the mods of those subs are responsible for hundreds of suicides, along with the continued suffering of tens of thousands of people with those conditions? Na. This is just the mods helping reduce an overpopulated world. I was already spreading the word for years in those subs and it was falling on deaf ears. The only detriment is that these people remain uninformed and thus are not helping me procure the treatment that I need as well.

All these people getting FMT from low quality, dangerous, and even fraudulent sources, despite there being publicly available information exposing the poor quality of those sources. Horrible that they're getting scammed out of many thousands of dollars, and that disreputable people are getting extremely rich off of ignorant people who didn't do proper research? Don't sweat it, it's just an idiot tax. Though it does still bother me that many of the FMT patients are kids who don't deserve what their parents have brought on them.