Vaccine-like "Inoculation" of Minds

Source:

https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/vaccine-like-inoculation-of-minds

Only Critical Thinkers like You could Resist It

Igor Chudov

7 hr ago

Ever wondered why…

• Some of your friends refuse to even listen to fairly reasonable ideas?

• Fact-checkers mostly debunk absurd-sounding propositions?

• Some of our allies appear out of nowhere and spout outright nonsense?

It is not a coincidence! It turns out that scientists, in addition to physical inoculations with COVID vaccines, also came up with a concept of inoculating human minds against what they call “misinformation”.

These intellectual inoculations work kind of like physical vaccines, introducing weakened forms of undesirable information to us, which makes people resistant to all forms of such.

According to vaccine psychology experts, the population needs to be intellectually inoculated against misinformation, in order to convince unsure and hesitant people to accept Covid vaccines. Such inoculations will future-proof individuals against listening to doubters, and will also make them accept physical Covid-19 vaccine injections. Check this out:

The article above represents a large field of well-funded psychology research aimed at making people comply with Covid vaccination mandates. These psychological approaches, applied to masses of people, make them reject skepticism, which is described by these actors as “misinformation”.

The problem that scientists encountered, unsurprisingly, was that debunking interesting, engaging, and well-sourced information does not work:

A common method to combat vaccine misinformation involves debunking false claims. Though seemingly intuitive, research has found that this approach can exacerbate, rather than correct, the negative effects of misinformation. This is because corrections directly refuting misinformation can trigger the “continued influence effect,” whereby people continue to retrieve misinformation from memory even when acknowledging the correction.

So, instead of exposing people to such relevant, comprehensive, and truthful sources, scientists came up with the idea of “inoculating” people with purposely weakened (distorted to sound absurd and stupid) information.

"The idea is that you can build mental armor or mental defenses against something that's coming in the future and trying to manipulate you, if you learn a little bit about it," [a little bit but NOT everything - I.C.] said Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, a division within Google that develops technology to counter online threats. "So it's a little bit like getting physically inoculated against a disease."

This technique is, of course, highly manipulative and unethical.

Are you surprised that promoters of physical vaccines are also developing unethical vaccines for human minds?

Let’s look at the example:

Typical Fact Check

The fact check below captures the essence of “intellectual inoculation” and is the prime example of fact-checkers modus operandi.

This fact-check is intentionally created to spread confusion among uninformed fact-check readers. It purportedly debunks Stew Peters’s Instagram posts, but its actual goal is to confuse and prevent people from seriously considering the Wasburne-Bruttel study.

That preprint study, offering entirely new proof that Sars-Cov-2 was lab-engineered, is very important, and if you want to know more, Brian Mowrey covered it very nicely. Politifact’s goal here is to prevent you from learning about lab origins of Sars-Cov-2.

So, Politifact picked a low-hanging fruit and is debunking Stew Peters’ take instead of a meaningful discussion of the Washburne-Bruttel article to cast confusion:

The Bruttel preprint article, of course, does not claim that “Fauci created Covid” or that “Covid is not a respiratory virus”. (Sars-Cov-2 is a respiratory virus even if it is lab-made.) So the fact check picked on Stew Peters, but the impression the fact check makes on uninformed people is that “lab origin of Sars-Cov-2” is a stupid right-wing conspiracy theory.

Inoculation and Vilification — Two Sides of the Same Coin

“Inoculation with weakened misinformation” makes ideas seem stupid. Vilification makes people seem stupid. The goals are quite similar!

In addition to confusing people with “intentionally weakened” information, pro-vaccine media intentionally tried to portray antivaxxers as dumb and uninformed. Intentionally “weakening” vaccine skeptics’ visual appeal, works just as well as debunking purposely “weakened” ideas. Hence, the guy on TV with a misspelled T-shirt, the fat unshaven San Diego protester, etc. They pick the worst looking people on purpose.

The objective was the same: prevent people from listening to vaccine-skeptic information, by presenting intentionally “weakened” ideas or by vilification of dissenters.

“Inoculation of the Mind” Wanes Just Like Covid Vaccines!

Here’s something that will make you smile. Remember how Covid vaccines were touted as “effective”? And then it turned out that Covid vaccine injections quickly wane in effectiveness.

The same thing happened to "inoculations with weakened information”! First, they were touted as effective, based on a fake news computer game called “Bad News” that was designed to make people not want to look at undesirable ideas.

Then it turned out that the effectiveness of these inoculations quickly wanes without regular booster doses of the inoculating “Bad News” game.

“Inoculations with weakened misinformation” require increasingly frequent re-inoculation “boosters” to stay effective. It sounds so ridiculous that you might think that I am joking, except that I am not joking.

What the scientists found is that without regular boosting sessions of the “inoculation game”, the effectiveness of “inoculations” wanes in 2 months, and people become open to skeptics’ information again!

That might explain why uptake of the “bivalent boosters” is so low nowadays — as the evidence in front of people’s eyes overcomes these waning mass-media "inoculations”.

You Resisted these Mass Psychology Methods

The best-paid scientists of industrialized mass psychology devised these advanced methods to close our minds against undesirable thoughts. They succeeded, with most people.

Most, but not all.

Their methods did not work against me, and if you are a vaccine skeptic reading this article, they did not work against you.

Note: You can be a vaccine skeptic even if you got vaccinated earlier. What is important is that you overcame the psychological mass tricks, not your personal vaccination status. To confess, I also seriously considered getting vaccinated, although I did not do it — but at some point I was not very far from deciding to go ahead.

So, if you resisted and overcame these fake news games, congratulations!

Why did it not work on you? Because you are a critical thinker. You think about what words and stories mean, and not about where you want to fit. You pay attention. You remember the news you heard. You reject bullying and vilification.

Critical thinkers can resist fake news games, smears, and even pretend consensus, which I described in my previous article on the Asch experiment, that started my psychology series.