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MIT Researchers ‘Infiltrated’ An Anti-Mask Group And Were SHOCKED That Members Relied On Data, Saw Science As A ‘Process’

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‘Science’. It was the club Democrats, the media, and big tech used to thrash anyone who questioned the righteous government imperatives given for our political betters.

Anyone who dares to question the policy, you are a flat-earther who doesn’t believe in science.

That was the caricature that was drawn. And with the news corps’ daily dose of panic porn driving fearful people to seek security wherever it may be found, together with the deliberate exploitation of those COVID body count numbers on the tv screen that caricature stuck. Don’t take our word for it see for yourself: PART TWO: Project Veritas Shows CNN Deliberately Manipulates Their Viewers (VIDEO)

How much of that anti-science representation of the Fauci non-conformists was rooted in science and how much was shameless propaganda slandering people for political gain? That’s what MIT researchers in one study set out to see for themselves.

There’s a field of study that looks at the way social groups and networks of people interact with ideas, sharing them, amplifying them, and so on. With so much interest being taken in holdouts against CDC approved narratives and so on, researchers wanted to get a look under the hood and see for themselves what was really driving it.

Their findings would be very upsetting to anyone desperately clinging to the idea that anyone challenging the narrative orthodoxy does so because they are some kind of a flat-earth believing, knuckle-dragging troglodyte.

If anything, these dissenting groups actually had a pretty good handle on the science. Tin foil hats were not part of the dress code. Here is a link to the full study. It’s title

Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online

Orthodox Data Practices? That’s a far cry from the line we’ve been force-fed by the media for more than a year now. What exactly have they been lying about THIS time?

While the researchers flagged the three anchor accounts as anti-mask, they shared an immense amount of research on many topics related to the pandemic. The researchers seemed astounded to make the following observations about the network that followed the “anti-mask-network”:

“For these anti-mask users, their approach to the pandemic is grounded in more scientific rigor, not less.”

“In fact, the explicit motivation for many of these followers is to find information so that they can make the best decisions for their families—and by extension, for the communities around them.”

“While these groups highly value scientific expertise, they also see collective analysis of data as a way to bring communities together within a time of crisis, and being able to transparently and dispassionately analyze the data is crucial for democratic governance.”

“In other words, anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over ‘expert’ interpretations.”

“Arguing anti-maskers need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as uninformed & inexplicably extreme. This study shows the opposite: they are deeply invested in forms of critique & knowledge production they recognize as markers of scientific expertise.”
To a rational person, this all sounds like the researchers stumbled upon a group of people genuinely interested in evaluating all of the information they could find in an emerging situation. Many mitigation measures were determined locally and being able to have informed discussions about various topics with members of local communities was important. It almost seems like they think this is commendable and defensible. Well, you would be wrong. —PJMedia

We see independence as a good thing.

Informational independence for the little guy? Informed consent? We’ve been banging that drum forever. We heartily approve.

The informational gatekeepers that consider themselves our betters, however, do not.

The MIT Researchers saw that as a fault, not a virtue. If someone disagrees with official declarations of the Self-refuting Authoritarian Smurf, the only possible explanation must be that they are irrational.

These paragraphs are taken from their conclusion. With one hand, they recognize the validity of information on which they base their info. With the other they take that back by assuming the worst about the common people’s motives.

As a subculture, anti-masking amplifies anti-establishment currents pervasive in U.S. political culture. Data literacy, for antimaskers, exemplifies distinctly American ideals of intellectual selfreliance, which historically takes the form of rejecting experts and other elites [53]. The counter-visualizations that they produce and circulate not only challenge scientific consensus, but they also assert the value of independence in a society that they believe promotes an overall de-skilling and dumbing-down of the population for the sake of more effective social control [39, 52, 98]. As they see it, to counter-visualize is to engage in an act of resistance against the stifling influence of central government, big business, and liberal academia. Moreover, their simultaneous appropriation of scientific rhetoric and rejection of scientific authority also reflects longstanding strategies of Christian fundamentalists seeking to challenge the secularist threat of evolutionary biology [11].

So how do these groups diverge from scientific orthodoxy if they are using the same data? We have identified a few sleights of hand that contribute to the broader epistemological crisis we identify between these groups and the majority of scientific researchers. For instance, they argue that there is an outsized emphasis on deaths versus cases: if the current datasets are fundamentally subjective and prone to manipulation (e.g., increased levels of faulty testing,
asymptomatic vs. symptomatic cases), then deaths are the only reliable markers of the pandemic’s severity. Even then, these groups believe that deaths are an additionally problematic category because doctors are using a COVID diagnosis as the main cause of death (i.e., people who die because of COVID) when in reality there are other factors at play (i.e., dying with but not because of COVID). Since these categories are fundamentally subject to human interpretation,
especially by those who have a vested interest in reporting as many COVID deaths as possible, these numbers are vastly over-reported, unreliable, and no more significant than the flu.

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck

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