Jeff Swann on Nostr: It sounds kinda like you are asking how do I trust my own understanding of the world? ...

It sounds kinda like you are asking how do I trust my own understanding of the world?

I tend to remember things by their relationship to each other & in my mind each peice of how I see the world needs to fit with every other peice. I don't like contradictions. Sometimes I have ideas that don't fit perfectly which I leave as place holders, or I have possibilities stacked in one area of interest, but for the most part everything has to logically fit together. In school, I never wanted to memorize all the formulas for the math test, so I would learn one or two & then just figure out how I could derive the others from the ones I already knew.

I have built houses & cars & I have designed & 3d printed all sorts of things to solve random problems, so I have a pretty good handle on how most things work based on first hand experience. Most things are just the same ideas applied over & over in slightly different ways to different areas of life.

When a good friend & I were building cars for a professional race team, the owner was concerned that we were young & so he hired an engineer to come & consult with us. But this guy, who had all the credentials, told us that a number of the very basic improvements we were working on wouldn't work. We did things our way & they worked just like we knew they would.

I was very aware from an early age that parents & teachers didn't always understand the situation when they came to stop a conflict or address a problem. Idk how anyone with a half decent awareness of the world would come to any other conclusion, because that's just reality. People who pay attention should understand that "authority figures" are just people & they are just as fallable as anyone else.

When I majored in economics with a focus on money & banking it was clear that macro & micro were contradictory. In trying to iron out the contradictions I studied MMT & found it to be more consistent, but it was also ethically insane & a bit like a castle in the sky. It was ultimately just totally disconnected from reality. Then I found the Chicago school & eventually the Austrians. The Austrians seemed to pretty much have everything worked out, but when I found Bitcoin (which fit perfectly in my mind) many of them were also wrong about that too. If I had at any time renonced or denied my own understanding in order to align myself with the larger group rather than stick to what logically fits then I would be a lot poorer.

When I developed gut issues, doing everything the doctor told me to do (which was supposedly accurate according to general consensus) made my problems significantly worse. So when the choice is between assuming they are all wrong & finding my own answers (as I have done before), or living in pain to maintain some broken idea of reality, it's really not that hard to choose. And because I looked, I found a whole bunch of doctors & people who had figured out how to solve their own problems too. Most of these people were all seperately aligned, & they had much more thorough & logical explanations than anyone else. And unlike the establishment recommendations, these people had ideas that actually worked.

So it's not that I have no trust in anything, maybe less than most people. But I recognize that the incentives which are shaping our current systems of authority are very broken. I recognize corruption for what it is & I build my own understanding of things by finding others who have done the same or by applying my own understanding & logic to a situation right by myself.

When it comes to nutrition all it really takes to understand what is natural for us, is knowing that prior to agriculture, 200+ mammal species were wiped out by human hunting practices. Wild fruit was nothing like modern fruit & would have only been available seasonally if at all. From just that we can pretty much conclude that meat had to be the primary form of sustenance. It's also worth noting that basically all cave paintings are of men hunting & probably represent early efforts to keep a record of who owes who what.

I would guess we started loosely growing things that would attract the animals we wanted to eat & then a lack of property rights over the animals probably produced tragedy of the commons like conditions in animal populations that forced us to start turning the grain into food for ourselves at times when meat was very scarce. And again, archeological records seem to show that eating grain had a detrimental impact on human health.

So when the "best verified science" doesn't match reality & the system that funds it is completely corrupt, it is pretty easy to discard. My life is infinitely better as a result of doing so both in terms of my health & my personal wealth. If you understand & believe in bitcoin, then you have already dismissed the work of nobel prize winning economists. You might as well let go of the other BS too.