Hi everybody this is Scott Sad in chapter six of the parasitic mind I

discuss the affliction of ostrich parasitic syndrome which is a malady of

distorted and irrational thinking.

And in that chapter, I have a section that wherein I tackle focusality, in other words where you try to argue that something causes something

else using completely shoddy and hallucinatory quote thinking. In the past I've talked about this in the

context of six degrees of Nome Chomsky. This is where I ask people for any given malady to link it to the U.S.

Industrial Military Complex in six or fewer causal links.

So if a Amazonian frog dies, please use the Chomsky six degrees of U.S.

military complex causality to arrive as to why it's the U.S. that is to be blamed for that thing.

So what I'd like to do, it might be a bit, take a bit of time. I want to read the entire section for my book and then link it in this case to how everything causes climate change and

change causes everything. So here we go. All right. So this is starting from

page 124 in the parasitic mind, six degrees of focusality.

Those infected with ostrich parasitic syndrome succumb to a broad range of cognitive biases

as a means of protecting them from reality.

One of them involves ascribing an illusory network of connectedness between variables.

Many important phenomena in our daily lives are organized as networks,

be it the small world phenomenon, human connectedness, the neurons in our brains

connected to one another via synapses, the world wide web, electric power grids, social

networks like Facebook, or biological systems.

That our world consists of an endless number of interconnected phenomena elements

has led to the so-called butterfly effect, the idea that a small perturbation in the starting conditions of a system could yield substantial downstream effects.

While it is indeed true that our world is composed of countless networks of interconnected

...