Tim Tripp

I'm a cartoonist, illustrator, designer and writer.

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@DrNice2026 @sjs856 Dr. Hazan has contrasted mRNA vaccines with traditional toxoid vaccines and accurately describes colonic microbial metabolism while distinguishing it from small-intestine host pathways. She doesn’t appear to have ‘forgotten’ either. Can you elaborate on why you think she forgot?

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

Retractions matter and should be part of how we evaluate evidence. But 'scary lady' and 'idiot' are not adversarial process. They are reputational dismissal, and one of the reasons there is a loss of trust in THE science.

Can you explain why she is scary, or an idiot. This seems at odds to your well written and thoughtful post on adversarial science

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

Endorsing the self correcting adversarial process would be more convincing if that same rigour were consistently applied, for example, noting the ecological fallacy in country comparison charts like those Mau has posted. When scrutiny is selective, it can create the appearance of rigour while shielding consensus views from the standards demanded of heterodox ones. Consistency strengthens the case for the process

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

I don't disagree, the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater. But I think you are undervaluing the reasons and intensity of the mistrust, not with the journal model itself but with failures of the adversarial process in research. These are not reasons to dismiss all mainstream evidence, but due to a lack of accountability and humility those failures remain untrusted, which is why the same scrutiny should be applied to consensus claims that you are applying to heterodox ones.

Maybe 'extremely sceptical' is more accurate phrasing than 'no longer trust'

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@EsquivelSi54573 @DrSuneelDhand @8maggiemay What statistics?

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@Suzyiam @Pencarrowgal @kn28219447 The Auckland lockdown, mandates, and extended MIQ, all came after those most at risk were vaccinated. How is criticising the proportionality of those responses either anti vax or wanting more people to die?

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@geyrdgwtwte @plainjane130632 @NMowbray23 ... or we'll be sent to the gulags

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

The speed is real but the cost is catastrophically understated. Soviet industrialisation was achieved through... Forced collectivisation that killed an estimated 5-10 million Ukrainians alone. Gulags providing effectively slave labour. Suppression of consumption to fund capital investment, people were kept poor to build factories. Mao's state-directed Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 15-55 million people through famine. That's not a model to cite approvingly. China's modernisation came after Deng's market reforms, not before them. And that growth was built on selling into Western free market economies, the very system you're arguing has been superseded was the engine that powered China's rise. Without American and European consumers, there is no Chinese miracle.

Feudalism wasn't replaced by a planned system, it was replaced by markets and property rights. Capitalism was the revolution against feudalism, not socialism.

I can’t think of any country where socialism has demonstrably raised living standards more effectively than market economies without eventually collapsing or adopting market mechanisms.

But you're way off topic, I support social interventions (education, healthcare, even a UBI, and land banking tax), but what is the most efficient way to reduce genuine inequity. More tax on the most productive people (which will achieve little), or government being smarter and more efficient

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

Corporatism is a form of corrupted capitalism (the right to own property), but not exclusive to it. All systems can be and are corrupted. Free markets provide the best antidote - competition.

History dosen't demonstrate your view. Innovation and prosperity came from innovators and entrepreneurs, they create work for the workers to create $$. I can get why some might envy their success but I don't understand the hate.

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

Wealth held in property developments, businesses and investments isn't hoarding, it’s not sitting in a vault. It's employing people, building houses, funding supply chains. The developer worth $70m has that wealth tied up in assets that are actively working in the economy.

What government handouts? Corporatism, where wealthy interests capture government subsidies, consent processes, and regulatory frameworks, and solidify monopolies/duopolies to entrench their position, is a real problem. But that's an argument against corporatism, not capitalism. A genuinely free market with low taxes on productive activity, with proper regulation has demonstrated historically over and over again to be the most effective system to reduce inequality

High earners pay significantly more tax, unrealised gains sit outside the net, but whether that is justified is a seperate argument. I don’t think it is.

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@geyrdgwtwte @plainjane130632 @NMowbray23 I don't dispute increased inequality, but I don't attribute it to the private sector. Businesses cannot survive if they are inefficient and expensive. Simply taxing those who are efficient more, to fund an inefficient model, won't fix the underlying problem

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

Pointing out a logical flaw in an argument isn't class betrayal. "Class betrayal" is thought-stopping language. That’s tribalism.

There is a difference between wealth inequality and having enough to be content. And the most wealthy are not a monolith either and I Imagine broadly share the view that everyone should have enough to live well too

What's actually contested is how you get there. In a well-regulated economy, private investment tends to reduce inequality more effectively than government redistribution. Capital retained and reinvested by businesses creates jobs, productivity and wages. That's not defending inequality. I believe private industry and community are better placed to reduce inequality than the state

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

Let's spot the irony...

You replace one generalisation with an even cruder personal and class generalisation

Your reply doesn't refute the 85% claim at all. Instead it's the perfect example of the exact attitude being called out

The "rest of us”... I assume people insulated from private sector realities, while many actual private sector Kiwis are quite critical of wealth taxes and big government.

It perfectly illustrates the mindset the original tweet was criticising: people who haven't built or risked capital in the private sector, but feel entitled to punish those who have. Your reply is basically self-parody.

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@RogerSeheult @SamaHoole Dr. Temple Grandin’s pioneering research and facility designs were instrumental in minimizing pre-slaughter stress.

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@thereal_truther @houmanhemmati That sort of sounds like a shibboleth

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

I don’t disagree, Grok is pattern matching not reasoning, or thinking. The training data is dominated by studies supporting vaccination and elimination as primary drivers, that’s the pattern. Grok's default output reproduces that pattern, which is what it does when I post anything without explanation or reasoning, and what it did when Kath asked leading questions.

When I challenged Grok, it acknowledged the literature gap as a fundamental limit on causal inference, that the ranking reflects what has been studied rather than purely what the evidence shows, and that the circularity is genuine and institutional. Those concessions went against the pattern. If Grok were simply reproducing its training data those concessions would not have occurred.

Grok resisted the flat Earth arguments because the training data overwhelmingly and independently verifiably supports a spherical Earth. The COVID consensus in the training data reflects a literature with documented publication bias, institutional capture, and methodological limitations that Grok itself acknowledged. The pattern is not equally well-founded in both cases. That distinction was the reason for the time sink… not that Grok is an authority, but that what it took to override its default output in each case reveals something about the underlying evidence. In the hierarchy case it was just one explanatory paragraph. If your hierarchy were the overwhelmingly well-founded pattern in the training data, a handful of sentences would not have moved it. The flat Earth arguments took ages and multiple sustained exchanges and still failed... miserably.

And this is Groks response to your request - no argument no explanation.

What was interesting about my response to the square wheels?
https://t.co/3oDziseRVs

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@MauritzPreller @MedRest1 @grok @DoctorTro @RogerSeheult Why?
https://t.co/AmPs7ZfLco

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

I've spent over 50 years across education and multiple careers where 'show your workings' was the mantra. I'm not going to change that now. And as this exchange just demonstrated, Grok is quite capable of determining fact from fiction regardless of how the argument is framed.
https://t.co/QT6BMN0JgM

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

My first question was not an argument, it was just a question... with an expected answer

"No, the graph does not prove that the COVID-19 vaccine was the primary cause of the differences in cumulative excess deaths between the countries shown… Crucially, the graph contains zero vaccination data, zero prior-infection rates, zero age-structure data, and no controls for any other variable. It is a pure ecological (country-level) comparison. Differences in outcomes can stem from many factors that varied enormously between these countries:"

If my explantation of why I changed the ordering (which was short, and easily readable by humans) was incorrect, Grok would have said so. If you don’t like it feel free to explain to Grok where I am wrong.

[Tim Tripp @TimTrippDesign]

@MauritzPreller @MedRest1 @grok @DoctorTro @RogerSeheult Was this fair?
https://t.co/seyyYjup7Q