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Hysteria, Science, and Certitude. Oh, my!
I work in technology. I currently spend most of my days creating tools to make the observed performance of super computers more explainable. Explainability is a long-standing problem in complex systems of all kinds. It’s a huge problem in machine learning in addition to super computers, which are themselves often comprised of thousands of distinctly different compute engines, each performing only a fragment of the total calculation. The more complex the system, the more critical it is to begin one’s investigation with humility. Humility is like some kind of magical elixir of extreme curiosity: if you think you already know a lot, you are unmotivated to explore. Which, I guess, is a rubber-meets-the-road existence proof of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Also probably why high self-esteem can be the enemy of achievement. One of the very best data scientists I know, when asked what he does for a living, has been known to reply, “I’m a data scientist, but none of us really knows what we’re doing.”
Which brings me to Covid. When faced with the uncertainty caused by complexity, there is a very human eagerness to get past that pesky uncertainty and move on to a point of comfortable certitude. That way you feel when you’re trying to get past the homeless guy on your way into Starbucks.
We are living through very uncertain times, and it seems to me that much of the social upheaval between all sides of the Covid-response wars represents a kind of hysteria rooted in a maniacal need to feel as if we have sufficient answers. Many of us are eager to race past the open questions (e.g. “masks now and forevermore”) and adopt a posture of certitude. Everyone, of course, claims “science” as the mascot of their Covid response doctrine.
Most of us are unqualified to thoroughly evaluate the science, but who wants to be unscientific? So we’re faced with one of two choices: believe the authorities, or believe our own lyin’ eyes. Some people, let’s call them “faucists,” are actually eager to trust the authorities. They trust that bureaucrats who have grown fat at the federal trough nevertheless have the citizen’s best interests at heart. Maybe they do – “no one knows the heart of man” (St. Paul). But I am harassed by doubts. The faucists, though, banish all such doubts and would even dearly love to banish other people who have doubts, especially if those doubts are regarding the altruism of government-made gazillionaires. The faucists have found certitude, but it is certitude borrowed from the authorities. They have embraced a bureaucrat’s certitude as their own.
On the other hand, some people want to develop their own certitude about Covid, let’s call them “roganists.” Usually unwilling to consider even the possibility of confirmation bias, roganists draw their conclusions from a multitude of assembled anecdotes regarding people who have actually recovered. Anecdotes are not data, of course, but that does not impede the determination of the roganists to find certitude in anecdotal evidence. And it is important to note, by the way, that anecdotes are evidence and don’t have to be ignored merely because they did not meet the fastidious standards of the biotech community or their bureaucratic allies in the government. Nevertheless, I suspect the certitude of the roganists suffers from the same problem as that of the faucists, which is that the trustworthiness of their source of certitude is essentially unknown.
The thorny problem we have is that, in the current complex environment, there’s no way to rush the acquisition of certainty. That means two things if we’re going to live as fully human. First, we’re going to have to find it within ourselves to recalibrate our notion of acceptable risk – a tiny notch higher. Still far below what most of our ancestors lived with – especially those before antibiotics. But it’s a teeny bit higher and we need to live fully anyway. Second, we’re going to have to be patient and allow for the passage of time to develop a more fully informed understanding.
Some things just–take–time.
In the meantime, we need to recognize that, however much we’d like to cling to a faux sort of certainty, we can’t yet really have actual certainty. So graciousness is called for. And liberty. And tenderness.
And by all means, we need to mock the self-serving pretense of certainty offered up by government bureaucrats. And we need to sympathize with the fears of our neighbors who have understandably lost faith in the authorities. Most of them are just trying to find their way to safety.
Even though I believe none of us has the certainty we would like to think we have, it’s still ok, if we’re so inclined, to join together in giving a hearty Bronx cheer to the multi-millionaire patron saint of the faucists.
Published in General
I know, I just took advantage of an opportunity to say how much unawareness of the disregard for the scientific method comes with the Left’s total quest for power. I think some know but don’t care and some just lack the knowledge.
On. most things we have to guess. There is one area where we can be fairly confident. The bureaucratic top which is about 7 thick levels removed from the daily lives of most of us, is so ignorant about people in thousands of cities and towns and neighborhoods that we can be 100% confident that they do not know nor care about such folks and do not make decisions in their interests. A tiny bunch of them who are very knowable and identifiable conduct research and report findings. We can listen and compare but can’t give them authority to decide for us.
I don’t believe that, of course. I don’t believe any of the conspiracies. I believe in unfolding scenarios of incompetence, confusion, power hoarding, new cultural norms of safetyism embraced by the tremulous, and statist inertia. It just seems sometimes like the people who are the most opposed to the vaccine now are also the people most enthusiastic about Trump, and if one takes a pro-vaccine stance, you’re somehow tossed into the Woke side of the equation.
There are some who don’t accept how this vaccine was presented to the people and there appears to be a much larger group who oppose any mandates, including the vaccine mandates.
I just posted a new post that shows in my personal published post but I’m not seeing it on my member feed but I do see counted views and followers on my posts. And now they may see duplicate posts that I don’t see on the member feed..
I voted for him twice. Not the epidemic but the post election shenanigans would make it even harder next time. I want the old guard of both parties to retire and let some younger folks have a shot at messing things up. Only fair.
Doesn’t the first part of this sentence just reflect a common sense of individual freedom that a personal health mandate goes completely against? That would naturally match well with those who supported Trump. Many of those people are pro-vaccine.
Do you actually believe what you indicate here is all that is happening to put us in the dire situation we are now in? You didn’t list illegal acts (criminal activity) that has been apparent to most of us during the period from 2015 to the present in the bureaucracy (Deep State) and by various political players. You don’t believe any of that?
Keith Lowery (View Comment):
Notwithstanding some of the comments on this post, what the government and big pharma may have done or not done vis-a-vis Covid is not at all what this post was about. My intention was to offer a thought or two on the anxiety people feel due to their lack of certainty regarding how to move forward, and where they look for certitude. Anything the government might have done or not done is incidental to this tale. I take a back seat to no one in embracing the view that, at best, the government is benignly incompetent and very often sinister. But I was not writing about the government here.
I think you need to be more specific about “illegal acts.” You could be referring to hundreds of thousands of different things.
I know, James. I assumed that. I consider you an eminently sensible fellow*. I just think that the groundwork is so shaky when engaging in a discussion that begins with, essentially, the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic was a planned event, that trying to build an are-you-consistent-about-Trump? edifice on it is kind of not worth the time.
I think about both Wuhan coronavirus panic and vaccine conspiracy theorizing like I think about climate change alarmism. The science is kind of hard, the math is kind of confusing, the reporting is execrable, the spin is relentless, and normal people are virtue-bombed into submission by our pop-media/social media monoculture. Safety-at-all-costs is asserted by the same Karens and safety-first castrati who can’t imagine why anyone would own a handgun, and public policy is weaponized by every public servant whose unspoken personal mantra is “do you know who I am?”
It’s a mess.
Lets go, Brandon! is the most coherent commentary on public policy of the past two years, with only the Great Barrington Declaration even coming close.
* In no small part because I happen to share the same views.
Hows that Biden fellla working out?
Are you referring to my comment? If so, I’d like to hear a thoughtful response, one with some actual conclusions? And not just more agnostic star-searching.
I think Lileks was being sarcastic.
Nooo, I don’t think that was the summation of his comment. I think the implied answer was, Nobody or Only Fools. But I don’t know because thought I’ve looked I haven’t seen any response from Lileks to my answer.
So true. I have been in the court room for patent and trade secret litigation, sometimes as an expert witness and other times as a plaintiff. The one constant has been the continual effort by the attorneys to discern, from available minutia, what is going on in the judge’ and jurors’ minds. In my own experience – admittedly limited – the attorneys have been consistently wrong.
We are all, to greater or lesser degrees, trying to debug the root cause of what has happened while in possession of woefully inadequate information or, at least, insufficient tools to unpack it all. My own sense is that the explanation for the curious behavior by the bureaucracy and politicians is not susceptible to any unified explanation. I think politicians, particularly on the left, are just acting on their dictum about not letting a crisis go to waste.
The healthcare bureaucracy, however, is more of a puzzle. No doubt some of them are in the hip pockets of the left. But one explanation for all the policy flailing and lack of transparence might be a combination of fear and guilt. Fauci et al clearly knew more than they let on, and the knowledge of that has only been extracted unwillingly from the bureaucracy. Fauci has not behaved in ways consistent with one’s expectations of a health bureaucrat’s behavioral response to a natural virus. People have tried to explain the curious behavior by concluding that there’s been some massive conspiracy afoot, that it’s all a big plan to subvert liberty. A desire to subvert liberty is always the agenda of the left, of course. But maybe the explanation for Fauci’s behavior is merely what we now know: Fauci and the American scientific community were knowingly involved in gain-of-function research. When this virus popped up, it could be they were actually afraid it might not exhibit the course of a natural virus. All the flailing and policies du jour may just have been reflecting actual panic for a while. And having had his own hand in the cookie jar, he didn’t really want to come clean. It’s hard to deny that Fauci’s behavior has very much resembled that of a misbehaving child, albeit one who has been allowed to play with toys that endangered the entire planet.
Aside from some eventual political and legal remedies, there is nothing we can do about that. The world is damaged and that is that. We must turn our attention to how to live going forward. All the political/legal remedies in the world will not make a Corona virus go away. It is time to get on with our lives.
I think we are in some dangerous territory to be playing literary games with a lot of satire and sarcasm mixed in with serious discussion. We don’t need to confuse ourselves about what is happening. The attempted Marxist takeover has progressed too far already.
Be more specific? This about control, not facts. By asking for specifics you’re just playing into the hands of Big Government/Big Pharma. Give them a specific and they will just find something in it to disagree about. No. Don’t be more specific.
Now are you just being sarcastic? Or are you seriously advocating that we just talk in generalities and never mention specific details?
Let’s see if John Durham can come up with anything. I think there was a large number (hundreds) of classified accesses by people in or closely connected to the Obama White House during the Trump Presidential transition to get information on General Flynn, who had been named by Trump to be National Security Advisor. I was never satisfied that this got a proper disposition.
I’m talking about the Covid reaction.
I agree; I think I was just popping off about how Trump seems absent from the discussion sometimes, as if he was a bystander. And I don’t care if anyone is consistent about Trump – he was all over the road at times, and hence reactions to him won’t be consistent.
This discussion is about at it’s core whether one can believe any of our government’s official documentation anymore.
That said one has to be delusional and seriously so to believe anything the government puts out now. The days when one can rely on the “data” are gone. Dead and buried. We will not ever go back to a time when we can fully trust the “Data” presented in the Media unless Millions – yes Millions – of people who perpetuated this fraud and brought to a very nasty justice . Not only is the government and it’s bureaucracy thoroughly corrupt but so is Big Tech , Big Med, Big Pharma and Big Media. Any “data” that runs counter to the narrative is driven quickly from Mainstream Media, and thoroughly censored with harsh, vindictive, personal and sometimes vicious attacks. The best “data” now comes from overseas which is not so suffocated by the American Corporatist Elite and is reported on website deemed “Conspiracy Theorists”.
Lileks: “I don’t believe any of the conspiracies.”
Well then James deal with this:
“The claim that the virus that causes COVID-19 definitely was not from a laboratory, put forth in a paper quietly shaped by Dr. Anthony Fauci that was cited by other scientists who called the lab idea a “conspiracy theory,” was “antithetical to science,” a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director says.
“The purpose of science is to have rigorous debate about different hypotheses. I’ve never really experienced in my life where there was private telephone calls among scientists that had a decision on what position they would take collectively, and to see that position then published in a scientific journal like Lancet, to say that individuals that thought like myself, had a different scientific hypothesis, somehow had to be put down and viewed as conspirators, this is really antithetical to science,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the agency’s head until Jan. 20, 2021, said during a Jan. 26 appearance on Fox News.”
Henry Raccette: “just think that the groundwork is so shaky when engaging in a discussion that begins with, essentially, the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic was a planned event,”
Well we will likely never know if it was a planned event but one needs to consider:
• The number 3 guy at NIH has admitted that EcoHealth Alliance in conjunction with the Bat Lady at Wuhan developed a precursor to COVID in 2018.
• Bill Gates along with the WEF and JohnHopkins University put on a conference in the fall of 2019 on how to exploit a pandemic.
• The Wuhan BioWeapons lab was working on vaccines for COVID in 2019.
• Dr. Robert Malone asserts that Big Pharma was working on COVID vaccines in 2019.
• China bought a million PCR COVID tests in 2019
• And of course, Dr Fauci played along for a very long time that he didn’t really know what COVID was and where it came from when he knew exactly what it was.
Very good, and true.
And the Gates forum Event 201 at Hopkins in Sept. 2019 dealt with a pandemic coronavirus, was many months in the making, with high-quality scripted videos, and planning included (but was not limited to) plans for soft information management and censorship, and hard handling of protests.
This is certainly planning. And there’s this:
COVID-19: The Great Reset Paperback – July 9, 2020
by Klaus Schwab(Author), Thierry Malleret(Author)
I think we often try too hard to find patterns in the noise. In terms of public policy, noise is an expression of mediocrity. We have a lot of mediocre public “servants.”
President Trump was, in too many ways, mediocre. His handling of COVID was pretty good, I think, though his optics were awful. His greatest mistake was keeping the contemptible Fauci in his post. But no one really understood that in the fog of the pandemic. (Disclaimer: I voted for Trump twice and will, if he runs again and is nominated as the Republican candidate, vote for him again.)
Fauci is, I think, both mediocre and crooked, a man who should never have been trusted with even a fraction of the responsibility he was given.
So they wargamed a coronavirus pandemic. I don’t think that’s terribly surprising, given the potential SARS had to become a global crisis. I do think the Wuhan coronavirus came from the Wuhan coronavirus lab. I suspect it was enhanced, that Fauci et al knew as much, and that we have some health industry folk who are worried that this will come out.
I don’t think it likely that it was released deliberately. I do think China behaved irresponsibly post-outbreak, but I find incompetence about as plausible an explanation as bad intent. Well, almost as plausible, anyway. (China’s government is evil, full stop.)
In general, I find conspiracy theories less convincing than normal incompetence, hubris, and self-serving malfeasance. We see those things every day, after all.
I sometimes think that we would be better off recognizing the danger of human nature itself, without feeling a need to gild that particular lily with conspiracy theories. The problem isn’t, I think, intricate plots and sinister coordination, so much as our willingness to empower flawed people with too much unchecked power. The fact that we still have Governors exercising “emergency” authority after all this time suggests that we are entirely too trusting of our public officials.
I should have been more specific: I don’t believe in The Plandemic. I do think it came from a lab in China, that they were doing GoF research, that US funding was involved because they thought it was a good idea, and China screwed the pooch through lax standards, and it got out. Do I believe it was intentional, planned and executed at the highest levels? I do not.
Brilliant … clear insight … balanced analysis … excellent writing. Thank you so much.
I was being sarcastic.
That’s an easy one to answer.
Yes, one can believe some of our government’s official documentation. All you need to prove that is true is one person who believes some of it, and that one person would be me.
Trust, but verify. It’s nasty work, and with some of the borderline cases it’s hard to tell, but it’s really hard for a liar to lie consistently and coherently. Those lies are easy to detect. The believable stuff holds up under cross-checking.
You contradict yourself.
Life is full of paradox.