Perhaps the problem is amplified by the opening up of discourses whose participation should be limited. Scientific disagreement is a necessary part of science and could be handled within science, but that fails when suddenly the public takes part in this discourse. "Disagreement" within a community of experts and "misinformation" of the public should have been clearly separated by barriers that would separate the populations that take part in each discourse. It is by opening up unfinished and disputed science to the public view that scientists get into trouble with the public by doing what they are supposed to be doing, i.e. criticising their science (but not in public). Access to all the world's information through the internet is not necessarily only a good thing. Gatekeepers, controlled channels that disseminate information to the public and expert disputes behind closed doors might have allowed for a level of freedom in scientific discourse that we have now lost. Just a thought. I'm not sure if this is even correctly diagnosed, but perhaps it would be worth looking into. -- Thanks for that inspiring article!
It occurs to me I tend to weigh in here only when I disagree with you, which seems a bit cranky. So: nice job, dude. Solid points. Although I expect you'll get some blowback from the slippery-slope crowd.
Also, regarding Wuhan: have you heard about the hybrid lab-leak-wet-market hypothesis? I know a source with a source claiming there's at least some evidence that covid did in fact originate in a lab, where some underpaid low-level flunkie was told to dispose of infected experimental animals— and, being both underpaid and not especially savvy on the whole epidemiological front, then sold those animals to the local wet market to make a few extra RMB.
Haven't been able to find any independent corroboration. Wonder if you might have read something.
You have, once again, forced me to consider concepts I thought I already had pat. Interestingly, you haven't convinced me of anything so much as made me look at the question of demarcation from a new perspective.
Perhaps the answer is not in how to demarcate but rather when. And in what to do instead.
Perhaps the question should not be what to censor, or, alternatively, what to demote, but rather to find a way, in a reasonable, justifiable, and perhaps semi-accurate manner, to assign a likelihood of its accuracy. This would sidestep any need for a clear demarcation line or for scientific consensus. Outliers would no longer be silenced but would instead have their ideas "rated" in relation to all alternative views on the topic.
I realize that this is a tall ask, not only in its definition but, maybe more so, in its implementation. There would likely never be consensus on whatever "algorithm" is devised but perhaps an approach can be found that will at least be highly challenging to argue against. My hope is that there are some great minds out there who could achieve this.
I'm at best a dabbler in the real hard-core professional debates, but from my (informed and credentialized) point of view, the best that the egg-heads have come up with to distinguish science from its pseudo-cousins is
"Science is what scientists do."
About as helpful as any other tautology, while still hitting on a deep truth.
I still feel capable of drawing a line between good scientific practice and making up nonsense, even if I (or anyone) can't list a precise set of conditions or criteria that define the boundary zone.
As far as the criticism angle, I'm in that camp that believes science progresses by explosions. Not literally, always, but certainly in the act of drawing attention to anomalies in the existing consensus.
It's not a coincidence that every "founding breakthrough" in the history of science, starting with Copernicus and Galileo, began with the heroic origin story fighting against the ignorance of the know-it-alls of the day.
Discontinuity is a hallmark of the process, which Kuhn (like the lesser-known lights of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Feyerabend) have helpfully shown us.
To settle down into a smug consensus of peers, while steadily eroding the processes and institutions by which those table-flipping moments can happen, strikes me as a modern-day return to the guild system rather than science in its purest form.
I'm also very curious as to how Elon will end bots, which he's also promised to do, and while this sounds like a good thing, some bots are useful or do interesting things. For example, I follow a bot that tells me every time an item from a certain NFT collection is purchased and for what price. I'm sure there are many bots people find beneficial, so the trick is how do we preserve the helpful automatons and eliminate the evil ones. Very challenging issue.
From my understanding also, after a conversation with a dev at Twitter, the Twitter algorithm is so complicated that even the people at Twitter don't fully understand how it works, or how changes will work until they release the updates out into the world and reverse study them... so good luck, Elon...
You’re so right. But I’m still conflicted as to the verdict.
In a the cases you mention: whether someone sleeps or doesn’t, takes part in the vaccination or doesn’t, the end result only affects the individual and that should be in their freedom to research both sides and choose what’s best for them.
But what about when the health of a large group is at stake? Such as when a Myanmar hate group wildly escalated on Facebook to the point of genocide against Rohingya Muslims. Should that have been stopped (by Facebook? By the government?). Could we have intervened?
I ultimately believe in freedom of speech and am anti censorship, and I agree with your well thought out points here, but I also wonder whether there are circumstances in which we might be able to deescalate a crisis. Though I admit I have no solution for how that might be achieved!
You are very smart which is both intimidating and inspiring. During my medical training, evidence based medicine was held up as the gold standard form of proof that something existed or didn’t exist, worked or didn’t work. Anecdotal evidence, or proof that is gained by a qualified individual through observation, was treated like a dim relative to be patted on the head and popped in a corner. But then we were also taught about the truckload of bias that can affect study outcomes and the validity of the findings – we’re fucked, because all I’m hearing is that we can’t rely on the reporting of reproducibility that underpins EBM and that anecdotal evidence has very little value. Your post says all of this in a much more cerebral way. The one thing it doesn't factor in is the flawed humanness that each and every one of us possess, even smart people and scientists. Many have narcissitic egos that will never gain insight and many succumb daily to all manner of base impulses. In other words, who the fuck do we trust? We have to start with ourselves. Thanks again. Melissa
Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022Liked by Erik Hoel
I was surprisingly disturbed by the info about the debunkings of the Walker book. I see that you cast some doubts on how disturbed one really should be by the debunkngs. And I get that you are talking about a larger issue -- how to we nurture and protect accumulating truth without using measures that damage the growth of knowledge and insight. And I am interested in the subject. But I can't seem to get past the Walker book issue right now.
It's not as though it was a book that had a profound impact on me. It was just a book that I thought was well and engagingly written, and told the truth -- ok, a neatened-up and simplified version of the truth, but close enough. I passed information and advice in it on to friends. And in some small way I felt a bit strengthened and comforted by adding Matthew Walker to the group of people I thought of as smart and trustworthy.
At the momentI'm feeling like it's just too hard to live through Trump and COVID and Ukraine and various events in my life feeling like there is now one less smart, sane, honest person out there who I can count on to think straight, tell the truth, and not be an asshole. I have always trusted science and intelligence and honesty more than anything else. It is just too hard to take on this vision of how research etc. is a fucking mess too, just another pile of people chewing on each other.
I will probably feel better after a good night's sleep.
This was a thought provoking substack post. Really enjoyed it. But I don't have much else to say about it. The sleep piece you mentioned, on the other hand, I do have a comment or three on. I had never seen it before. I found it engaging too, but I thought it needed a bit more nuance and detail. Don't get me wrong, I definitely think there's something there, but it needed more detail and balance. Sure, the field of sleep research probably needs to get away from this whole standard 7-9hr prescription. That's probably simplistic. And I agree that there is a lot of BS out there in a lot of scientific fields. On the other hand, you'd think that something that leaves you so vulnerable to predation would have quite a lot of selective pressure against it, and yet sleep is ubiquitous in the biological world. Clearly it's performing something(s) that are very important (maybe correcting for overfitting like you say, is one of those things). Sure, missing out on SOME sleep every so often probably does make you a more robust, resilient, less fragile organism to some degree, like going hungry does. But, two things are important to emphasize that I think Alexey did not spend enough time on:
1) difference between having "adequate" sleep level, while optimizing sleep FOR something other than health/well being/longevity (competitive sailing or whatever) VS. optimizing sleep FOR long term well being/health/longevity,
2) overall load of different combined stressors and different combinations of stressor intensities at any one time.
Just because you can "get by" & sort of adjust to a certain amount of <7hr sleep doesn't mean it's optimal FOR long term well being/health/longevity, but a given sleep pattern might be optimal for something else. Also, out of fear of sounding like a naïve paleo bro, what we DO want to (to some degree) to mimic from our ancestors is the stress AND RECOVERY patterns (emphasis on to some degree). Very intense acute stress should be accompanied by appropriate levels of rest and recovery. Very intense and acute stress should take place, but you should subject yourself to it A LOT less often than mild and moderate stress (sleep stress or otherwise). Chronic stress of any type isn't good. The more intense/severe the stress the worse the chronification of said stress is for you. Sleep stress also does not occur in a vacuum. If you're doing prolonged fasting WHILE still working out (even if you reduce your workout load while fasting), WHILE still doing cryotherapy, WHILE going in the sauna, WHILE working your day job, WHILE chronically undersleeping, WHILE taking care of a newborn baby ect. ect., something tells me your body will not respond well to all of this. So, yes, while complex living organisms NEED some levels of stress, how much stress one should ideally subject oneself to depends on A LOT of factor (not least of which is that individual's biology, genes, ect.). If I had to bet money, the best sleep pattern for the "typical" person will include some days of 8 hours, some days of 7 hrs, some of 5-6hrs, occasional days of 1-4 hours (but these very sleep deprived nights should probably happen a lot less frequently than the 5-6 hr nights). All this is contingent on whether you're not also doing a heavy fasting/ work out regimen, dealing with certain illnesses ect. ect.
Apr 27, 2022·edited Apr 27, 2022Liked by Erik Hoel
Hey Erik,
As you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can help people "think together", and I Have Thoughts here too. At the risk of saying something deeply unfashionable in the current moment: people should be given the opportunity to govern themselves, with all of the messiness and compromise that requires.
A lot of my work in the past focused on the early "miracles" of open systems like Wikipedia—a thing that worked in practice, but not in theory. One of the things that I began to see was the emergence of a lifecycle for these communities. Aaron Shaw and Ben Mako Hill wrote a terrific paper a few years ago on this, titled "laboratories of oligarchy", which is a really important read: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcom.12082 In a way, some of this parallels the "geeks-MoPs-sociopath" cycle (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) except with much higher stakes.
Subcultures like Wikipedia are really different from Twitter, however. On WP, the infrastructure and the culture are deeply intertwined. The users govern, or governed, themselves, to a great extent—WP really was a blank canvas, with a huge "affordance space" where users could interact and lever.
Twitter, by contrast, owns the infrastructure, and strictly controls the affordances (likes, retweets, replies, quote tweets; and then bans of various lengths, enforced by a central system—the library is small). It is a real monarchy, with all of the disasters that leads to.
Right now we see a lot of would-be monarchs showing up: people who want to regulate epistemic communities the way they regulate, say, the water supply. That just can't (in my opinion) work. The alternative—wrestling with the complex logic of self-governance of the information commons—is not the world's most appealing option (as Shaw and Hill point out), but I can't see anything else that's compatible with the continued flourishing of the species.
Once billions of dollars are on the line, of course, political theory tends to go out the window (or into the prison—Machiavelli). But it seems entirely plausible to me that we don't have to go down that route. Decentralization, fragmentation, and plurality are ideal counterparts to the experimental values that characterized the flourishing of epistemic communities in early 2000s.
"Even if one assumes (correctly or not) that during the pandemic there was good reason to put a far-reaching system in place with which to censor criticism of scientific consensus, my fear is that this system will remain in place after the pandemic is over and end up applying to a wider domain of science than anyone anticipated."
Of course it will remain in place. This is one of the unwritten rules of modern collectivism. A powerful few must be the voice for the masses in the name of the "greater good". If you can write that into law or even the public's consciousness using fear, then all the better. A key part of that effort is the suppression of any information that is a dissenting viewpoint.
Your entire essay makes perfect logical sense, which is exactly why it would be maligned on Twitter today, but not in a near future hopefully on Elon Musk's version of Twitter. One of the great things about science was that it was always open to debate, criticism and change. It evolved, and sometimes this had dangerous consequences. However, science is not that way anymore. It's now used to bludgeon dissenters. How many times have you heard it said in some narrow minded circles that the "debate is over". What debate? This isn't ethics. It's science.
I have lunch once a week with my grown daughter, and from March 2020 we have had a regular discussion about the COVID origin. Our lab-leak odds went from 10% at the start to 99% now. The furin cleavage site discovery (that was patented) was the kicker that sent it that high.
Re: astrology as a pseudoscience. Astrology is originally an indigenous practice, and to hold it up to the specific rigours of Science misses the point. Judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree is absurd, and so is trying to make sense of astrology through a scientific lens. There are "more things in heaven and earth" than climbing trees.
This is great. I'm glad that you referenced the demarcation problem. One of the strangest ideas that I see repeated ad nauseam is that we have some kind of "anti-science" problem. Meanwhile, I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't believe in science, no matter how crazy their particular set of beliefs are.
Astrology, homeopathic medicine, biodynamic winemaking, even religious fundamentalism all have some sort of "scientific" explanation for how they work. The problem isn't separating science from superstition; it's separating good science from junk science.
We should reject the assertion that the measures/policies/societal shifts were Wrong because they had *some* undesirable consequences, such as the lab-leak hypothesis being made Verboten. The question is whether they actually resulted in net fewer deaths, in net less suffering. If they did, then the measures were Good. In this analysis the suffering of lab-leak proponents and shifts in distributions of futures wrt free speech should of course be taken into account. But the latter seems to be given infinite weight whenever speech is slightly curtailed and that is just not supported by any evidence.
Another thing: that the problem is too difficult to solve completely doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution that at least shifts the world into a better equilibrium. That the problem is “a beast that’s never been solved” doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to ‘brute-force’, ‘design away’ or ‘compromise’ such that the bad consequences aren’t diminished relative to just letting things run their merry course. We haven’t “solved” disease either, but we still rightfully throw vaccines, antibiotics, transplants, etc. at the problem. I don’t see why I should believe that technology or politics cannot possibly help to shift how well-informed people are in the right direction.
Perhaps the problem is amplified by the opening up of discourses whose participation should be limited. Scientific disagreement is a necessary part of science and could be handled within science, but that fails when suddenly the public takes part in this discourse. "Disagreement" within a community of experts and "misinformation" of the public should have been clearly separated by barriers that would separate the populations that take part in each discourse. It is by opening up unfinished and disputed science to the public view that scientists get into trouble with the public by doing what they are supposed to be doing, i.e. criticising their science (but not in public). Access to all the world's information through the internet is not necessarily only a good thing. Gatekeepers, controlled channels that disseminate information to the public and expert disputes behind closed doors might have allowed for a level of freedom in scientific discourse that we have now lost. Just a thought. I'm not sure if this is even correctly diagnosed, but perhaps it would be worth looking into. -- Thanks for that inspiring article!
It occurs to me I tend to weigh in here only when I disagree with you, which seems a bit cranky. So: nice job, dude. Solid points. Although I expect you'll get some blowback from the slippery-slope crowd.
Also, regarding Wuhan: have you heard about the hybrid lab-leak-wet-market hypothesis? I know a source with a source claiming there's at least some evidence that covid did in fact originate in a lab, where some underpaid low-level flunkie was told to dispose of infected experimental animals— and, being both underpaid and not especially savvy on the whole epidemiological front, then sold those animals to the local wet market to make a few extra RMB.
Haven't been able to find any independent corroboration. Wonder if you might have read something.
You have, once again, forced me to consider concepts I thought I already had pat. Interestingly, you haven't convinced me of anything so much as made me look at the question of demarcation from a new perspective.
Perhaps the answer is not in how to demarcate but rather when. And in what to do instead.
Perhaps the question should not be what to censor, or, alternatively, what to demote, but rather to find a way, in a reasonable, justifiable, and perhaps semi-accurate manner, to assign a likelihood of its accuracy. This would sidestep any need for a clear demarcation line or for scientific consensus. Outliers would no longer be silenced but would instead have their ideas "rated" in relation to all alternative views on the topic.
I realize that this is a tall ask, not only in its definition but, maybe more so, in its implementation. There would likely never be consensus on whatever "algorithm" is devised but perhaps an approach can be found that will at least be highly challenging to argue against. My hope is that there are some great minds out there who could achieve this.
I'm at best a dabbler in the real hard-core professional debates, but from my (informed and credentialized) point of view, the best that the egg-heads have come up with to distinguish science from its pseudo-cousins is
"Science is what scientists do."
About as helpful as any other tautology, while still hitting on a deep truth.
I still feel capable of drawing a line between good scientific practice and making up nonsense, even if I (or anyone) can't list a precise set of conditions or criteria that define the boundary zone.
As far as the criticism angle, I'm in that camp that believes science progresses by explosions. Not literally, always, but certainly in the act of drawing attention to anomalies in the existing consensus.
It's not a coincidence that every "founding breakthrough" in the history of science, starting with Copernicus and Galileo, began with the heroic origin story fighting against the ignorance of the know-it-alls of the day.
Discontinuity is a hallmark of the process, which Kuhn (like the lesser-known lights of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Feyerabend) have helpfully shown us.
To settle down into a smug consensus of peers, while steadily eroding the processes and institutions by which those table-flipping moments can happen, strikes me as a modern-day return to the guild system rather than science in its purest form.
There are a host of misinformation outside of scientific consensus that no one seems to care is being spread constantly:
- Astrology
- Homeopathy
- The effectiveness of high end audiophile cables
- Native creation myths
- Power of New Age Crystals
- ESP
- Aliens
- Cryptozoology
Why are these things ignored? This is the low hanging fruit, yet no one seems to care?
"Misinformation" seems to be very selectively applied.
I'm also very curious as to how Elon will end bots, which he's also promised to do, and while this sounds like a good thing, some bots are useful or do interesting things. For example, I follow a bot that tells me every time an item from a certain NFT collection is purchased and for what price. I'm sure there are many bots people find beneficial, so the trick is how do we preserve the helpful automatons and eliminate the evil ones. Very challenging issue.
From my understanding also, after a conversation with a dev at Twitter, the Twitter algorithm is so complicated that even the people at Twitter don't fully understand how it works, or how changes will work until they release the updates out into the world and reverse study them... so good luck, Elon...
You’re so right. But I’m still conflicted as to the verdict.
In a the cases you mention: whether someone sleeps or doesn’t, takes part in the vaccination or doesn’t, the end result only affects the individual and that should be in their freedom to research both sides and choose what’s best for them.
But what about when the health of a large group is at stake? Such as when a Myanmar hate group wildly escalated on Facebook to the point of genocide against Rohingya Muslims. Should that have been stopped (by Facebook? By the government?). Could we have intervened?
I ultimately believe in freedom of speech and am anti censorship, and I agree with your well thought out points here, but I also wonder whether there are circumstances in which we might be able to deescalate a crisis. Though I admit I have no solution for how that might be achieved!
You are very smart which is both intimidating and inspiring. During my medical training, evidence based medicine was held up as the gold standard form of proof that something existed or didn’t exist, worked or didn’t work. Anecdotal evidence, or proof that is gained by a qualified individual through observation, was treated like a dim relative to be patted on the head and popped in a corner. But then we were also taught about the truckload of bias that can affect study outcomes and the validity of the findings – we’re fucked, because all I’m hearing is that we can’t rely on the reporting of reproducibility that underpins EBM and that anecdotal evidence has very little value. Your post says all of this in a much more cerebral way. The one thing it doesn't factor in is the flawed humanness that each and every one of us possess, even smart people and scientists. Many have narcissitic egos that will never gain insight and many succumb daily to all manner of base impulses. In other words, who the fuck do we trust? We have to start with ourselves. Thanks again. Melissa
I was surprisingly disturbed by the info about the debunkings of the Walker book. I see that you cast some doubts on how disturbed one really should be by the debunkngs. And I get that you are talking about a larger issue -- how to we nurture and protect accumulating truth without using measures that damage the growth of knowledge and insight. And I am interested in the subject. But I can't seem to get past the Walker book issue right now.
It's not as though it was a book that had a profound impact on me. It was just a book that I thought was well and engagingly written, and told the truth -- ok, a neatened-up and simplified version of the truth, but close enough. I passed information and advice in it on to friends. And in some small way I felt a bit strengthened and comforted by adding Matthew Walker to the group of people I thought of as smart and trustworthy.
At the momentI'm feeling like it's just too hard to live through Trump and COVID and Ukraine and various events in my life feeling like there is now one less smart, sane, honest person out there who I can count on to think straight, tell the truth, and not be an asshole. I have always trusted science and intelligence and honesty more than anything else. It is just too hard to take on this vision of how research etc. is a fucking mess too, just another pile of people chewing on each other.
I will probably feel better after a good night's sleep.
This was a thought provoking substack post. Really enjoyed it. But I don't have much else to say about it. The sleep piece you mentioned, on the other hand, I do have a comment or three on. I had never seen it before. I found it engaging too, but I thought it needed a bit more nuance and detail. Don't get me wrong, I definitely think there's something there, but it needed more detail and balance. Sure, the field of sleep research probably needs to get away from this whole standard 7-9hr prescription. That's probably simplistic. And I agree that there is a lot of BS out there in a lot of scientific fields. On the other hand, you'd think that something that leaves you so vulnerable to predation would have quite a lot of selective pressure against it, and yet sleep is ubiquitous in the biological world. Clearly it's performing something(s) that are very important (maybe correcting for overfitting like you say, is one of those things). Sure, missing out on SOME sleep every so often probably does make you a more robust, resilient, less fragile organism to some degree, like going hungry does. But, two things are important to emphasize that I think Alexey did not spend enough time on:
1) difference between having "adequate" sleep level, while optimizing sleep FOR something other than health/well being/longevity (competitive sailing or whatever) VS. optimizing sleep FOR long term well being/health/longevity,
2) overall load of different combined stressors and different combinations of stressor intensities at any one time.
Just because you can "get by" & sort of adjust to a certain amount of <7hr sleep doesn't mean it's optimal FOR long term well being/health/longevity, but a given sleep pattern might be optimal for something else. Also, out of fear of sounding like a naïve paleo bro, what we DO want to (to some degree) to mimic from our ancestors is the stress AND RECOVERY patterns (emphasis on to some degree). Very intense acute stress should be accompanied by appropriate levels of rest and recovery. Very intense and acute stress should take place, but you should subject yourself to it A LOT less often than mild and moderate stress (sleep stress or otherwise). Chronic stress of any type isn't good. The more intense/severe the stress the worse the chronification of said stress is for you. Sleep stress also does not occur in a vacuum. If you're doing prolonged fasting WHILE still working out (even if you reduce your workout load while fasting), WHILE still doing cryotherapy, WHILE going in the sauna, WHILE working your day job, WHILE chronically undersleeping, WHILE taking care of a newborn baby ect. ect., something tells me your body will not respond well to all of this. So, yes, while complex living organisms NEED some levels of stress, how much stress one should ideally subject oneself to depends on A LOT of factor (not least of which is that individual's biology, genes, ect.). If I had to bet money, the best sleep pattern for the "typical" person will include some days of 8 hours, some days of 7 hrs, some of 5-6hrs, occasional days of 1-4 hours (but these very sleep deprived nights should probably happen a lot less frequently than the 5-6 hr nights). All this is contingent on whether you're not also doing a heavy fasting/ work out regimen, dealing with certain illnesses ect. ect.
Hey Erik,
As you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can help people "think together", and I Have Thoughts here too. At the risk of saying something deeply unfashionable in the current moment: people should be given the opportunity to govern themselves, with all of the messiness and compromise that requires.
A lot of my work in the past focused on the early "miracles" of open systems like Wikipedia—a thing that worked in practice, but not in theory. One of the things that I began to see was the emergence of a lifecycle for these communities. Aaron Shaw and Ben Mako Hill wrote a terrific paper a few years ago on this, titled "laboratories of oligarchy", which is a really important read: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcom.12082 In a way, some of this parallels the "geeks-MoPs-sociopath" cycle (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) except with much higher stakes.
Subcultures like Wikipedia are really different from Twitter, however. On WP, the infrastructure and the culture are deeply intertwined. The users govern, or governed, themselves, to a great extent—WP really was a blank canvas, with a huge "affordance space" where users could interact and lever.
Twitter, by contrast, owns the infrastructure, and strictly controls the affordances (likes, retweets, replies, quote tweets; and then bans of various lengths, enforced by a central system—the library is small). It is a real monarchy, with all of the disasters that leads to.
Right now we see a lot of would-be monarchs showing up: people who want to regulate epistemic communities the way they regulate, say, the water supply. That just can't (in my opinion) work. The alternative—wrestling with the complex logic of self-governance of the information commons—is not the world's most appealing option (as Shaw and Hill point out), but I can't see anything else that's compatible with the continued flourishing of the species.
Once billions of dollars are on the line, of course, political theory tends to go out the window (or into the prison—Machiavelli). But it seems entirely plausible to me that we don't have to go down that route. Decentralization, fragmentation, and plurality are ideal counterparts to the experimental values that characterized the flourishing of epistemic communities in early 2000s.
Simon
"Even if one assumes (correctly or not) that during the pandemic there was good reason to put a far-reaching system in place with which to censor criticism of scientific consensus, my fear is that this system will remain in place after the pandemic is over and end up applying to a wider domain of science than anyone anticipated."
Of course it will remain in place. This is one of the unwritten rules of modern collectivism. A powerful few must be the voice for the masses in the name of the "greater good". If you can write that into law or even the public's consciousness using fear, then all the better. A key part of that effort is the suppression of any information that is a dissenting viewpoint.
Your entire essay makes perfect logical sense, which is exactly why it would be maligned on Twitter today, but not in a near future hopefully on Elon Musk's version of Twitter. One of the great things about science was that it was always open to debate, criticism and change. It evolved, and sometimes this had dangerous consequences. However, science is not that way anymore. It's now used to bludgeon dissenters. How many times have you heard it said in some narrow minded circles that the "debate is over". What debate? This isn't ethics. It's science.
I have lunch once a week with my grown daughter, and from March 2020 we have had a regular discussion about the COVID origin. Our lab-leak odds went from 10% at the start to 99% now. The furin cleavage site discovery (that was patented) was the kicker that sent it that high.
Re: astrology as a pseudoscience. Astrology is originally an indigenous practice, and to hold it up to the specific rigours of Science misses the point. Judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree is absurd, and so is trying to make sense of astrology through a scientific lens. There are "more things in heaven and earth" than climbing trees.
This is great. I'm glad that you referenced the demarcation problem. One of the strangest ideas that I see repeated ad nauseam is that we have some kind of "anti-science" problem. Meanwhile, I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't believe in science, no matter how crazy their particular set of beliefs are.
Astrology, homeopathic medicine, biodynamic winemaking, even religious fundamentalism all have some sort of "scientific" explanation for how they work. The problem isn't separating science from superstition; it's separating good science from junk science.
We should reject the assertion that the measures/policies/societal shifts were Wrong because they had *some* undesirable consequences, such as the lab-leak hypothesis being made Verboten. The question is whether they actually resulted in net fewer deaths, in net less suffering. If they did, then the measures were Good. In this analysis the suffering of lab-leak proponents and shifts in distributions of futures wrt free speech should of course be taken into account. But the latter seems to be given infinite weight whenever speech is slightly curtailed and that is just not supported by any evidence.
Another thing: that the problem is too difficult to solve completely doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution that at least shifts the world into a better equilibrium. That the problem is “a beast that’s never been solved” doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to ‘brute-force’, ‘design away’ or ‘compromise’ such that the bad consequences aren’t diminished relative to just letting things run their merry course. We haven’t “solved” disease either, but we still rightfully throw vaccines, antibiotics, transplants, etc. at the problem. I don’t see why I should believe that technology or politics cannot possibly help to shift how well-informed people are in the right direction.