“Everything
that can be invented has been invented.”
--Charles Duell,
US Patent Office Commissioner (1899)
“Reports that
say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we
know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know
there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do
not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't
know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free
countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”
--Donald
Rumsfeld, Secretary of the US Department of Defense (2002)
“Nobody
knows much of anything and we’re all going to die.”
--Me
I find it somehow both fascinating and boring that we
live in what is currently being described as a “post-truth” world. Indeed, “post-truth” was selected by the
Oxford dictionary as the 2016 word of the year.
I am fascinated because people seem to finally be clueing in to how much
of the world is swimming in, for lack of a better term, bullshit. But I am
bored because even the slightest scratching beneath the surface of those that
are referencing post-truth shows that they are still bullshitters themselves,
stuck in the endless chamber of “Your tribe is the worst! My tribe is the best!”
Humans do not handle uncertainty. Humans want
control. This extends to ideas and
knowledge. In my life, I have seen that the
most difficult thing for otherwise intelligent people to say is “I don’t know.” I’ve never heard a one say “I can’t know.”
It’s not that I don’t have strong feelings, opinions, or
beliefs. No one who’s spent a few moments talking to me would say that. It’s just that behind every single one of
them, other than my religious ones, is “except if it turns out I’m 100% wrong,
I won’t be that surprised.” I’d say I have, at best, 95% conviction about
the things I’m certain about.
What I particularly am fascinated yet bored with is
people’s religious worship of “science”, particularly the non-religious who
mock faith. 97% of scientists agree on
climate change!
Hold on. I’m not going to do the climate thing. Not yet,
anyways.
You
should listen to your doctor. You absolutely should. I’m not saying otherwise. He
or she is doing the absolute best based on the information he/she has at the
time to do what’s best for your health, as he/she understands it. I’m just saying that you need to understand
that he/she might very well not really know what he/she is talking about. And
it’s not his/her fault. It’s reality.
We
live in 2017. This is not the Neolithic or even Medieval times. We know
complicated things. Of course we know the simple things. Of course we do.
Did
you know that in 2013, a completely new ligament was found in the knee? (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/a-surprising-discovery-a-new-knee-ligament/?_r=0
) Galen didn’t discover that in 200A.D. Leonardo didn’t in the 1400s. 2013.
Did
you know they found (or rediscovered) an entire freaking organ within the past few weeks?
Yeah. The Mesentery. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/health/new-organ-mesentery/
Did
you know until less than a year ago, the brain did not really connect to the
lymphatic system? Well, of course it
did, but we didn’t know about it:
And
then, did you know that your immune system affects your social interactions and
perhaps even controls them, because it was only a few months after that
brain-lymphatic connection that UVA researchers discovered that as well:
Except,
guess what? You can find a study to support nearly everything. UVA posits the brain lymphatic system, but
until it’s replicated and confirmed, who knows?
I certainly don’t. Neither do you. And that’s the issue.
Nearly every day you can find a study that will say something
shocking (you will definitely find boring ones) that supports or upends your
beliefs. And guess what?? Who cares?! A
study isn’t science. Confirmation and consensus is science. But that’s boring and takes forever.
Headlines grab attention.
In 2011, articles popped up stating that CERN scientists
had discovered neutrinos that broke the speed of light. Which isn’t actually what happened at
all. Their data indicated that, but they
were investigating because anything faster than the speed of light upends
physics. But that was long and decidedly
non-sensational, so the articles didn’t state that. And the articles didn’t do much when it was
discovered later that there was a fiber-optic cable issue that accounted for
the timing of the neutrinos. The
scientists, following scientific protocol, found that of their own
investigation, which is to their credit. (http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-data-that-threatened-to-break-physics)
And sometimes, there’s consensus and confirmation, except
it turns out there is consensus and everyone assumed confirmation but no one
actually confirmed, which is, apparently, what happened when it turned out that
daily flossing your teeth has no real scientific basis. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/health/flossing-teeth-cavities.html Of course, that doesn’t say flossing doesn’t protect your teeth, either. Just
that the studies don’t specifically show it. So floss. Or don’t.
Everyone likes to have firm opinions on big things, so
from time to time, I get someone who will lean in conspiratorially to confirm
that I, of course, agree with them that vaccines are/are not effective. And I make both camps equally furious when I
say, “I don’t know.” Because I don’t. And they don’t either.
I tend to assume that vaccines work. I know that polio wasn’t a fear for me the
way it was for my parents, and, without looking into it, I figure that’s from
vaccines. But I have no idea. Because I
haven’t done any research whatsoever.
And then, if I ever do, I will have to figure out if the information I’m
looking at is legitimate. Because most of it’s not.
I do have 4/5ths of an anthrax vaccine I was forced to
receive as an adult when I was in the army.
I wasn’t willing to risk court martial refusing it, so here I am. Was that vaccine good? Was it fraudulent? I
have no idea. It appears there isn’t, nor ever was agreement.
Anyways, I don’t have kids, but when I do, I’ll look into
it. My medical friends have looked at me like I’m a blithering dolt when I didn’t
jump to agree with them that of course vaccines are effective, but then I think
about new knee ligaments and new organs and I smile and nod until they get it
out of their systems.
Okay. Climate Change. Global Warming.
I
dunno.
I know
that I’ve been to Thermopylae. And when I looked out on the famous “Hot Gates”
which were so narrow that 300 Spartans (and thousands of allies) could hold
back the Persian Hordes, I saw that if you replicated the battle today, the
Spartans would be annihilated quickly, because the water is way, way away from
where it was 2500 years ago.
Troy/Ilium/Hisarlik is miles
away from the waters of the Aegean whence it was 3500 years ago.
At the South Carolina Aquarium here in Charleston, there’s
a map that shows the coastline was 70 miles farther out 17,000 years ago, and
if you do the math on that (70 miles = 70*5280 feet= 369,000 feet, which you
then divide by the 17,000 years) you end up with about 21 feet of rise per
year, on average, since then. As sea
level hasn’t risen by even half a foot in my lifetime, I dunno.
But 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real!
Let’s
make sure we’re talking about the same thing when we talk about that 97%. Because that’s not all scientists, it’s
climate scientists, which makes sense, because what the hell does a biologist
or chemist really know about climate trends?
But it turns out that 97% isn’t simply all climate scientists. It’s
either from a “random” poll of climate scientists who belonged to two meteorological
societies (which one could argue is akin to asking the National Republican
Party or National Democrat Party for the consensus opinion of the American
people), or it’s from a cursory review of abstracts of papers submitted on
climate change or global warming (11,944 such papers), but only those that
endorsed a position (97.1% of 4,014 of them). An overwhelming number of the
abstracts that discussed global warming or climate change did not endorse a position (the remaining
7,930 of 11,944).
However, of course, just like Big Tobacco being
responsible for all those ads and studies over the years where scientists and
doctors said that smoking was fine or perhaps even good for you, Big Oil and
Coal and who-have-you can very much be throwing false science into the mix to
create a false argument. Of course.
However, climate science is big business unto
itself. I got stuck in an argument with
a big climate change supporter and when I asked him about the University of
East Anglia scandal, he scoffed and said he didn’t know about any “Community
College of East Bum(screw)” but “anyone with a brain” knows that climate change
is real. Which was pretty much the
moment I realized we were having a discussion where he heard himself talk.
If you don’t know, the small (to Americans) university in
Norwich has what is probably the world’s foremost climatology department, known
as the Climatic Research Unit
(http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/about-cru). So influential is the CRU that it has been involved
heavily with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change, “probably
more than anywhere else relative to the size of an institution” according to
the CRU itself.
Except, there was Climategate
Wherein someone hacked the email servers of the CRU and
published them and seemed to show that there was a concerted effort to
manufacture data to support their positions. Climate Science is a multi-billion
dollar “industry” where tax dollars and donations evaporate if it’s proven that
man doesn’t affect the environment, mind you.
Here’s an outraged article reaming against the scandal:
Here are two articles saying that there is no scandal and
the outrage was hokum spun up by climate deniers:
You know what I know?
I know that both the climate change believers and deniers
can’t even agree on the known knowns.
They refuse to acknowledge known unknowns, let alone the possibility of
unknown unknowns.
So at the end of this, what’s my position?
I don’t
have one.
I don’t
know.
I know
there is bias in all kinds of media. I
definitely don’t trust nearly anyone who prattles on about it; that’s for sure.
Is it
easy to have to question and look at everything? Of course not. But if you're
going through life using the easiest route, you're probably doing it wrong. It is 100% okay to stay quiet and observe; there
is tremendous value to not adding noise to the echo chamber.
You
know why I love that Patent Commissioner’s quote I put at the start of all
this? Duell never really said that. According to this website (http://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-everything-that-can-be-invented-has-been-invented.html),
it was a misattribution from a comedy magazine.
Of course, I haven’t looked into the nuts and bolts myself, so, as ever,
all I can tell you, with any certainty whatsoever, is that nobody knows much of
anything and we’re all going to die.
2 comments:
Good argument for skepticism, though I'd argue that you (and all of us) need to take more of a probabilistic approach to assessing these various questions. And throwing your hands up when something isn't definitive (given that almost nothing is ever definitive) seems like a cop out.
I just can't shake how much I truly dislike when people prattle on as if they know a thing and they're spitballing. Just been in too many situations where people (myself included) were super-certain and were dead wrong. I try to speak to what I know first hand, as much as possible. Perhaps it's a cop-out, but that's where I am these days.
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