Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Why I Am a Skeptic


“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:

Exnicios said...

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.

Ajax said...

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.