Surety Brings Ruin

The Scientific Navigation of Ignorance and its Dogmatic Impediments

Introduction

Science is not merely a collection of facts about Nature, it is an error correcting social technology that requires rigorous interrogation of all claims to propositional knowledge. This is because no matter how far our understanding of Nature advances, all scientific knowledge is potentially surpassable since we are always operating with incomplete information. Moreover, scientists themselves are finite, limited, and fallible primates who, just like all human beings, are capable of profound errors of judgement, irrationality, and deceit. As such, uncertainty is the only epistemic certainty in science. 

But if we are to most effectively navigate our inescapable ignorance, we must have error correcting feedback loops that harness the collective intelligence of minds with a diversity of opinion, belief, understanding, and bias. This is what makes science a social technology. We must systematically compensate for our inevitable blind spots by allowing as many individuals as possible, to take as many sledgehammers as possible, to as many ideas as possible. Hence, the less freely we can exchange ideas and inquire openly, the less we will be able to identify and correct errors as they arise, and the more we subsequently impede the scientific process. 

Deep concern about threats to the free exchange of ideas and open inquiry has prompted the writing of this essay. Between a seemingly widespread lack of understanding around what science actually is amongst even serious professional scientists, an arrogant hijacking of “The Science” by a self-anointed high priesthood, and an insidious infection of individuals and institutions by anti-scientific ideology over the last few years in particular, the truth-seeking endeavour of science is in legitimate danger. 

This is a 3-part essay. Part 1 will focus on the basic drives, assumptions, and process of genuine scientific truth-seeking. Part 2 will focus on the use of “The Science” as an inquisitorial bludgeon. Part 3 will focus on the dangerous politicization of science and how we might begin to resist it. 

Part 1/3

In spite of the fact that we are trying to read the label from inside of the jar, we may still, one day, discover an Ultimate Truth about the workings of Nature. In fact, we may have already done so. What we could never know with absolute epistemic certainty, however, is if we had ever managed to accomplish such a feat. Moreover, claiming to have done so might well impede future discoveries, or even stifle the desire to seek them in the first place. ‘Surety Brings Ruin’ states the ancient Delphic Maxim. 

Yet, despite this inherent limitation to truth seeking, we persist. An insatiable yearning seems to pour forth from the wellspring of a truly scientific mind. Drinking from this source means accepting the beautiful burden of an unquenchable desire for that which thrives in fervently generating more thirst. Max Planck describes some of the essence to this self-perpetuating search: 

“Science enhances the moral value of life because it furthers a love of truth and reverence…Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and, therefore, part of the mystery we are trying to solve.” (pg. 162-163)

Such a limitation did not deter Planck, the father of quantum theory—a pillar of modern physics. He pursued science from a place of almost spiritual veneration, and he was not alone in doing so. Albert Einstein, the father of general relativity—the other pillar, greatly admired the venerable approach to science exemplified by Planck: 

“The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.” (pg. 157)

A scientific thinker is viscerally compelled toward vigorously investigating the enigmas of existence whilst remaining cognizant of their myriad limitations. Science can, therefore, not only be conceptualized, but actually experienced, as a study of Nature that iteratively commands more of itself. 

Such a process of complementarity is captured by the following phrases: “ignoramus et ignorabimus” and “wir mussen wissen— wir werden wissen.” The former, in Latin, is from a German physiologist named Emil du Boi-Reymond and means “we are ignorant and will remain so.” The latter, in German, is from a mathematician of the same nationality named David Hilbert and means, “we must know—we will know.” These two seemingly contradictory declarations form a functional paradox: they work in unison as two ends of a bow creating the necessary tension to propel us toward further exploratory understanding. As William Blake demonstrates in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without contraries is no progression.”

This complementarity exists because we simultaneously need to realize that an Ultimate Truth about Nature—a propositional truth that will, with 100% certainty for eternity be true regardless of any possible future evidence—will never be known, yet we must strive to know it regardless. And so, the quintessential attribute to genuine scientific thinking, would be that of recognizing the endeavour of science as an eternally incomplete project. I am here reminded of the heuristic offered by André Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.” This is of paramount importance because “[o]ur knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete,” as Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in Skin in the Game, “so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble.” But apart from recognizing the tension between our inescapable limitations and our desire to know, how do we actually seek scientific truth? 

To borrow phraseology from Carl Sagan, we seek truth through a balance of wonder and scepticism. We need to have enough wonder to be open and be curious enough to let new ideas in, no matter how intuitively offensive, while also remaining imaginatively playful enough to entertain the generation of creative hypotheses, no matter how absurdly nonconformist. Necessary balance is then provided through being sceptical enough to honestly try and find out where we may be wrong. Such scepticism becomes especially important around those ideas which we hold most dear, those most likely to deceive us, due to components of the human condition that impede critical thinking: confirmation bias and group normative conformity are but two examples. 

An excess of wonder at the expense of scepticism, and we risk being cast adrift in a vast ocean of endless possibilities; an excess of scepticism at the expense of wonder, and we risk being moored down in a stale puddle of stagnant discoveries. Sagan describes this balance in The Demon-Haunted World:  

“...the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued.” (pg. 31) 

No matter how many white swans we may pile up in attempting to verify a claim that all swans are white, it only takes one black swan to provide falsification. Sir Karl Popper used this famous illustration around the primacy of falsification in scientific truth seeking so as to illustrate a simple point: no amount of supportive evidence can prove we are correct with absolute epistemic certainty since there is always the possibility that evidence may exist to the contrary. As such, it is not the good explanations with the greatest supporting evidence we should put greatest trust in, but the good explanations that are actually falsifiable yet have withstood the “most rigorous, sceptical scrutiny” as Sagan put it. This made Popper a fallibilist. 

Fallibilism assumes we are always operating with incomplete information, and hence only ever formulating conjectures. A basic consequence of fallibilism is, therefore, that the more ruthlessly we try to find out where a falsifiable conjecture may be wrong, the less likely it is to be wrong should it survive refutation. Fallibilism does not, however, prove something to be right. Thanks to more than a century of highly motivated experimentation, to give but one example, we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that Einstein’s general relativity is less wrong than Newton’s explanation of gravitation. Regardless of explanatory success, however, what we can never know with absolute certainty, is if Einstein had managed to explain any Ultimate Truth’s about the behaviour of Nature. 

The fundamental axiomatic epistemic foundation for fallibilism did not have a name that I could find. And so, with a certain uneasiness, I gave it one. When fully coming to terms with the fact that the entirety of Nature is too much for a single person to comprehend, I am forced to concede, quite obviously, that I myself am only ever formulating opinions and generating beliefs with incomplete knowledge. As such, I can reach 100% epistemic certainty about no propositional aspect of the reality within which my conscious experience is occurring other than the inability to reach 100% epistemic certainty. This paradoxical truism at the bottom of fallibilism is due to what I call the Axiom of the Infinite Unknown (AIU). A revised description of the AIU is as follows: 

The Axiom of the Infinite Unknown (AIU) acknowledges that a single human is limited in capacity and finite in scale, whilst the information contained within Nature from which knowledge could be generated is relatively unlimited and infinite. Accepting the AIU means acknowledging the impossibility of knowing all knowledge that there was to know in the past, is to know in the present, or could ever be known in the future. One will, therefore, strive to maintain uncertainty as one’s only certainty as it pertains to describing any propositional aspect of the reality within which one’s conscious experience appears to occur. 

A fallibilist attitude is of the utmost importance in highlighting the inherently doomed and destructive nature of dogmatic thinking because, by its very definition, it acknowledges the inescapability of human fallibility. Fallibilism also, however, acknowledges that there is always the potential for new problems to solve as we continue to learn more about the reality of Nature and our place in it. As David Deutsch writes in The Beginning of Infinity: 

“The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation: just as ‘the gods did it’ is always a bad explanation, so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too. It must be easily variable because it cannot answer the question: why that foundation and not another? Nothing can be explained only in terms of itself…Thus fallibilism alone understates the error-prone nature of knowledge creation. Knowledge-creation is not only subject to error: errors are common, and significant, and will always be, and correcting them will always reveal further and better problems.” (pg. 64) 

This makes fallibilism central to science, which I have previously described as being used in 4 different ways that are related but distinct: science as a field of study; science as a human endeavour; science as a method of investigation; and science as a body of knowledge. Since the Spring of 2020 though, I have noticed that a most ugly fifth use of the word has become increasingly prevalent in our colloquial zeitgeist: “science” as an inquisitorial bludgeon.  

Part 2/3

Given the fallibilist foundations to our epistemic station as students of Nature, I am hardly alone in being intellectually offended when some propositional scientific justification is used as a cudgel to beat down even the possibility of nonconformist dissent. 

Considering who it came from, for example, the prize for the most anti-scientific sentiment uttered in the entire Covid-19 pandemic, might well go to Anthony Fauci: 

“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science because all of the things I have spoken about from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science.” 

Later, Fauci was even more direct about his apparent scientific-Papacy when explicitly stating that “I represent science.” This actually happened. For a man of his position and credentials to put not only himself, but whatever was held up as “science” above the level of critique, is as anti-scientific a statement as one could comprehend. Especially when Fauci seems to have knowingly lied about masks, and inexplicably ignored natural immunity even as evidence mounted that it offered comparable if not superior protection to the vaccines. More damning still, is that the former director of the Centre for Disease Control in the U.S., Robert Redfield, claimed that when it came to investigating the possible laboratory origins of the Wuhan virus, Fauci “has acted in an antithetical way to science.” Recent journalistic work by Paul Thacker on links between Fauci’s organisation, the NIH, and the very lab in Wuhan under suspicion for leaking the virus, may provide some clues as to why Fauci is said to have been acting in an “antithetical way to science.” “So if a leak occurred,”  Thacker writes, “that might tie the NIH and Anthony Fauci to the pandemic that started killing people.” 

Setting misrepresentative figures aside, there is something that genuine scientific thinkers are awesome at: systematically compensating for one another’s blind spots, weaknesses, and inadequacies. True science is an inherently anti-authoritarian and decentralized endeavour that relies on the ruthless interrogation of all claims to propositional knowledge. As Jonathan Rauch notes in Kindly Inquisitors:

“Without public checking, there is no way to know, even in principle, whether the man scribbling alone in his room is Einstein or a lunatic…Science is unique not because it tests propositions experimentally but because it tests them socially, through a decentralized public process that refracts and distils the experience of countless observers, reaching conclusions which embody the view of no-one in particular. The magic is not in the experiment but in the repeating of it and the criticism of it.” (pg. 170-171) 

I am deeply concerned that ludicrous proclamations and assertions of authority from high profile figures like Fauci will only serve to sow seeds of distrust in those who do not understand what “science” actually is. These concerns are especially relevant when a top class publication like The British Medical Journal (The BMJ) publishes an extremely disturbing investigation into “data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial”—the very vaccine that many millions of people were relentlessly assured to be “safe and effective”: 

“A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson, emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day. Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.”

As this very worrying Pfizer vaccine story highlights, “science” is not a monolith that tells a single unified story. This was also made quite clear in all the hullaballoo around ivermectin which many of its proponents even saw as an alternative to the vaccines. In a tour de force literature review of the relevant studies, Scott Alexander described how “[a]bout 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud.” And so, when rhetorical soundbites like “follow the science” are rammed down our throats—without explaining that science is a perpetually ongoing process of systematic error correction subject not only to human fallibility but intentional falsity—things can backfire. As Alexander notes: 

“Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much.”

When a self-anointed priesthood presents “The Science” as if it were revealed to them from On High, to those whom they seem to view as unwashed plebs, they create a scenario in which even totally reasonable sceptical inquiry is framed as punishable heresy. This is made especially clear when “The Science” is said to be “settled.” 

Mortal existence, to be fair, seems to present itself as a forum for action. If in doubt of this statement, simply do nothing and then recognize that trying not to act is, in and of itself, an action. As individuals and collectives trying to make decisions, we need to eventually settle on an understanding of reality in order to act in the world. This interpretation of a “settled” upon viewpoint is not what I am alluding to. No, I am referring to the dogmatic use of the word as a weapon against dissenting critics of “The Science” because they are assumed to be wrong by sheer virtue of their heterodox position. The former description of “settled” science is totally reasonable in light of the AIU and fallibilism. The latter description, on the other hand, is fundamentally self-contradictory; uncertainty, to reiterate a core premise, is the only propositional certainty we have about Nature. Hence, those of us interested in seeking objective truth must keep the door open to new ideas. 

For example, I believe human activity to be contributing to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions. On top of this, we are disrupting the carbon sequestration side of the equation too, through activities like the destruction of whale populations, and our heavy reliance on intensive industrial farming methods that degrade soil biodiversity instead of seriously exploring an increased use, where at all possible, of more animal inclusive regenerative practices (circular farming methods that can actually increase soil health and the subsequent sequestering of carbon).  However, I do not have the sort of quasi-religious carbon-emission-tunnel-vision so evident amongst Western intelligentsia; a tunnel vision which has resulted in myriad idiotic manifestations. One such example was provided by Rodgers and Wolf in their book Sacred Cow: 

“[M]oose produce large amounts of methane and the Green Party in Sweden is now proposing that citizens should “shoot as many moose as possible and reduce the number of cattle,” for the sake of the climate. A myopic view of methane production is now casting doubt on the utility, if not sanity, of promoting more life on this planet. The misunderstanding and fear surrounding this topic are so potent that seemingly credible people are suggesting we should have less life on earth...so we can protect the other life on earth, and all to reduce the perceived danger of biologically sourced methane (which is a process that has occurred since the earliest days of life on earth).” (pg. 138) 

This sort of deranged myopia also seems to be driving horrifyingly anti-human policies that I have argued sacrifice energy security and food sovereignty at the altar of climate alarmism. These policies disproportionately harm rural communities that farm for a living, and the vulnerable who are most affected by energy and food prices, not only in Western societies, but the wider world—especially when these atomistic policies are sustained during our current time of extreme geopolitical instability. German food and agriculture minister, Cem Özdemir, even suggested that “hunger should not be abused as an argument to make compromises regarding biodiversity or protection of the climate.” Another example on this front is the Western eco-imperialism evidenced when the usual suspects, like John Kerry, try to impose their “sustainability” agenda on poor nations. Macky Sall, president of Senegal and chair of the African Union, has rejected such impositions: “You cannot tell us that renewables alone can develop a continent – it has never been the case anywhere else and it cannot be the case in Africa.” 

But why might such a blinkered attitude be so evident amongst supposedly rational and highly educated Western elites? In his 2020 book, Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger reckons one reason may be to do with the provision of religious meaning: 

“Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change or some other disaster. It provides them with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars…believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives…The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad.” (pg. 264-265) 

As a result of this quasi-religious zealotry around apocalyptic climate alarmism, what we might call Climatism, a healthy scepticism about the low resolution catastrophic narratives that we are relentlessly bombarded with by many journalists and politicians is justified. These are, after all, two groups fond of “menacing” the populace, as H.L. Mencken might say, with an “endless series of hobgoblins”. My scepticism stems from the simple fact that any potentially error correcting information that runs against the apostles of Climatism gets harder and harder to discover and effectively disseminate as the low resolution alarmist narratives gain more traction. 

It is, of course, worth noting here that some anti-Climatism views have successfully gone against the grain. The aforementioned Apocalypse Never by Shellenberger, for example, is one such collection of views. This is a thought provoking book that presents, at least to a lay science nerd like myself, what mostly seem to be sensible arguments that accept modern scientific findings while rejecting silly policy. Arguments of Shellenberger’s that might resonate now, in light of war in Ukraine and industry crippling disruptions to cheap Russian gas, would include his criticism of Germany’s bizarrely irrational decision to turn off its nuclear plants. 

“France spends a little more than half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions of German electricity. The difference is that Germany is phasing out nuclear and phasing in renewables, while France is keeping most of its nuclear plants online…Had Germany invested $580 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, it would be generating 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emission sources and have sufficient zero-carbon electricity to power all of its cars and light trucks, as well.” (pg. 151-152) 

Of note here, is that Dr Steven Koonin of New York University presents a set of different, yet similarly thought provoking anti-Climatism analyses to the likes of Shellenberger; as does Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.  ‘Eat bugs and give up your cars you Gaia-raping parasite’: Shellenberger, Koonin, and Lomborg all offer varied, yet refreshingly human-centric alternative approaches to this sort of Climatist nonsense. 

Scepticism of mine on the actual scientific front of climate discourse, however, has been historically low. This is thanks to encountering carefully measured and seemingly non-Climatist communicators like Professor Richard Betts. Unfortunately, and somewhat disconcertingly, my scepticism has increased of late. Part of this increase was due to seeing the power of groupthink and conformity enforcement during the pandemic. Another contributor was upon recently hearing Dr Richard Lindzen, a now retired atmospheric scientist who spent 30 years at MIT, saying in a recent interview that “when we get to climate, you don’t get grants if you question the current narrative.” Elsewhere in the same conversation, Lindzen claimed that two different journal editors got fired for accepting his papers for publication, and how his own funding was threatened due to the scientific arguments he put forth on climate change related topics. These are deeply troubling claims. How can we possibly find out where we might be wrong if we are aggressively enforcing groupthink through the crushing of heterodox viewpoints? Given the countless billions being spent on climate measures, alongside the widespread existential despair being driven by omnipresent Climatism, should we not be trying extremely hard to find out if we are incorrect in any of our current interpretations and assertions? Should we not be enthusiastically encouraging a ruthless Devil’s Advocacy in order to decrease the chances that we will drift into the abyss because of some otherwise correctable mimetic psychosis? 

Now, since we are already in the business of acknowledging nuance around spicy topics, let’s talk plague. I chose to receive vaccination against Covid-19 in the spring of 2021 when offered it. Given my specific health circumstances, alongside my understanding of the information on vaccine injury and efficacy in preventing viral transmission made available at the time, I decided that the potential risks of accepting vaccination most likely did not outweigh the potential costs to my loved ones and wider society of refusal. However, I feel compelled to mention my serious ethical concerns about the dehumanizing techno-segregationist policies and relatedly inhumane attitudes of puritanical scapegoating toward the manifestly 2nd class citizens commonly referred to as the “unvaxxed”. These were dystopian state interventions and sanctimonious public attitudes that emerged and escalated in the months after I had chosen to receive the novel medical technology. A technology which, as it turned out, has grossly unequal risk to benefit analyses depending not only on underlying illnesses and comorbidities, but on sex and age. This was especially concerning after it became clear as the nose on my face, in at least October of 2021 if not months earlier due to Israeli data, that the vaccines didn’t prevent reinfection or transmission. Moreover, if I had known that the politicized safetyism and social neuroticism around vaccination status was going to get so crazy, I probably would have refused the jab as a conscientious objection. And even though I acknowledge the seriousness of the virus in terms of how dangerous or even deadly it was for vulnerable people, I still feel some visceral shame around a few areas of personal participation in plague bio-security theatrics. A major source of this shame relates to personal acquiescence in playing along with segregationist QR code scanning to prove vaccination compliance, even a handful of times, just for the sake of entry to a restaurant or music gig. To draw parallels with the aforementioned Climatism, this Covidianism had, in many ways, even more of a quasi-religious authoritarian zealotry than much of what was discussed above. Paul Kingsnorth summed it up well: 

"we have shown that we are prepared to Follow The Science in great numbers into the territory of digital health passports, mass surveillance, enforced house arrest and censorship of dissent."

And so, given the complexity of these two topics, there is a non-zero probability that even the most hardcore “climate denier” or “anti-vaxxer” may be correct in some opinions. They should, therefore, be totally allowed to openly express their views—even encouraged to do so. To claim otherwise—that the people who hold even the most far-fetched of opinions on climate change or vaccines are definitively, 100% wrong about everything, with absolute epistemic certainty, and therefore deserve censorship that prevents them from expressing dissent or sharing their opinions in our information commons—would make me no different to any other arrogant dogmatist who looked to burn books and aggressively enforce ideological conformity throughout history. 

‘But how so?’, one might ask. ‘Surely some opinions are just wrong?’ Well, apart from my grounding in the AIU and the subsequent fallibilist awareness that I am always navigating inescapably infinite ignorance, a much more difficult problem arises that closely resembles the debates around the ever-widening classification of what supposedly constitutes “hate speech”. This problem revolves around two key questions. Firstly, where does the censorship line get drawn between the more extreme heterodox views and the more reasonable ones? Secondly, who gets the power to be the “Ministry of Truth” that decides where the line gets drawn? 

What if such a process of politically-correct-censorship hinders truth seeking, not only by suppressing heterodox views that are totally plausible and provide potentially beneficial hypotheses, but even goes so far as to suppress legitimate scientific findings? Such a situation would mean that currently heterodox scientific discoveries about climate science or vaccine safety and efficacy, for example, could be suppressed or even censored due to political or ideological inconvenience. Unfortunately, and with purposeful avoidance of getting any closer to the eerily convergent Climatism and Covidianism event horizons, there is mounting evidence that we are already at the point where the free exchange of such information is being impeded in multiple ways.  

Part 3/3

A truly ludicrous example of science suppression involved Dr Colin Wright. Wright, a PhD evolutionary biologist and science writer, had a post censored on Instagram in late 2021 because it apparently violated their rules on “hate speech.” His post showed findings from a peer reviewed scientific paper, from one of the top sports science journals in the world, demonstrating that biological males who medically attempt to become trans-women, were still much stronger than biological females even after prolonged hormone therapy. Wright’s posting of peer reviewed scientific data was pulled down by the Facebook owned platform on the grounds that it was “going against our guidelines.” 

While the reader may be forgiven for thinking that this kind of Big Tech interference in science dissemination is a one off, or that this does not indicate the presence of a dangerous threat to scientific truth-seeking, they would appear to be grossly mistaken. Many more sacred cows abound.

Facebook “fact-checkers” also attempted, for example, to undermine the distribution and credibility of the aforementioned BMJ piece describing issues with Pfizer’s vaccine trial. They described it as “false information”, and threatened to have the posts of those who shared it “moved lower in the news feed”. This is only scratching the surface though. 

We have also seen absurd Big Tech censorship of lockdown critics such as Prof Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, as well as censorship of the lockdown critical Great Barrington Declaration he co-wrote with two other academics—Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—by Facebook, Google, and Reddit. On this almost unbelievable display of anti-scientific arrogance by Big Tech gatekeepers, Fraser Myers of Spiked writes:

“Censorship presents a serious problem for science. Science thrives in a climate of free speech and open disagreement, where testable propositions can be put forward and rebutted. Now we have the likes of Google deciding the correct science in advance. These tech firms then shield the public from anything that diverges from that view.”

Recent revelations in the “Twitter Files” demonstrate that Professor Bhattacharya—an MD, economist, and full professor at a world renowned institution—was even placed on a “Trends Blacklist” by the company in order to limit the reach of his posts. A piece in The Free Press from Dec 2022 explains: 

“Twitter put Bhattacharya’s account on the Trends Blacklist, which meant that, no matter how many likes or views one of his tweets racked up, it could never “trend”; its visibility to users on the platform would be sharply curtailed.”

While economically hit very hard, I had the luxury of a relatively comfortable life during lockdown. However, the blunt force policies were not a free lunch for very many people, especially the most vulnerable. In a recent piece for Tablet Magazine, for example, Alex Gutentag paints a bleak picture about the impact of school closures in the U.S.:

“Currently, entire urban school systems are plagued by high rates of chronic absence, dismal test scores, and student violence. Pediatric hospitals are still seeing enormous surges in mental health emergencies and suicidal thoughts. Over a million students have left U.S. public schools and enrollment may continue to decline. The policy of school closures was not a one-year event—it broke the already fragile American public education system and initiated a tailspin of profound and worsening dysfunction among children and adolescents.”

And the U.S wasn’t alone in sacrificing the wellbeing of its young. In a piece by Danielle Barron in the Irish Independent newspaper from the 25^th of February this year, Professor Martin Cormican, a member of the national group who guided pandemic policy here in Ireland, shed some light on why school closures may have happened in Ireland longer than the international average, despite lacking solid scientific justification for doing so:

“Cormican is adamant that children will pay the price for this “for decades to come”, noting education as the single biggest determinant of health…The decision to close schools was not a child-centred one, Cormican believes; he says that it was instead driven by “vested interests”. “There were people who were very invested in not having the schools open, in relation to fears for themselves and others but very little of it was about the children, it was about other people,” he says…The strength of his feeling is apparent as he talks about the “abandonment” of children with special needs and those from deprived areas.” 

Later, when asked which country got their pandemic response “closest to right?”, Cormican suggested Sweden. “They probably had the most balanced approach and did the minimum of mandating people to do things,” says Cormican, “and the most amount of letting people make decisions themselves.” Journalist and author Johan Anderberg might well agree with Cormican here. In a June 2022 piece for Unherd, Anderberg makes the case that Swedish kids “have been spared” from the detrimental harms accrued elsewhere, and that “students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds did not disproportionately suffer.”

Cormican then goes on to say that Sweden’s “final death toll wasn’t a whole lot different than ours.” Non-locked down Sweden also happened to do better many other Western nations. In a late 2020 paper entitled Assessing mandatory stay- at- home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID- 19, for example, Eran Bendavid and colleagues from Stanford University compared countries that employed more restrictive measures versus those with less restrictive ones: 

“In the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the United States in early 2020” 

The net benefits of blunt force lockdowns do seem increasingly dubious when we see what happened in Sweden. Led by State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Sweden stood out from the crowd in choosing to avoid copying the sort of lockdown tactics employed by the Chinese Communist Party, yet far outperformed most European neighbours. Sweden ranked just 18th out of 26 European counties in 2020 in terms of excess deaths when there were adjustments made to “account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal mortality patterns”: 

“Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively. Twenty- one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden.” 

One can’t help but wonder what beneficial changes might have occurred in public discourse, and subsequently public policy throughout late 2020 and 2021, had the Great Barrington Declaration—a document that Bhattacharya says merely suggested a return to pre-Covid pandemic strategy rather than emulate the Chinese Communist dictatorship—had not been censored by Big Tech. It is a genuine travesty that more nuanced public debates about the costs and benefits of lockdowns were so stifled. 

But if censorship of lockdown critics wasn’t damning enough, Big Tech’s interference in scientific truth seeking was shown nowhere more clearly than in their policing of discourse around the possible origins of the very virus that had caused the pandemic in the first place. According to a Guardian piece from late May 2021 about Facebook:  

“Anyone posting claims that Covid-19 was “man-made or manufactured” could have seen their posts removed or restricted, and repeatedly sharing the allegation could have led to a ban from the site entirely.” 

Despite recent statements by high profile US government agencies apparently coming as a surprise to certain people, the hypothesis that the current pandemic began due to a laboratory leak in Wuhan, had never once been discredited as a highly plausible possibility. Not even close. It was never “debunked” and could never have been plausibly dismissed as a mere “conspiracy theory”. Never. Work from the likes of Alina Chan, Yuri Deigin, Nicholson Baker, Norman Doidge, Josh Rogin, and Jamie Metzl  demonstrated the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis long before Facebook lifted its despicably anti-scientific ban. 

That Facebook is at the centre of our global information commons, with billions of users, yet had the ability to impede truth seeking on this scale, is utterly insane. Just because Facebook might very well have had good intentions around stopping the spread of what they saw as supposed “misinformation”, and had been in consultation with the demonstrably fallible and marionetted WHO, does not mean that they had access to some sort of God given truth. Whether or not uncovering the pandemic’s origin was key to optimally addressing this current virus, from a public health perspective, is irrelevant. Not only do the millions who suffered deserve answers, we must minimise the risk of future pandemics. It is, of course, not as if this would have been the first lab leak in history. Far from it. 

In The Precipice, a brilliant book that was coincidentally published in early 2020, Toby Ord of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute lists a number of previous leaks of dangerous pathogens—including smallpox and anthrax—from laboratories of even the highest security (pg. 129-131). Moreover, Ord warns of engineered pandemics as having an estimated 1 in 30 chance of causing an existential catastrophe—the permanent destruction of humanity’s future potential—within the next century (pg. 167). To put this 1 in 30 in context, he gave climate change a 1 in 1000 chance of doing the same thing. Given how things unfolded in the recent pandemic involving a relatively benign pathogen compared to many others we know of—the gain-of-function modified H5N1 from 2011 which may kill an estimated 60% of those infected being a prime example—such dramatic odds really aren’t that surprising. What is surprising, however, is how little attention a risk such as lab engineered pathogens garner, even now, post-Wuhan plague, when compared to the relentless Climatism related tirades we are subjected to by what appear to be Machiavellian narcissists looking to signal cheap virtue, and by deeply troubled activists who glue themselves to surfaces and throw soup at priceless artwork. Alas, I digress.  

Unfortunately, it seems that many in the scientific community are well able to suppress their own truth seeking capacity without needing assistance from Big Tech. A quite worrying example of this bottom up self-censorship, is that some of the hesitation amongst scientists to discuss the lab leak hypothesis, may have been driven by a fear of being associated with racism. The aforementioned Alina Chan, a researcher connected to MIT and Harvard, was one of the earliest and loudest expert voices on the lab leak hypothesis. Chan is also a lead signatory on the May 2021 letter in the journal Science that called for serious re-investigations into the origin of this virus. According to her, there was resistance hindering the truth-seeking exploration around the origin of the pandemic that had nothing to do with scientific plausibility: “At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins” 

And so, even with the lab leak being a totally viable scientific possibility since the start of 2020, a fear of being seen as politically incorrect and being labelled as ‘racist’ may have driven self-censorship and hence stifled a serious scientific endeavour of enormous importance. This is indescribably absurd. In their book Viral, Alina Chan and co-author Matt Ridley write: 

“[I]f some research experiment or fieldwork project had gone awry, lessons must be learned, and laboratory practices reviewed. Searching for the origin of Covid-19 could not and cannot be some idle pastime for a few curious scientists and internet sleuths; it is a vital task for the safety of humankind and demands a rigorous, credible and evidence based investigation by experts worldwide.” (pg. 6) 

Furthermore, if impediments to truth seeking from Big Tech and self-censoring scientists were not bad enough, we have evidence that Western educational systems are also succumbing to distorting ideologically infestation. Richard Dawkins, in a recent piece for The Spectator, describes moves in New Zealand to culturally relativise science as it were simply one way “of Knowing” amongst many equally valid “Ways”:

“Jacinda Ardern’s government implemented a ludicrous policy…Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’…have equal standing with ‘western’ science…New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.”

A similar process of ideological infestation is taking place in major institutions of science dissemination. Here, we are seeing what looks to be an incursion of resentful Nietzschean ‘slave morality’, of weaponized identity worship and aspirational victimhood. The aforementioned Jonathan Rauch, for example, has written about the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour (NHB) turning toward politically correct activism and away from scientific truth seeking for the sake of preventing “harms”: 

“From the Church’s attempt to suppress heliocentrism to modern efforts by the federal government to stymie research on gun violence and the health benefits of cannabis, authorities have consistently cited social harms as grounds to suppress research, and they have consistently been wrong. NHB’s editors’ crystal ball will be no clearer. In practice, they, too, will merely interpose their own guesses and prejudices between researchers and the larger community of scholars, prejudging and distorting the search for truth.”

Another example of institutional suppression of science for politically correct reasons was described by Professor Anna Krylov and colleagues. In a paper entitled Royal Society of Chemistry Provides Guidelines for Censorship to its Editors, the authors quote from the new editorial guidelines which seem to give primacy, not to the furthering of knowledge in chemistry, but to the  avoidance of offensiveness: 

"The aim of this guidance is to help you to identify and prevent the publication of inappropriate content in our journals and books, and to encourage you to reflect on how inappropriate content can impact members of the community and readers around the world…Words, depictions and imagery have the potential to cause offence, therefore we need to consider how content might be perceived by others. There can be a disparity between the intention of an author and how their content might be received—it is the perception of the recipient that determines offence, regardless of author intent. This highlights the need for scrutiny and awareness at all stages from content creation to publication." 

Krylov and colleagues go on to list examples of censorship by scientific journals, not because of factual inaccuracies or fraudulence in the censored material, but because of things like “microaggression” or “political controversies”. They conclude with a call to abandon ideology and return to the spirit of science: 

“Censorship is antithetical to the scientific enterprise. The publishers of the Royal Society of Chemistry should focus on its mission, facilitating the communication of high-quality chemistry research, and stay true to the purpose of the Royal Charter—"the general advancement of chemical science and its application." Rather than turning Twitter censorship into policy, scientific publishing leadership worldwide should defend the core principle of science—the free exchange of ideas.” 

In what felt like an important moment from earlier in 2021—due to her excellence as a scientist and personal history in the archetypal extreme-leftist Soviet Union—the same Anna Krylov outlined this insidious creep of political agendas within the institutional endeavour of science. Krylov, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, wrote a powerful essay entitled The Peril of Politicizing Science. Presented in this jarring piece of writing was a disturbing exposé of the parallels between the Marxist regime within which she grew up—with its anti-scientific insistence on something as ridiculous as Lysenkoism—and the faltering Western academic environment within which she now finds herself. Krylov issued an urgent summary of our dire situation: 

“The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM...education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society—the free and uncensored exchange of ideas—and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.” 

As I have described before in reference to global catastrophic risk, I too share genuine concern about the “real, important problems of humankind.” One now very timely problem, given Putin’s February 24^th 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the Doomsday Clock subsequently being positioned the “closest it has ever been” to Midnight, is the risk of nuclear holocaust. Sudden global cooling caused by the blackened skies of nuclear war is a problem I wrote about 2 days prior to Russia’s gambit when, on February 22^nd 2022, I published Ukraine and the Other Side of Climate Change. Nuclear annihilation is a problem that has been around for 70 years or so, with awareness of climate impacts for about 40 or 50 of those. Yet, in recent decades, this threat has incomprehensibly received almost no attention when compared to apocalyptic Climatism. Michael Shellenberger recently highlighted the effects of this attention when arguing that the Media Must Take Responsibility For Greta Climate Panic: 

“Around one-third of people in the world think climate change will make humans extinct. That’s pseudoscience on the same level as believing that Earth is flat. People didn’t come to that belief on their own. It was drilled into their brains over 30 years…Climate change is real, but it’s not the end of the world. Emissions have dramatically declined in rich nations and globally over the last decade, thanks mainly to natural gas and nuclear. We need more of both” 

To further illustrate the lack of attention given to dark sky driven starvation, there are, apparently, more scientific publications on “dung beetles” than on studying how to feed the world in the event of nuclear weapon induced sudden global cooling. 

With that in mind, we must acknowledge that science is not entirely a force for good: everything has a shadow side. Alongside nuclear weapons, the other greatest threats to our future were also garnered through our deepening understanding of Nature’s workings. Engineered pathogens have already been mentioned above, but forms of AI and surveillance technology enabled permanent authoritarian lock-in even Orwell couldn’t have imagined, and which I have previously written about, deserve acknowledgement. I do have some sympathy for the sentiment offered by Churchill in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech: 

“The dark ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction.” 

We must also acknowledge, quite straightforwardly, that the scientific cat is out of the bag; the horse has bolted; the toothpaste is out of the tube; the genie is out of the bottle. Moreover, when we look at the lower probability yet high impact risks from natural sources such as supervolcanic eruptions or impacts from large space objects (both of which could have similar sky blackening effects to nuclear war), we face existential catastrophe on too many fronts to get complacent or handicap science through impeding the free exchange of ideas. 

If we are, therefore, not only to address these threats to the permanent destruction of humanity’s future potential, but to figure out how to cure currently incurable diseases, feed the world no matter what, and to improve the human condition writ large through an ever deeper understanding of how to live in better alignment with the evolutionary requirements that, in the age of ever advancing gene editing technology, I believe ought to continue to constrain our biology, we must avoid close-minded dogmatism by continuing to place the knowledge we do not have—our unknowledge—on a higher pedestal of importance than that which we have. The propositional unknowns, in other words, are more important to humanity than the knowns. This makes what I have termed Ignorance Navigation the anti-dogmatic name of the game. 

Epistemic humility—this placing of unknowledge on a higher pedestal of importance than knowledge—is not optional if we are to give our best shot at successfully engaging with the vast suite of immense problems that face us. Unfortunately, with the reality of human fallibility being ignored by politicized misrepresentations of science and many other dogmatic impediments to truth seeking, the likelihood of otherwise avoidable disasters occurring has been increasing. An Amnesty International report, to illustrate this point, highlights the damage done to democratized problem-solving around the pandemic due to increased censorship:

“Restricting freedom of expression must not become the new normal. Restrictions to the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds must be lifted as they are not only unnecessary and excessive, but also counterproductive in dealing with the pandemic. The solutions to the huge problems created by the pandemic are out there. Enabling the full enjoyment of freedom of expression is key in finding them.” 

This key to solution seeking applies to most, if not all of our biggest problems. Hence, it would seem that the maximization of decentralized collective intelligence is of central importance to securing humanity’s best possible future. A prime example of this from the recent pandemic involved a loose confederation of online sleuths who called themselves ‘Drastic’, an acronym for ‘Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team investigating COVID-19.’ Drastic, according to Chan and Ridley in Viral, “filled the gap” where “the scientific and intelligence establishments had, in 2020, displayed only a surprisingly shallow interest (at least publicly) in the origin of the pandemic.” (pg. 26) In relation to censorship, Chan and Ridley go on to highlight the role of Big Tech in the discussion of pandemic origins:

“Drastic had its beginnings on Twitter, one of the few places that did not censor discussion of the virus origin throughout the first year of the pandemic. Facebook flagged as “false information” much of the work of these sleuths, even when it proved to be true information, while Reddit simply deleted it.” (pg. 28) 

We might also do well, of course, to never forget that the first few days of 2020 saw the Chinese Communist Party suppression of Wuhan doctors and scientists, including Dr Li Wenliang, after they tried to share information on the new plague spreading throughout their city. “A healthy society,” said the late Dr Li on his deathbed, “should not have only one kind of voice.” 

Conclusion

At a lecture delivered in Harvard in 1957, the haunted midwife of the Nuclear Bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, stated that "there is a great deal to know, and we don't know very much of it." We may do well to recognize that this remark is no less timely today. After all, “while differing widely in the various little bits we know,” as Sir Popper once put it, “in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.” (pg. 38) While Oppenheimer and Popper offered their respective calls to epistemic humility within the last century, the logical implications of their sentiment suggests something that was said to be engraved above the entrance to the Temple of Delphi thousands of years prior. An aforementioned maxim which suggested that rigid certainty about anything other than uncertainty, paradoxically enough, summons disaster. 

And so, during times of such dangerous threats to the social enterprise of studying Nature—be it widespread misunderstanding of our station, authoritarian censorship and its associated ad hominem attacks on heretics, or the grossly invasive politicisation of truth seeking—perhaps it could be in refusing to forget our unifying infinity of ignorance that we might best resist the dogmatic impediments to scientifically navigating the mysteries we face from inside the jar. Or, perhaps we will forget the Ultimate Truths on the label might well lie forever beyond our reach and, instead, let our surety bring ruin. 

Ciarán O'Regan is an Irish physical culturalist and curious generalist. His Substack is Quarrelsome Life, his Twitter is @quarrelsomelife, and he co-hosts the Learning to Die Podcast with Dr Ian Dunican.