Digging out the truth

One aspect of my worldview where I have been fairly constant is my unmitigated belief in the philosophical materialism: the idea that things are what they are regardless of how we interpret them, which means that, particularly for the physical world, there are many situations where it is possible to know the truth, even if we do not know (or do not know yet) why or how the situation came to be. For instance, a vase is either whole, broken or glued back together and there should be little discussion as to in which condition it is. Of course, if the gluing is properly done (and the damage is limited) it is entirely possible that it seems whole even if it is not.

However, this approach is much less robust when we speak of the relations between two circumstances: If we find the vase on the floor in shards we could think that it fell from the coffee table, but it is also possible that it was already standing on the floor and someone just toppled it over. It is also possible that it was broken somewhere else and the shards brought over to the place where you found them. The fact that we might not be able to know what happens does not mean that all the three things happened, not even from a Bayesian point of view. It is indisputable that one of them took place and the others could have happened but did not, we just do not know which.

Photo: Carsten ten Brink

Everyday situations in real life can become way more complex than this one, so that even determining the sequence of events is difficult, let alone their causal relations if any. If a smoker gets diagnosed of lung cancer, is it because they smoked? Or was it in their genes and would have happened even if they had not smoked? Perhaps it was related to some asbestos that they inhaled some decades ago, or the lack of exercise, or something they regularly eat, or even several factors acting together. But even if the causes for some results are very difficult to identify, there are some results than others and even some that are not desirable at all, so when faced with a decision we need to contemplate the possible outcomes and decide our actions based on the (limited) evidence available, combined with past experiences and beliefs.

But getting used to constantly mixing the information that is at hand with the idea that we have formed ourselves is a double-edged sword. After a few times of taking an unjustified assumption as the basis for a decision, it is just too easy to start believing that we have formed this idea out of evidence and start to treat it as such. For instance, if we see the trash can at a bus stop toppled over, our memory can fly back to a different time (and maybe even a different place) when we witnessed how an immigrant boy doing the same. We know that the trash can is toppled now, and we know that it was that boy who toppled the other one back in the day. Those are two facts, but linking together to assume (or suspect) that it was an immigrant boy (in all likelihood not the same one, who might already be old enough to be himself father of a boy) is just a guess. Of course I do not mean that it is impossible; if the even happens frequently enough the assumption might be justified, but even if it is justified it is still a guess.

I came to think about this combination of facts and beliefs today because yesterday Karen and I watched a documentary called "Downfall" about the outrageous way Boeing handled the catastrophic accidents of two 737 Max airplanes in 2019 and, surprisingly, what impressed me the most was the indefatigable conviction of the journalists that had the intuition of foul play and criminal greed, and kept investigating and knocking on doors until they found the truth: that Boeing had installed a new system in their airplanes, that the design of this system was flawed and caused the accidents, and that the company had tried to cover it to avoid their responsibility. And in this time and age of misleading information and false accusations it was refreshing to see that there are still journalists with a true interest in digging out the truth, not with the intention to make money blackmailing anyone, but with the firm belief that the truth is owed to the citizens, that they cannot govern themselves through hearsay and doctrine.

On the other end of the spectrum we see all these media who are owned by the big hedge funds and obediently pay lip service to the matters that their masters dictate. Particularly in the case of the COVID vaccines and the rising movement of skeptics that are not convinced about their merit, it is sad that demonstrations of tens of thousands of people get dismissed with a single line as a foot note; that the words of well-respected doctors and scientists are ignored or even deleted just because they do not fit within the official narrative, that the paradoxical situations caused by contradictory regulations are not pointed out and are instead praised as examples of good organization.

My only hope is that we will be able to hold the fort long enough that the pandemic will just extinguish itself as the seasonal flu does every year. The UK is already dropping most of the measures and so will France by March 15th. Let us see if luck gives us the chance to get back our cool head, analyze the data and figure out the truth about the virus without the sense of panic that has driven us in the last two years. Have a nice week.