Among the many challenges of the past thirteen months has been the everyday-epistemological challenge of staying grounded and vigilant in an environment of ever-polarizing opinion. Recent conversations with two valued friends reveal the danger of the post-COVID world bifurcating absolutely into sheep and denialists. I hasten to insist that these are not the only two options.
I am someone who will not even take a pain killer except in the most extreme of circumstances. I am willing to accept science while reserving the right to limit my exposure to scientific error. Science has given me a few new sets of front teeth over the years, no small matter in my case, and yet I shudder to think what toxins I may have ingested this way (and may yet ingest again). I am an enthusiastic but late adopter of technology in something like Mumford's mode, seeking to enhance life through machine use and to avoid outsourcing life to machines. I don't like to change, but in a pinch I am often surprised at just how adaptable I can be. I think this is a fine way to live. The pandemic is, nevertheless, something of a challenge to this outlook. Like a really bad headache or a baseball to the chops, the pandemic forces the issue. It also forces us to consider how our decisions affect others in a way that literal aches and pains, being perhaps the exceptional "individual" problems, do not.
Somewhere between an "abundance of caution" and "throwing caution to the wind," I would posit a workable middle-ground location, something like a "minimum of caution," meaning: take all the precautions that don't cost you anything; prioritize the basics. I speak now somewhat in the language of N.N. Taleb, who, with a much greater technical and practical arsenal at his disposal, handles these sorts of epistemological questions brilliantly and in precisely the way I, albeit supremely lacking in such technical and practical equipage, have often tended to think about them, especially in the realms of ingestion and vaccination. I confess that my inner "negative empiricist" tends to rather selectively conjure himself in matters of ingestion and vaccination. I am also guilty of focusing too exclusively on downsides and of underrating upsides, as Kahneman and colleagues have shown is endemic to our "fast" brain. (I accept this science!) And I know much, much less than any committed consumer of news likely does about the granular details of vaccine ingredients and reactions. Taleb, Kahneman, and others have curated for lay consumption the quite troublesome phenomenon of more information leading to worse decision-making. I don't know that the vaccination question truly falls into this category, but I am very comfortable applying the "minimum of caution" heuristic to it, because that is the heuristic I apply most everywhere else. So, given my membership in the new untouchable subcaste of "workers who can't work from home," I decided to get vaccinated without thinking too hard (okay, without thinking at all) about ingredients, reactions, science, or politics.
There is a third branch of the barbell which Taleb, bless him, promises to take up but never really does (or not to my satisfaction), this being ethics and morals. With COVID we have a perfect irritant for this epistemological wound: the various corrective measures, from the least to the most intrusive, are really more about protecting others than about protecting ourselves. My "minimum of caution" works well for decisions which affect only me, but it is not such a simple proposition here.
Masking and distancing seem to me like archetypal barbell propositions: most of the benefit can be had this way without costing us much. The more onerous, top-down measures further limiting what masked, distanced people are allowed to do are, on the other hand, very costly, and more importantly, they are differently and inequitably costly. Some curious rhetoric has come out of this sagging barbell. Late last summer I heard a scientist-commentator claim, in response to the proposal that restictions be eased for low-risk groups on grounds of limiting economic damage, that the science on risk factors was not conclusive enough to permit such a policy. Perhaps so, but then much policy had already been made based on this fairly crude science. During the period where grocery stores blocked off the early morning for high-risk groups to shop, I never heard anyone waiting in line at Whole Foods invoke the ultimate uncertainty of science so that they could get in faster; and yet this tack was enthusiastically taken by a well-established scientist in order to avoid litigating a bedrock ethical/worldview conflict. This I find frustrating.
I draw a very different conclusion from uncertainty: if all science is to some degree uncertain, then moral urgency is always already part of how we use science, and this is where the real action is. In the moral framework I am calling a "minimum of caution," we do not treat science as certain until we are forced by circumstances to do so. When we are forced to confront a life-threatening injury or to bring a serial rape suspect to trial, we behave as if we are certain of the science even if in reality we know we cannot be; and then, implicitly at least, we consent to live with the possibility of being wrong. The notion of degrees of certainty, of whether we are 50%, 90%, or 99.99% confident in a given piece of science, is, I want to argue, quite easily and quite often rendered irrelevant by extenuating circumstances, and this more often than we would like to think. Put another way, for each of these percentages there is a countervailing degree of moral urgency which can dictate quick and dirty adjustments, adjustments which are quite unscientific but not at all irrational. If this were not the case, all science would continually be moving halfway toward usability without ever arriving. Colloquially speaking, in the end we are either "in" on some given piece of science or we are "out" on it. In deed if not in word, the percentages are always either zero or one hundred. Because of ultimate uncertainty, it is safer for the ego to be "out" on it all! Especially if, like Taleb, your personal success heuristic ("not being a sucker") is sensitive to the small-minded judgments of others1. But it is not possible to get out of the game entirely. The pandemic has enabled us to be certain at least of that.
For the aforementioned scientist-commentator, then, I am left to think that the moral urgency of long lines at Whole Foods was low, while that of general containment of the virus was extremely high. The preliminary and crude understanding of risk factors was good enough for one and not for the other. She was not going to be certain of her results unless forced to (or, more to the point, allowed to) by circumstance. I accept this reasoning. But this is not the reasoning that came out of her mouth. It is not the reasoning that laypeople like me, who already were ignoring the news even before we read Taleb's diatribes against following the news too closely, were accosted with that day upon daring to come up for epistemological air. Only sheep and dinosaurs can survive on such meager rations.
There are a few reasons why I have become fixated on this single instance. One is that, admittedly, skepticism comes easily when you've been cut off at the knees. Another is that I previously associated the uncertainty card only with the rightest of climate deniers and the leftest of social constructivists. In those cases too, litigation of the science is more interesting intellectually than it is morally necessary for laypeople. Pollution and waste were already killing us a thousand other ways (even my old roommate the climate denier did not deny this); similarly, perfect knowledge of the genetic-social nexus is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to how we interact with others. Even where the science itself is pursued with perfect disinterest, it might as well still be called ideological science. The wider world makes it so.
One area where we need science most is when the consequences of our actions are otherwise hidden from us. Some such things are perfectly transparent though, and others can be made transparent rather easily, without formal scientific intervention. I suspect it is the things we have learned this way that have always shaped how we use science more so than anyone's notion of scientific certainty. If we can stay open, honest, and yes, just slightly skeptical, this is precisely as it should be.
1. Taleb is best read for general thrust and not for small details. He himself has noticed as much, and he's right. That said, I think the construction of the "sucker" heuristic has a transparent epistemological flaw which is pragmatically significant, even in Los Angeles. The "sucker" heuristic may work brilliantly in the realm of global trading, but it does not work well at all in, say, a 5-on-5 basketball game. The defender who tries the hardest and looks the worst is often the best defender on one team, who is customarily tasked with guarding the best scorer on the other team. On the professional level, the try-hards more often get "posterized" by spectacular dunkers while the deadbeats simply get out of the way and start jogging up court. The advent of Analytics has somewhat exonerated the "suckers" here, at least in the eyes of their employers; fans of course are another matter, and fans ultimately are very important to revenue. At the recreational level, since I am often the tallest, I have been the try-hard "sucker" many times. I also have observed and participated in many games amongst young men for whom "not being a sucker" was almost as important as winning, and a few where it was transparently much more important than winning. This is how I learned what it feels like to "win" while also being a "sucker." It is not a good feeling! Different from losing, but just as bad. There is nothing absolutely wrong with any of this vis-a-vis mere recreation, but needless to say it is a rather extreme departure from the archetype "basketball." It is also, I would contend, a strong indication of trauma given the near-universality of competitive play among men and the lengths to which men typically go to win even in the recreational realm.
I am reasoning by induction here, which a true negative empiricist wouldn't allow. Perhaps I should reformulate: basketball is a single counterexample which disproves any conceit that "not being a sucker" has universal applicability to zero-sum games. (At least if you like to win. Even in Minneapolis.)
