What Is Science?

Matt Ridley asks what the coronavirus has taught us about science? It is a good question, considering that a certain senile presidential candidate is telling us to trust the science.

Then again, the basics about the question have been known for quite some time now. Around two and a half centuries ago, David Hume, the leading philosopher of the British enlightenment, a towering figure in philosophical empiricism, remarked that science can tell us about what is. It cannot tell us about should. It should not be confused with ethics. Science cannot tell us what we should or should not do.

And then, in the mid-twentieth century one Ludwig Wittgenstein, certainly one of the greatest philosophers, explained that scientific fact does not tell the future. To say that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow is a hypothesis. It will be proved or disproved tomorrow morning. If reality validates your hypothesis, it becomes a fact. Before the event in question, it is not a fact.

So much for the idiots who have been trotting out computer models explaining what must happen to the climate a decade from now. Predictions about the future of the climate may be hypotheses, if we are feeling generous. Otherwise they are prophecies, uttered by idiot prophetesses like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Among those who have more recently opined about the philosophy of science, I recommend late Oxford biology professor and Nobel laureate, Peter Medawar. His books on the subject are, The Art of the Soluble and Pluto’s Cave. 

Allow Ridley his say. Beginning with the currently fashionable notion that mathematical models can produce scientific facts about the future:

Some scientists fall so in love with their guesses that they fail to test them against evidence. They just compute the consequences and stop there. Mathematical models are elaborate, formal guesses, and there has been a disturbing tendency in recent years to describe their output with words like data, result or outcome. They are nothing of the sort.

Consider the notion that we should fight the virus with lockdowns. The conclusion was based on a model developed in London. As it happened, the Swedes tested the model, and discovered that it was flawed:

An epidemiological model developed last March at Imperial College London was treated by politicians as hard evidence that without lockdowns, the pandemic could kill 2.2 million Americans, 510,000 Britons and 96,000 Swedes. The Swedes tested the model against the real world and found it wanting: They decided to forgo a lockdown, and fewer than 6,000 have died there.

Who among us was promoting lockdowns? Why, none other than Dr. Fauci. As you know the last thing he will ever admit is that he was wrong. After all, as we now know, Dr. Fauci was a great fan of Hillary Clinton-- ought that not to cause us to question his judgment?

On 6-12-2012, Fauci wrote this to Hillary's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, regarding a speech:

Wow. Very rarely does a speech bring me to tears but this one did. Talk about telling it like it is. This one was a bases loaded home run. Please tell the Secretary that I love her more than ever.

I consider that to be unworthy of a man of science. And I also consider it a sign of seriously biased judgment.

Compare Fauci with his Swedish equivalent:

Anthony Fauci, the chief scientific adviser in the U.S., was adamant in the spring that a lockdown was necessary and continues to defend the policy. His equivalent in Sweden, Anders Tegnell, by contrast, had insisted that his country would not impose a formal lockdown and would keep borders, schools, restaurants and fitness centers open while encouraging voluntary social distancing. At first, Dr. Tegnell’s experiment looked foolish as Sweden’s case load increased. Now, with cases low and the Swedish economy in much better health than other countries, he looks wise. Both are good scientists looking at similar evidence, but they came to different conclusions.

Of course, science is conducted by human beings. And human beings can be biased. They can trot out what they consider to be science in order to promote a political agenda-- or to pretend to be serious thinkers.

In science, we also find evidence of confirmation bias. Psychologists have demonstrated that we tend to embrace the facts that prove us right while we ignore the facts that would disprove our hypotheses.

For the record, this simple observation severely damages the Freudian project-- since Freud, when he was pretending to do empirical science, happily embraced, as proving his interpretations, any thought or fantasy that his patient stated.

If the patient has been induced, as a function of confirmation bias, to search his memory bank for something that confirmed Freud’s interpretation, it should not count as a fact. Or as a proof.

This implies that there are facts and that there are facts. Considering how much our political nitwits are mewling about facts, we ought to recognize that one fact may contradict another. We might believe that Col. Mustard killed Mr. Boddy because his fingerprints are on the murder weapon-- the candlestick, of course. The presence of said prints is surely a fact. And yet, if you can establish that at the time of the murder Col. Mustard was incarcerated in the local jail-- that fact definitively discredits the first hypothesis.

Ridley explains confirmation bias thusly:

A fourth mistake is to gather data that are compatible with your guess but to ignore data that contest it. This is known as confirmation bias. You should test the proposition that all swans are white by looking for black ones, not by finding more white ones. Yet scientists “believe” in their guesses, so they often accumulate evidence compatible with them but discount as aberrations evidence that would falsify them—saying, for example, that black swans in Australia don’t count.

Of course, Ridley concludes, science today has been politicized:

The health of science depends on tolerating, even encouraging, at least some disagreement. In practice, science is prevented from turning into religion not by asking scientists to challenge their own theories but by getting them to challenge each other, sometimes with gusto. Where science becomes political, as in climate change and Covid-19, this diversity of opinion is sometimes extinguished in the pursuit of a consensus to present to a politician or a press conference, and to deny the oxygen of publicity to cranks. This year has driven home as never before the message that there is no such thing as “the science”; there are different scientific views on how to suppress the virus.