Saturday, August 21, 2021

Truth should be our goal, not the label we put on our assumptions

Further to my point that with Covid-19 we still don't know what is going on.  Our challenge is not that we don't know but that our government and leashed "experts" declare with great confidence that which they cannot in truth yet know.  

From The wages of conventional wisdom: Is truth our goal or the label we put on our assumptions? by Razib Khan.

I wish I had a more positive spin on this. Much of what you see pronounced with certainty about COVID-19 is likely wrong. SARS-Cov-2 is a new virus, and COVID-19 is a new disease. We don’t have all the details. The experts have a great deal of experience with pathogens and pandemics in general, but there remain limitations to their accrued wisdom in novel situations like this. As a consumer of news and analysis, you have to be personally critical-rational. The consequences of your conclusions, of your actions, are going to impact you, as well as society. Buying fully into the consensus du jour may have more than abstract consequences. Remember washing produce with baking soda? Or the conventional wisdom that droplets, not aerosols were the major vector? No one was lying. But experts were not nearly as certain about the truth as they signaled to the public.

We need to act in the pandemic. But we do not need to pretend that we are certain about all our actions, or that we know the whole truth. Science is a process of incremental convergence upon the truth over time. It’s not tablets of divine revelation to be disseminated to the masses. Humility, not hubris, is essential in this situation. Truth should be our goal, not the label we put on our assumptions.

 

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