Once you have shattered that which is delicate, you can't repair, you can only regenerate

The Swan Song of Dr Collins by Polimath sparks a thought.  The subheading is A shining star of scientific exceptionalism is spending the last stretch of his career trying to get people to trust science again.

To say that Francis Collins is a fallen angel is to grant too much influence and weight to Opinions on the Internet.

Dr Collins is the quintessential institutionalist scientist. A pioneer in the field of genetics, he was the director of the Human Genome Project - the most important public health advance since the eradication of smallpox. He was appointed director of the National Institute of Health (NIH) by President Obama and served there for 12 years, overseeing this core public health institution throughout the Covid pandemic. He retired at the end of 2021, concluding an astonishing career of scientific achievement and public health administration.

So why is one of the most important figures of institutional science spending his retirement years doing townhalls and discussion events on the breakdown of institutional trust?

There have already been a lot of pixels spilled on this event hosted by Braver Angels (a “cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the political divide”) in which Dr Collins talks with Wilk Wilkinson and discusses the need to rebuild our institutions.

How Is He Going To Fix It?

I watched this event because I wanted to understand the full context of Dr Collins comments and opinions; I think I got that. Dr Collins has rightly recognized that there is a huge problem with institutional trust, stemming from the events of and responses to Covid. He wants to repair this loss of trust and this is part of his attempt to do so.

The repair of institutional trust is a fascinating and awful problem, largely because we don’t know how to do it. My goal here is to examine how Dr Collins is trying to do it, what his solutions are, and to turn the spotlight towards my own biases and ask myself what I want him to do.

Intricate and delicate things, once broken, are difficult to repair.  If it can be done at all.  The more intricate and delicate, the more unlikely a "repair" can be effected at all.  All that can be done is to regenerate and replace that which was destroyed.  

My suspicion is that the effects of derivative Marxism (critical theory, postmodernism, critical race thory, social justice theory, intersectionality theory, DEI, ESG, etc.) have destroyed aspects of our delicately constructed Classical Liberal/Scientific Method world which cannot be repaired.  For example, Trust in big institutions which have demonstrably failed the public.  Rebuild and regenerate - possibly.  Repair, perhaps not possible.

I want to tie in two other ideas.

There are concerns being expressed that we are perhaps bumping up against two different limits.  One is a problem solving limit.  Have we solved all the easy problems and are future improvements in life processes going to be small increments at much greater costs than we have been accustomed to?  

Theoretically that is possible.  Yesterday's post, Interesting officer gun use data is an example.  Salt Lake City Police Department seem to be down to 2 accidental discharges and 40 unavoidable gun discharges a year by a force of 565 officers.  That is an astonishing low rate.  Can it be reduced lower?  Sure.  Cheaply and easily?  Probably not.  The easy improvements have already been made.

In economics there is also concern in some circles about another example of declining returns.  Are we innovating at a slower or lower rate than we did in the past?  This is a trickier issue to measure and the argument is not resolved, but it is not a baseless concern.  Falling returns on innovation seem to be a real possibility, at least under some conditions.

There is a second limit alluded to in Stabilizing forces push people back toward the path they would have been on absent the intervention.  The post is about research suggesting the complex social structures are self-stabilizing in the face of deliberate interventions.  To a degree that the interventions are mere flecks.  I argued:

I would put it this way:  There are systems so complex, interdependent, chaotic, and loosely coupled in unpredictable ways that they are too delicate to be discovered by the heavy hand of gold standard studies.  The fault is not in the method of study but in the delicacy of that being studied.  Perhaps there is a form of Heisenberg Uncertainty at play.

Possibly there are useful ways of studying system effects this diaphanous in a way which is convincing to all participants.  I don't think that we are there yet.

In the meantime, it seems to me, that this is where wisdom comes in.  There are things we know and there are things we choose to believe.  In between are potentially useful supposition which are true under particular conditions for discreet periods of time and to limited extent.  

We want certainty but we can make progress with wisdom but only when there is shared trust in whatever the source of wisdom might be (an individual, a tradition, a culture, a religion, a book, etc.)

There are five concepts floating around in these items.

Declining rates of return on efforts of improvement.

Robust systems resistant to change and intervention.

Intricate things are difficult to repair, sometimes they have to be regnerated.

Trust, once lost, is not readily regained.

Trust is intimately entangled with religion, culture, social norms, and traditions

All of which seem to me to reinforce the conclusion which I have been forming over the past decade or so.  Progress, technological and social, is great and desirable.  That potential progress enabled by novel technology and relaxed social norms is, simultaneously, constrained by fences of religion, culture, social norms, and traditions as in Chesterton's Fence.  

We have been throwing out the cultural and social norms which were the fences for two or three decades now.  Academia in particular, has been eagerly burning every fence - religion, culture, social norms, traditions, etc. - as fast as they have been able.

And we are only now really beginning to appreciate just how valuable those norms, those fences were all along.  We might not have understood why they stood there on the path, but they were there for good reasons.

The upper class, perhaps as part of the proposed phenomenon of luxury beliefs, have been among the most vocal in championing the discarding of norms and traditions but, as pointed out by Charles Murray, they have also been the ones most doggedly adherent to those norms.  And who has suffered the most in recent decades and who gained?  Those who departed from religion, culture, social norms, traditions, etc. have lost out on most socioeconomic metrics while those who remained adherent have held their own of gained on those metrics. 

The shared religion, culture, social norms, traditions have, I strongly suspect, been an evolved bulwark of ancient lineage and refinement which have supported us in creating Trust and in establishing a very effective and efficient functional epistemic ecosystem. An ecosystem not easily or effectively substituted by those in blind pursuit of progress and outright hostility to those old structures.

This is not a call to be reactionary.  What is old is not necessarily wise.  But we should also recognize that tossing that which is old simply because it does not fit with an ephemeral and faddish sense of progress is almost certainly foolish.

Neil Postman was beginning to get a some of these ideas, especially in his Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.

For Collins and those like him, there is no repairing of the delicate fabric of Trust which has already been sundered.  Which they, by their choices, actions, and behaviors shredded.  As the Roman adage (an old, old fence) had it, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.  Once you have demonstrated that you cannot be trusted, you can never really ever be fully trusted again.  That delicate web has been torn and cannot be repaired.  

Trying to win back trust is likely a fool's game.

What you can do is begin to more clearly be seen to respect all those Chesterton fences and to be stalwart in adherence to the refined wisdom of the ages as encoded in religion, culture, social norms, and traditions.  Make progress, but do so wisely and respectfully.