Truth in the Time of COVID

In my post COVID & Personal Sovereignty I described a collective sensemaking process taking place on my Facebook feed. It’s not going particularly well, as evidenced by an exasperated post from one of my friends:

Sigh… I’m not sure what to make of this discussion. It is certainly depressing. I’m assuming that all of you are smart and paying attention to what’s going on, but well, nearly everything I read here seems to suggest many (most) of you are ending up with the wrong conclusions. Before I go any farther, you ought to know I have a PhD, from [Ivy League caliber university] no less... and yet I generally struggle mightily to read, understand, and appreciate academic papers — even in my own areas of expertise. And I consider myself a left-wing hack. So it might not come as a surprise to you that it is truly mind boggling to me that those with, well no scientific training keep trying to reference the science as justification for their just otherwise untenable positions.

I’ve spent considerable time already pointing out (for other posts) how Rafe’s “beliefs” are not consistent with the “data”… and I loathe to keep going because, well, it seems to have no effect on what he posts.

I must admit to my own exasperation as well, since it is clear to me that both of us (and by extension many other conversants) are truly earnest in our search for the truth about COVID and its implications for our lives, and we yet struggle to come to what Seth Godin calls shared objective reality.

I’ll suggest that that there are two categories of reasons for our failure:

1. The science of COVID is inherently complex, and our rational/conscious brains are barely fit for the complicated. There are inherent limits to the individual human mind and COVID seems to be beyond any one person’s ability to comprehend the total picture.
2. There is a global war on sensemaking taking place which we are normally only vaguely aware of, and the implications are profound (and much bigger in scope than “simply” understanding COVID). When people talk about the “politics of COVID” (or politics of science) this is fundamentally what they are referring to.

If true, there is some good news and bad news about this conundrum. The good news is that while individual human minds may be incapable of complex thinking, collectives of human minds are capable. This is why the scientific process is so powerful and why, given enough time and focus, a scientific community eventually is able to do complex things like crack the atom.

The bad news is that the scientific process itself has been under seige in the last century or so, and during the war on sensemaking in particular. The net effect is that Science — by which I mean the process of science as it’s practiced today amongst the community of scientists alive today — is not a collective sensemaking process but rather a rivalrous marketplace in which research dollars and peer-reviewed prestige are co-dependent currencies, locking us into a race to the bottom of the truth stack.

To drive home the double-whammy of complexity and sensemaking, consider this. John Ioannidis is a well-respected physician-scientist most famous for the meta-analysis claiming that “most published research findings are false”. Earlier this year a paper he co-authored on COVID epidemiology that showed that the incidence of undiagnosed coronavirus was two orders of magnitude greater than anyone has previously believed. If true, this would have profound implications for diagnosis, treatment, prevention, policy and nearly everything the world is doing to deal with COVID. Shortly after publication, the paper was called into question by another high-powered scientist who found a technical error in the paper. In a healthy scientific process, the discovery of the error would lead to the scientific community as a whole rallying to either confirm or falsify the orders-of-magnitude claim of the original paper, since the implications were so profound. But what actually happened was that everyone seemed to dismiss and ignore the claim entirely, and the reputations of the original paper’s authors was impuned. If the goal is truth seeking or collective sensemaking, the Science failed miserably on this count. And if the goal was saving human lives and the wellbeing of humanity, the same could easily be said.

Healthy Collective Sensemaking

Science wasn’t always broken, nor was the public dialectic, which was the main way of collective sensemaking in society until recently. But the interent seems to have broken both, and we will need to find new ways that work in the presence Big Tech, perverse economic incentives, institutional/regulatory capture and the war on sensemaking. I’ll leave you with this half hour video which outlines both the gravity of the situation and suggests possible ways forward. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this in the comments.