Yet another Covid Take
from a philosopher-scientist
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Many scientists are celebrating a win for science literacy today, for good reason, but science isn’t the only knowledge well-spring that guides solutions to problems, including the current pandemic.
We have many sources from which to draw knowledge, but there’s been a steady push towards science-based policies - and of course, steady push-back. Being a scientist myself, I like this idea, but I know that most of us White Coat Nerds have been living in a single, tiny (albeit deep) bubble of knowledge. Most of my day-to-day living (eating, drinking, working, playing, loving, fighting) and the major decisions in my life (choosing a career, getting married, buying a house, raising my daughter, being a friend) aren’t solely informed by science. So, why is it that we’re supposed to depend solely on science to tell us how to live now? It’s smart to say “I believe/trust/follow the science” to cure/treat/prevent the disease, but science isn’t the only source we go to for information on how to live.
In fact, most humans rely on emotions, rarely considering science in daily decisions. That’s probably why it’s so hard for people to choke down dry, prescriptive, science-based rules about how they’re supposed to limit exposure to COVID-19...
That and the blatant hypocrisy, irrational, inconsistent guidelines, and an extremely polarized hijacking of science and personal liberties for political gain. But go ahead. Tell me how the policies and guidelines surrounding COVID have all about the science.
NUMB3RS
The COVID-19 numbers have been pretty clear cut. We can argue here and there about strains, populations, and long-term effects, but the important parts are the infectiousness and mortality of the virus. Sure, some places are over-counting and some are under-counting, but if we look somewhere in the middle, we’ve found the truth.
We know (objectively) that ___%* of people will die from the sequelae of an acute COVID infection. That means that ___ people would die if EVERYONE got it before we could get vaccines rolling. We can even say in people ___ years old or with ___ condition, ___ will die and ___ will suffer from long-term effects.
We can argue about quarantine, school shutdowns, and lockdowns, but most of the data that have supposedly informed policy aren’t optimal. Most of the social/epidemiological studies involve retrospective analysis or subjective measures like QALYs. This kind of science isn’t our favorite brand. I mean, we’ll take it, but scientists like prospective, randomized, multi-source, studies with objectively measurable end-points. We rank, order, model, and extrapolate evidence accordingly, and we can estimate how many people ___ action will kill. We can predict what ___ policy might do to disease burden, but hold up! What is the overall goal with all of these numbers and predictions?
I think I speak for scientists and policy-makers when I say the goal is to minimize suffering brought on by COVID-19.
Unfortunately, science doesn’t answer how much suffering comes from each death, how much money we should spend on saving how many people, who should get assistance from the government, who should get the vaccines first, which workers in society should have to work, or how much risk we should expect our teachers/grocery store clerks/nurses/etc to assume.
As a society, we tolerate a certain level mortality and ambiguity from infectious diseases (flu, HIV, staph, pneumonia, food-borne diseases, etc) before government agencies intervene in public and private activities. But where is that line? At what point do ___ deaths become a crisis? Here we have to address a sorites (heap) paradox. How many grains of sand make a heap? How many COVID deaths call for the suspension of which liberties? How strong should our lock-downs be? How much economic burden (aka debt to China) should our country bear from lockdowns? How much does that burden impact the existential risk to humanity? How much do future generations matter? Is everything quantifiable?
Gahh! It’s fuckin’ complicated.
So, you won’t find this scientist ridin’ around with an “I trust in science” bumper sticker. Science and numbers matter, but ultimately we’re relying on many more sources of input to decide how to live during COVID-19.
LEADERSHIP, VALUES, & ACTION
As a republic, our leaders make decisions for us. Not many of them are scientists, but I hear a lot of talk about science from politicians lately. Our leaders need to be able to apply a host of knowledge from many sources to make decisions. This is why we seek leaders based on their values and actions, not the color of their skin, their age, party allegiance, or even their experience as politicians**.
A thought experiment
Early in 2020, I posed a thought experiment to my scientist (and non-scientist) friends: Imagine you’re Superman. You see 100 people of all ages and backgrounds trapped in a room that is about to be infected with COVID, but you only have time to save 50, who would you help first?
Some said we should get the kids out first. Some said we should save the elderly. Some said the sick/high-risk are most vulnerable. Most refused to answer on account that they shouldn’t have to choose who lives or dies. “No one should have to die!” One such friend likened my hypothetical question to Sophie’s Choice.
This is a classic bleeding-heart liberal sentiment - and I feel it. We want to help everyone. However, if Superman whined about saving everyone, everyone would get infected. We have to do what we can to help the most people.
This is a Trolley Problem variant. Thankfully in this instance, Superman has data to use to minimize mortality. Age and comorbidity make the highest risk, but MANY of my scientist friends couldn’t overcome their personal biases. “Get the kids out first” is not a choice based on science and minimizing mortality. It’s always amazing to see that people, even those who profess to “follow the science” are almost uniformly subject to heuristics.
The reality of this pandemic is nowhere near as simple as my Superman setup. Entire states and industries might be collapsing under international/national lockdowns. Policies and decisions aren’t being made just on the science. The key difference between politicians and scientists is that the scientific method itself is a vehicle for scientists to find mistakes and course-correct. Politicians have no such vehicle.
Sadly, we’re dealing with xenophobia, censorship, personal liability for health, global economic instability, exacerbation of income inequality, childhood education/abuse, racial/marginalized group disparities, diminished quality of life, and much more outside the realm of hard science.
Back in the spring, scientists and politicians were pressed to think about solutions and many drew a false dichotomy:
Disagreeing with lockdown policies equates to caring more about money than human beings.
You’re a grandma killer if you won’t let your small business die. This went over real well. It seemed the righteous scientists are blue, and the grandma killers are red. Even states wore their political badges of honor in their policies. Lockdown policies are still being debated, but one thing is for sure: Many people on the blue and red teams died.
If we have a goal of applying science and making it more accessible, maybe we shouldn’t alienate people on the other end of the political spectrum, who are already suspicious of white coats and undervalue science? Think “deplorable” ca. 2016. That didn’t work out so well.
This is why leaders must make hard choices that include MANY facets of human life, not just science. If you want to have a voice in what happens, you have a responsibility to make well-reasoned choices that take into account more than just science.
If you just wanna help people by doing great science or practicing medicine, please do that, but leave social policies to people who are willing to think broadly.
PHILOSOPHY VS. SCIENCE
Scientists are trained in experimental design, calculation, execution, and interpretation. They are not typically experts in other arenas.
Why?
Well, honestly, they’re super busy. The university systems need slav—cheap labor to perform very complex tasks. It takes a lot of time to learn the principles, quirks, holes, and loose-ends of an ultra-niche subject and then troubleshoot complicated machines, calculations, procedures, and buffers to conduct an experiment. Forget about even replicating, writing or disseminating information. That’s like a whole other job. So, it doesn’t serve the university busine—system to produce a well-rounded scientist. Get grants, write papers, do experiments. Anything else is a distraction from your productivity. We all know the addage: publish or perish. Yeah, it’s harsh.
So, we have a surge of young scientists, who know a fuckton about a teeeeeeny tiny bit of the world. They’ve been busy poking out a tiny bump in the sphere of human knowledge, and the white space is all the stuff in the world that they don’t know and don’t have time to learn:
I’ll lay on the chopping block. Look at my very specific dissertation title:
The Molecular Components of Estrogen Receptor Beta (ERB) Signaling in Neuronal Systems
and that’s a BROAD take on what I learned empirically from 2007-2013.
During my Ph.D., I didn’t have a second to read about anything other than that topic. Even if I didn’t sleep and only read journal articles, completing one every 4 minutes I wouldn’t have been able to read everything on Pubmed about ERB.
I came out with a Ph.D. and didn’t know shit about the world (still don’t). I wouldn’t have trusted my opinion on anything other than how ERBeta acts in neurons (even that).
What else do scientists need to know?
Grad school helped teach me how to think and create knowledge, but it severely narrowed what I thought about (see red bump). Without any contacts, it feels like a waste. I've learned way more applicable skills after my PhD training, but I wouldn't sacrifice the failures, the journey or the lessons that doing science afforded me.
I think we need a supplement. The postdoctoral experience needs give more to our burgeoning scientists. If they are to be indentured servants, or a sink for our overproduced elites, they should at least be offered real OG training as a scientist, including protected time to think about their own philosophy of science. It's not like they need another department seminar, or more obscure technical training that may or may not get them where they want to be in their career. Only a slight fraction of them will become investigators themselves. Give our scientists something that they can use in the real world, possibly to help people.
Thanks to a terribly boring industry career, I’ve had a good amount of time to read hundreds of books/blogs/articles/etc on a very broad range of topics, and I still can't sufficiently answer the questions I posed above. I’m definitely better informed now. So well that I know that if we even want to attempt to mitigate human suffering (whether it’s possible or not), we need science integrated into a broad knowledge of people, culture, history, AND philosophy.
Political Philosophies of Scientists
Largely, knowledge workers lean towards the left. The cause and effect of that is a whole ‘nother subject, but in short:
As creators and explorers of knowledge - scientists value learning something new (progress) over what’s already been done (conservativism).
Scientists get into science for two reasons: We’re curious as hell and/or we want to have an impact on the world. These reasons bias our politics.
When I was 10, I asked my mom questions about the 1996 presidential election. What’s an independent (Ross Perot)/Republican/Democrat? Don’t they all want the best for us?
Her answer was that Democrats care a lot about taking care of people. Republicans think that people should learn to take care of themselves.
I was a kid, so naturally, Democrats sounded like the Good Guys. Ross Perot, I still don’t get. I carried my early-formed political opinions with me to college, where I voted for John Kerry (yikes), and took care of my fellow students, like a good democrat. I volunteered to drive students to the polls between my lab and work schedules. I was doing science by day, and practicing my (weakly developed) political philosophy by night (cringe).
As curious, efficacious soldiers of science, there comes a point where we discover the cognitive dissonance fizzing from nearly empty buckets of knowledge that we’ve neglected. Politics, economics, anything outside of our discipline has a bucket. In these instances, we trust in some loosely imagined consensus of scientists we know (far from scientific consensus). Even if political philosophies could be examined by the method, long-standing ideas should still be subject to scrutiny. This is why Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Carl Sagan all speak about the dangers of leaning on dogma - even scientific dogma.
A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE
So what’s a scientist to do when science doesn’t give us the answers?
When should we trust scientific consensus? What do we trust when the science is flimsy or nonexistent? How do we manage the social sciences in our ideas of science? These questions mostly belong in the white space (i.e, epistemology and ontology) of our sphere of human knowledge. Questions like these are shoved out of scientists’ field of view to attempt to poke out that tiny bubble in the sphere. To create better scientists and problem-solvers, we need to bring these questions into perspective and carry them with us as we press on.
If we back away from the starkness of scientific knowledge and the polarization of our politics, I think we might be able to have a more polite and unifying discussion. We can start with our values, and understanding the philosophies that inform our decisions and worldview.
SARS-CoV2 is not the last pathogen that will enter our sphere.
To do better in the future, we have to address the type of societies we want to live in by forming our decisions based on history, philosophy, culture, economics, and of course, science.
* I wrote this entire article before looking up the current numbers, and at the end, I decided the whole point of this essay was served best by leaving them out.
***In fact, political experience might be a detriment given the state of money in politics and embedded corruption.
Love the point about the "bump" that PhDs make in human knowledge. Super important to remember. Thanks for fighting for better science literacy and communication!