"I don't know."

Sometimes "I don't know" is a frank admission of reality.

Sometimes "I don't know" is a dishonest and dangerous weapon.

The scientific method requires a frank acknowledgement of doubt. A person states a hypothetical and then makes close observations to try to falsify that hypothetical. It is impossible to know what is always true. What we can know is what is false. That leads us to a better approximation of truth.

Trump weaponized doubt. Trump asserted that Obama wasn't born in the USA. He dismissed evidence and kept saying there were unanswered questions. The result is that, today, about half of Republican voters question whether Obama was born in Hawaii, notwithstanding his birth records, contemporaneous newspaper records, and eyewitnesses.

Trump and some of his GOP allies say they doubt the 2020 election. There may have been forged ballots, maybe counterfeits with bamboo fragments, maybe dead people voting. They dismiss evidence that falsifies those assertions. They say they have new questions, new doubts. They assert accusations as hypotheses, and say they could have happened. The question/accusation is what sticks in minds, if the accusation/question fits a welcome partisan narrative. 

Doubt -- and claims of doubt --  can justify asserting whatever serves one's interests. One can disguise slanders by framing them in the form of questions. And yet questioning conventional thinking is how we get progress. Sometimes the doubter is right.

Galileo. "And yet it moves."

We now understand Galileo to have been a courageous scientist and observer, not a man suffering from Oppositional Defiant Disorder, DSM-5.

Career software engineer and college professor Michael Trigoboff, now retired, has watched the mainstream media and the liberal/progressive establishment in policy and academia assert some supposedly true things about the equality of races, about crime, and about the source of Covid. Trigoboff's career operated in an arena of detail and rigor. Computer code is right or it is buggy. "Pretty good" is wrong. He accuses the liberal elite establishment of confusing group-think with accuracy. Doubt may look like contrariness for the sake of picking fights, but considered rigorously, truth is an approximation. What we can know for sure is we never know for sure.

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff.

Was the Covid pandemic caused by a virus that jumped from animals to humans, or was it caused by the leak of a modified virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? The correct answer, supported by all of the available scientific knowledge is, “We don’t know.” There is evidence in both directions; none of it is conclusive. Besides, the Chinese Communist government, not especially known for openness, has concealed important information.

 

There seems to be a widespread aversion to admitting that we don’t know. This is intellectually dishonest, and it interferes with using the scientific method to find the answer. If you can’t think of hypotheses and test them without preconceptions, the scientific method is unlikely to work.

 

Early in the pandemic, people were denounced as “racist” for even bringing up the idea of a leak from the Wuhan lab. A significant part of the medical establishment and mainstream media tried to make it impossible/unacceptable to think that the pandemic’s origin had been anything other than viral jump into humans from an animal.

 

This was in part a reaction to Donald Trump and some things he said. But while reacting to Donald Trump may have felt necessary to some, doing it to the point of interference with our ability to scientifically understand the pandemic’s origin was a destructive overreaction.

 

The scientific method is great when it’s done competently and correctly, but it’s vulnerable to a variety of outside pressures. Will you get the grant you applied for? Will your peers review your results with approval? Will a scientific journal print your article? The potential for hidden agendas is always present. Careerism and political prejudice may significantly influence your chances of success.

 

When building a scientific career, the incentive to “torture the data until it confesses” can overwhelm integrity. Recent studies have shown that attempts to replicate literally half of the peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of psychology have failed. Even scientists are susceptible to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.

There is no smoking gun, but there is suggestive evidence that Dr. Anthony Fauci collaborated with Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance to fund “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab. This kind of research aims to make an infectious agent more infectious so that scientists can see what the possibilities are and hopefully prepare for the actual emergence of the increased level of danger. But it’s very controversial; many scientists say it should not be done. Could this sort of research have produced the Covid virus? We don’t know.

 

I worked for 30 years as a software developer. Much of software development involves debugging your code, which means figuring out why your code doesn’t work the way you want it to. Debugging involves coming up with hypotheses about what’s wrong and then testing those hypotheses to see if they explain the behavior of the software. It’s the scientific method in miniature, right there inside your computer. As a developer, you become very accustomed to being wrong, and to realizing that you don’t know what’s going on. If you do not become comfortable with not knowing, you will never develop the calm focus you need to figure out what’s wrong with your code and how to fix it.

 

We don’t currently know for sure the exact origin of the Covid pandemic. “Don’t know” means that all possibilities, including a leak from the Wuhan laboratory, are still on the table.

 

Some people are so uncomfortable with “don’t know” that they refuse to believe it. During the 2016 election, I had friends who knew that Trump could not win. I maintained that I didn’t know, and they would say things to me like, “Come on, of course you know Trump can’t win.” But I stuck to my guns and maintained against all resistance that I actually didn’t know. And it turns out I was right; I didn’t know.

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