When Is "Agreement" OK?
This question has bugged me for years.
In a previous piece, I mentioned the vexing question of when “agreement” is OK. My understanding is that the norm is to “agree” with things and then cease to “agree” later on if research, testing, challenge overturns those things. But this approach will mean that you often “agree” with wrong things. In a world where people follow this approach, people will run around with all sorts of false beliefs until they (hopefully) get those beliefs knocked down by research, testing, challenge.
How much research, testing, challenge should you do before you accept something? What is “due diligence”? Imagine a religious person who doesn’t believe in evolution who never goes to their local university to talk to the biologists in the biology department—in my view, that person is irrational because they failed to even do the basics of finding out why scientists believe what scientists believe about evolution.
One day I’d love to ask a professor of philosophy the following questions:
When it comes to believing that stuff is true, what is the bare minimum and what is “due diligence”? I’m talking about initially accepting that something is true and also continuing to believe that something is true month by month and year by year. If you fail to regularly check for criticisms of your beliefs, then you’re like the religious person who refuses to visit the biology department.
Probably 1 in 100 people would think that their political beliefs are well-supported enough that they would be willing to publish those beliefs non-anonymously. But then the question arises: “If your ideas are, by your own agreement, definitely not well-researched enough to be published with your name attached to them, then how can they be something that you’re willing to think is true?”
What does “agree” mean? If you’ve read zero books on, say, the topic of intellectual property then is it possible to “agree” with a claim/argument/position on that topic? The same question arises for every other political topic under the sun.
And even if you read one book on a given topic then how can you know that that book wouldn’t be easily overturned by reading another book on the topic?
If you have a 50.1% confidence in a claim/argument/position, then can you say that you “agree” with it? What if you have a 60% confidence in a claim/argument/position?
If Bob “agrees” with X then how does one distinguish whether Bob has 50.1% or 60% or 99.9% confidence in X?
Few (if any) people are able to put a ballpark percentage on their confidence in a given political claim/argument/position that they “agree” with, so where does that leave us epistemologically?
I know somebody who opposes “lockdown” measures to combat Covid. It’s obvious that these measures cause enormous damage and ruin lives—no sane person on Earth would argue against that. Of course, you need to do a cost/benefit analysis because these measures also prevent enormous damage and prevent hospitalizations and prevent deaths.
On the matter of climate change, I can get a vast treasure-trove of information on any climate-related topic imaginable within mere minutes. It’s easy. In contrast, on Covid, it’s absolutely impossible. The only site that I know of that even attempts to answer the anti-lockdown crowd is this site. And it’s a good site, but it’s far too narrow.
Let me just give you a mere sample of the questions that anti-lockdowners have (don’t feel obligated to read every question in the list):
Doesn’t this 2008 ACLU report make a strong case against lockdown measures?
Can you name at least 3 measures that you would consider as going too far in fighting Covid?
How many lockdown-caused deaths is “too many”?
What kind of research have you done to inform yourself about how many deaths can be expected from lockdowns?
What kind of cost/benefit analysis have you done to weigh the effects of lockdowns against their gains?
What is your exit-strategy from lockdown measures?
How long do you consider it reasonable to ask the public to live this way?
What’s the longest tolerable lockdown in your view?
What criteria do you have for lifting various measures, including masks?
Masks were imposed virtually overnight, so what research was done to ensure that masks would not have any negative health-effects due to long-term masking for hours at a time (sometimes during heavy physical labor)? Was due diligence done to ensure that this practice was safe? If due diligence was done, how and by whom?
What do you think of the government of California presenting ICUs as having 0% capacity on the basis of adjusted figures when in fact there was capacity? What effect did this have on the public?
What doubts do you have that lockdowns work?
How do you test your own beliefs regarding the effectiveness of lockdowns?
How do you empirically research the efficacy of lockdowns?
Are you prepared to consider the possibility that lockdowns don’t work and to engage with it intellectually?
In 2019, were lockdowns (in response to a pandemic) something that you had considered? if not, on what basis do you now advocate for lockdowns?
Have you considered that some of the information that you now base your support for lockdowns on may turn out to have been incorrect, give how new so much of it is?
How reliable is the statistical information that we’re being given on (e.g.) deaths?
What is your view on the distinction between dying “with Covid” vs. dying “from Covid”?
Will we ever know how many of the 500K deaths in the US were “with Covid” vs. “from Covid”?
Why isn’t it a fair argument to say that in the case of a truly serious virus no lockdown would need to be imposed because people would be terrified and would therefore be doing it of their own accord (in the case of a truly serious virus, the government would just need to pass laws to help people self-isolate and help society keep functioning)?
500K deaths is a lot of people, but the US is a big place in which a lot of people die annually so why is there no public outcry and massive intervention over deaths from medical errors (which kill 250K annually)?
How much consensus is there that lockdowns work? Among scientists? Among public-health officials?
Aren’t there papers that conclude that “non-pharmaceutical interventions” don’t work?
What carrots/sticks (institutional pressures, pressures due to the culture, pressures due to the firestorms that hit people who dissent, financial incentives) might bias research on lockdowns, even if there’s no conscious deception?
If the government has such reckless disregard for human/animal life in so many instances, how can citizens trust this same government to be sincerely imposing lockdown measures for the sake of human life?
How are these two things reasonable, given that these two things have nothing to do with ICU beds?
Aren’t mental-health services needed to keep people out of the ICU during this crisis?
Why didn’t the Spanish flu involve restrictions of this scale?
How much science was generated “ad hoc” to justify lockdown measures that had already been implemented?
What evidence in favor of lockdowns existed prior to March 2020?
What do you think of the role of total non-scientists like Tomas Pueyo and Jeremy Howard (the #masks4all guy) in creating immense social pressure through viral social media campaigns that played a huge role in the public’s appetite for lockdowns and masks respectively?
What about all of these people (including over 13K scientists) calling for the restrictions to stop?
Why are there so many measures being imposed that disproportionately harm vulnerable people (healthcare-service suspensions that have nothing to do with maintaining Covid-treatment capacity; increased wait-times; worse outcomes; putting mentally ill people in an unsafe situation; patients being put into a much longer-term limbo due to increased wait times even after lockdowns are lifted—this results in ruined life-plans and lost opportunities; society being made less accessible through one-way systems and increased queuing and not being allowed into buildings and not being allowed to sit and increased expenses and the need to pay a taxi to wait because standing in the cold is impossible; limitations on where it’s possible to go and any exercise options; worsening of existing health-conditions; isolation of people, which harms everyone but especially elderly dementia-patients; loss of needed support)?
Why is there no mitigation for the victims of everything that I mentioned in the question immediately previous to this question?
Is the lack of accommodation regarding disabled people in line with disability-rights legislation?
What about the headlines like this?
And what about the headlines like this?
Why do you think the government needs to enforce a shutdown? If risks from Covid are really so enormous, shouldn’t we trust individuals to lock down of their own accord out of a desire to self-preserve?
Regarding lockdowns, how should policymakers weigh the fact that individuals regularly make decisions, of their own accord, to incur the risk of death for economic reasons (e.g., taking a more hazardous job in exchange for higher pay) or just for convenience (e.g., accepting the risk of a crash when driving a car)?
If you could pick one metric for measuring the impact of Covid, what would it be and why, and what are the downsides of that metric? At what level of that metric would you call off the lockdown?
How do you think about estimating the incremental benefit of a broad-based shutdown vs. a targeted protection of the vulnerable? Do we know whether the differences in effectiveness will be night-and-day or marginal?
What is the biological mechanism for “long Covid” symptoms? How does this mechanism and the magnitude of these symptoms compare to the aftereffects of the regular influenza virus?
What would be your criteria for declaring a hospital “overwhelmed”, and why would you choose that criteria? By the standard you chose, how frequently were hospitals overwhelmed in 2020?
Why is there little to no correlation between lockdowns and death rates for given areas? Could it be that the collective health of an area is more of a factor in how it’s affected by the virus than government policy?
How do you justify lockdowns when you’re intentionally driving up unemployment, exacerbating inequality, creating more mental-health issues, delaying non-elective surgeries in a way that could lead to deaths, and increasing drug-overdoses? At what point does the collateral damage outweigh lockdown benefits, given that the virus has a 99.6% survival rate?
Given that many countries have had some form of lockdown for 10 months, and no country has effectively reduced cases to zero (even New Zealand has had cases pop up again), at what point do you just admit the virus is here to stay and let people live their lives?
Why are Croatia, Iowa and South Dakota numbers all decreasing despite no lockdowns the past 4 months?
Why should we trust public health officials when they have consistently broken the rules that they have tried to impose on the general population?
I included that whole list of questions so that you can see how many questions there really are. And they’re good questions. I went on a quest to find answers, but I ended up with nothing and almost every expert I emailed didn’t even respond. It makes sense that epidemiologists are hard to reach during this crisis, but it’s impossible for me to know who was busy and who was just not interested.
I ultimately told the anti-lockdown person that the best I could do was to show him this very narrow site that ignores virtually all of the burning questions that he had. But I told him that his anti-lockdown views weren’t justified if he was unable to get any scientific engagement—that the appropriate response to the scientific silence was to say: “That’s too bad. Thanks to the lack of scientific engagement, I have no way to form an opinion on this matter.”
Whether you can’t dive into something (because the experts are too busy to engage—or maybe just not interested) or you choose not to dive into something, my instinct is that you shouldn’t “agree” with something when you don’t even know what the arguments are around the issue. But this instinct caused me to renounce all political views for a while. And my renunciation caused a serious dispute between me and someone who called me a liar when I told him that I didn’t have left-wing views. This person just wasn’t buying the idea that I was “neutral” on the various political topics that Chomsky or Dean Baker talk about.
Speaking of Baker, I just wrote a piece on his work. One of my friends told me that I wasn’t qualified to write that piece because I didn’t know enough about the relevant economics to weigh in. How much research does one need to do to be qualified to write on a topic? I don’t know the answer. But we don’t all need to be specialists to write about something—if that were the standard, there’d be no journalism and little scholarship.
This issue of when “agreement” is OK vexes me, but I’ve become normal in the sense that I “agree” with stuff all the time without significant research, testing, challenge. I plan to ask a philosopher about these issues one day to put my vexation to rest.
Chomsky made some great comments on rationality:
I think it’s important to read pretty broadly. Not merely to keep to material that reinforces your own beliefs. It’s useful to read across a pretty broad spectrum. If it’s serious. If it’s junk, no.…
You can never be confident that your views are correct. Even in the sciences. One thing you always have to do is keep an open mind, and a questioning mind, about the conclusions that you draw. And in fact it’s useful to look for disconfirming evidence and try to evaluate it.
You live in the world. And in order to act you have to act with a certain presumption of confidence.
But in the back of your mind you should keep open the possibility that the confidence is misplaced.