Science drags it's knuckles, then its feet...
We recently encountered on a large scale something very symptomatic of scientific discourse: a scientifically grounded position that flirts with logical fallacies and seems at odds with our common sense experience - don't use face masks.
This is of course a somewhat misleading way of framing the issue. To be precise, though the people who know more than me on this topic are correct when they say the CDC / WHO never officially discouraged face mask, it is true that, in order to save the supply of masks for health officials in direct contact treating patients, the WHO and CDC
"Both...have repeatedly said that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing"Masks not discouraged, but unnecessary. Though there is a difference here, most won't know how to spot it.
The US Surgeon General did not contradict this position
which spawned a debate online regarding the effectiveness of masks, with ivy league professors, medical professionals, and conspiracy theorists alike all chiming in with conflicting information.
Since the initial 'effective/ineffective' debate, both the CDC, WHO, and many public health officials have reneged this position based on "new data" that shows people without symptoms - who are not sick and coughing - may be spreading the virus, and that masks may help prevent this.
As "Everyone Thinks They’re Right About Masks" neatly summarizes,
"If masks are limited, conserving them for the people who need them most makes sense. But that message was lost amid the confusing claim that masks somehow protect health-care workers but are useless for everyone else"
"If the virus is traveling through the air, then it seems intuitive that masks would block it. But the evidence for this is all over the place [ranging from ineffective, somewhat effective, to effective]."It is important to remember that - and this is not an endorsement - this is how science 'works.'
A True Scotsman, a Red Herring, and Billy Occam Walk into a Courtroom...
I am finishing up a Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychoanalysis (which means I am ironically both an essential personnel at my 24 hour care day clinic and also completely inessential when it comes to anything other than talking about your feelings on the virus) and was recently in a research class with a relatively prominent Ivy League professor. He had just finished explaining that, as is par the course for science, the findings on some important research from 2 months ago are now invalid, and with them all theory, hypothesis, policy, whatever, etc., that was based on that research.
Me: "Then what would incentivize one to do research and base further research on findings if it is likely to be undone shortly thereafter? What makes this any different than the 'constant relativism-flux' of postmodernism?"
Professor: "Research is a social endeavor. Each study contributes to a bigger picture. Now we know what not to do so that we have a clearer idea of what to do in the future."Let's be clear. This is not postmodernism. This is dialectical, enlightenment age positivism. As parties work together to share information through a cycle of negations (scientific method - falsifiable / verifiable / repeatable, etc.), the truth as an object of representation becomes clearer and clearer until we have a mirror-like representation of the real, outside world.
Through this model, it is par the course that things we may have accurate or pragmatic intuitions about cannot be considered true or real until 'science' has done the dirty work. For example, the big tobacco companies were able to push off regulations on cigarettes (and avoid lawsuits) for years for the reason that there is no ethical (and perhaps even pragmatic) way to randomize people to smoke / not smoke and therefore other scientific methods had to be utilized to support the claim that smoking is harmful.
These alternative methods opened up a gap which the tobacco execs filled with rhetoric, throwing red herring fallacies around the courtroom, forcing scientists to test for absurd confounding variables. Each time the science came back, the tobacco execs suggested another confounding variable was making people ill, not cigarettes. This is the kind of 'no true scotsman' argument psychology unwittingly uses - 'the patient has not improved because they have not taken the therapy seriously, therefore they require more therapy to take therapy seriou...' - which was inherited from medical science during its time of blood letting, 'the patient is sick not because draining blood may have have negative effects, but because we did not drain enough blood to treat the sickness' (also see 'the moon is made of cheese, you're just not digging deep enough;' 'communism does work, all its failed attempts weren't 'actual' communism,' etc.).
The assumption that inhaling substances not inherent or natural to the internal systems of the body would somehow damage those systems - especially when this assumption was later supported by a seemingly high correlation between damage to the organ associated with the substance and consumption of the substance - is intuitive, makes sense, and follows Occam's razor, but could not be 'verified' by science until science of another kind (molecular cell biology, or whatever) advanced and was able to lend a hand. In this way, the science of this era committed itself to following legal arguments - which we will remember are for the most part derived from moral arguments which are from religious arguments - that required one to give the time of day to complex and absurd theories rather than follow Occam's razor.
Slate Star Codex’s blog post from March 23rd tackles much of these epistemic questions right down to the legal discourse of science.
Just like with cigarettes,
“It’s unethical to randomize people to wear vs. not-wear masks during a pandemic, so nobody has done this. Instead we have case-control studies…an especially bad study design”
and despite there being somewhat
inconclusive or statistically insignificant findings regarding the effectiveness of masks, the
science seems to contradict our intuitions.
For example, take the following clever analogous gestures:
“respirators are better than masks are better than nothing. It would be wrong to genuinely conclude this, because it’s not statistically significant. But it would also be wrong to conclude the studies show masks don’t work, because they mostly show respirators don’t work, and we (hopefully) know they do…”
“Masked health care workers...travelers...family members... were less likely to catch disease than unmasked ones...All of this accords with a common-sense understanding…None of these…prove that regular people can benefit from masks. But health care workers are closely related to homo sapiens and ought to have similar anatomy and physiology….”
Scientific research - or its language rather - says one thing, intuition and experience, another.
Ultimately, not unlike our discussion of the tobacco execs
in court above, Codex’s theory is that
“…they’re [the CDC] trying to do something different with medical communication. Consider legal communication. If a court declares a suspect is 'not guilty,' that could mean that he is actually not guilty of the crime...that he did it but they can’t prove it...that he did it, they can prove it, but the police officer who found the proof didn’t have a warrant at the time so they had to throw it out. A legal communication like 'this man is not guilty' is intended not just to convey information, but to formally reflect the output of a sacrosanct process. Medicine has been traumatized by its century-long war with quackery [blood letting, bad psychotherapy], and ended up with its jargon also formally reflecting the output of a sacrosanct process. Remember, there are dozens of studies supposedly showing homeopathy works, not to mention even more studies proving telepathy exists. At some point you have to redesign all your institutions to operate in an environment of epistemic learned helplessness, and the result is very high standards of proof. So masks haven’t been proven to work beyond a reasonable doubt. Just like the legal term for 'not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' is 'not guilty,' the medical communication term for 'not proven effective beyond a reasonable doubt' is 'not effective'
Jurassic Patch
For Moldbug, the sacrosanct process that restricts sensible thought through counter-intuitive, legalese derived from moral and therefore religious beliefs is referred to as the Cathedral (note the similarities between Moldbug and Codex's use of analogous logic that connects up with intuition to override the thought restriction). In short, horribly reductive terms, it is an irreproachable cultural security system that transparently exists as a given and therefore influences all values through the spread of memetic thought viruses.
As I have written elsewhere, as both a computer programmer and political theorist Mencius Moldbug conceptualizes the memetic virus in a highly useful way
"Moldbug’s rhetorical genius should be pointed out here; 1: The concept virus captures the violence and virility of the way ideas contagiously spread with brute force through any avenue available, sexual or not (STD), rather than gene [per Richard Dawkins' definition of meme], which, solely sexual, seems more associated with reproductive processes and naïve teleology or agency (virus is Darwinian, gene is Lamarckian). Genes are passed down through filiation and are associated with values such as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ while viruses irreverently infect and mutate and are beyond good and evil. A person can host and transfer a virus without knowing it (impersonal force), just like ideology, while, for gene, a person requires agency to reproduce with another person (ego-level interactions). The former captures the chaos of overflowing life and its sublimated residue and sediment known as culture whereas the latter seems too reductive and restrictive (and naturalistic); 2: Virus is a perfect concept for the meme as it is language pertinent to both the computer programming world and biological world. By utilizing the videogame sub culture term ‘pwnd’ in the piece where he expounds on the meme as virus [and criticizes Dawkins for, in spite of his atheist edginess, being unable to critique the outer layer of the Cathedral, its humanism], Moldbug highlights the meme’s digital subculture connotations as well as its bio-socio-scientific connotations in our contemporary digital world."
This is all not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the virus when they remind us in their 'orchid-wasp' motif of A Thousand Plateaus that it is viral contagion, surplus of code, not linear transmission, that is transferred between radically different organisms which leads to previously unlikely parallel evolutionary processes (and it is no surprise that Nick Land manages to tie Deleuze and Guattari with Moldbug).
The virus - COVID19 or otherwise - does not represent something as some will surely argue. It is life itself spilling over its containment system, running amok. (Royal) science cannot keep up with reality. Life does not wait for science to figure it out. The virus unfolds in real time, science in human-time. Science is always dragging its feet, precisely because its dragging its knuckles, trying to 'prove,' communicate, and convince others of facts about a [T/]thing that neither needs, nor heeds proofs, communications, or arguments yet is itself, with its brute processes, an unrelenting proof.
What would be of interest here is not only taking this into account to help people from dying - I am a fake accelerationist here in that I do not want to die, nor do I want my loved ones to die, nor do I mind saving people's lives if possible - but of also studying the virus from a position of following the virus' flow, letting it inform our concepts; researching it and acknowledging it as a strong indication of our human limits; acknowledging that we cannot arrogantly exercise human agency over the virus to the extent we believe.
This is what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as minor science, rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities, most notably introduced in A Thousand Plateaus by Professor Challenger (and remember, the sequel to Jurassic Park is subtitled 'The Lost World,' a clear reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel which contains the a character of the same name...).
In the words of the chaos theorist Doctor Ian Malcom responding to John Hammond's arrogant attempts to obsessively contain and monetize that which is uncontainable, i.e. genetically cloned killing machines
"Life, uh, finds a way."
"this is the virus of life..."
