A Critique of Lockdown.
In an article in The Sunday Telegraph of 20/9/20, entitled “Where is the evidence for going back into lockdown?”, Daniel Hannan begins by opining that ‘lockdowns arguably make sense as an emergency measure, a way to buy time and build response-capacity’; but that ‘they are no answer to an endemic virus’; that ‘they are the bluntest and most destructive of instruments; that ‘they offer no exit strategy; and that ‘surveying the data from around the world (shows) precious little evidence that they actually work’. He then states that he defies any one, presented with a set of un-headed graphs showing the infection and fatality rates in different nations to guess which had closed their economies and which had not’; that ‘back in March people were predicting almost an extinction level event in Sweden which had defied international pressure and kept its shops, schools and restaurants open; and that in fact the disease there followed pretty much the same trajectory as here – with the difference that Sweden is not worried about a second wave and suffered less than half the economic hit we did’; that supporters of lockdown have since come forward with all sorts of explanations’, such as that ‘Swedes are apparently, a solitary and morose people who practice social distancing even in normal times’; that ‘they are more likely to live alone’; that ‘their population density is low’. ‘Well maybe’, he responds, ‘but no one was saying these things in March’; that cognitive dissonance is a powerful force’; that ‘when a new fact challenges our prejudice, we question the fact more readily than the prejudice’; that ‘yet the facts keep piling up’; that ‘even countries which practiced no social distancing at all have avoided disaster; that ‘Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus decided early on that his citizens were immune’.
Daniel Hannan proceeds to recall that ‘it’s a similar story on every continent’; that ‘Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonara was condemned for his laissez-faire approach’; that ‘yet his country has fared far better than Daniel Hannan’s native Peru which won plaudits for its prompt and harsh crackdown’; that ‘indeed, the way the corona virus peaked and dropped off in developing countries, even in slum populations where self-isolation was impossible, confounded every earlier prediction’; that in ‘giving evidence to MPs, Professor Francesco Checchi, and epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medecine, observed that even in war torn Yemen, which was in no position to apply social distancing, hospitalisations had been falling since June’; and that given the foregoing, Daniel Hannan asks ‘why in heaven’s name are we thinking about another clampdown here‘? ’Why have we continued to mandate local closures without any evidence that they make a difference’? His response is that ‘it won’t do to say “better safe than sorry”, or ‘I’d rather err on the side of caution’. Instead, he himself says that ‘when you are proposing measures which destroy lives and livelihoods, throw people out of work, wreck children’s education, drive up deaths from cancer and suicide and remove our basic freedoms, the onus is on you to prove your case’; that ‘indeed, with such high stakes, the burden of proof must be commensurately heavy’; that ‘it isn’t enough to show that, on balance, lockdowns might have had some (positive) impact’; that ‘you need to demonstrate incontestable and significant benefits’.
In contrast, he declares that ‘no one looking at the numbers, can do this’; that ‘the only clear argument for lockdowns was the initial one, namely that they would slow transmission while we increased our hospital capacity and found which treatments worked best’; that ‘this was the basis on which the closures were originally proposed – supposedly for three weeks’; and that ‘no one has since come up with a better justification’. However, he states that ‘once the prohibitions had been imposed, they took on a momentum of their own; that every cluster, every rise in fatality rates, was turned into an argument for even stricter rules’; that ‘the revelation that infection rates had peaked on March 18, five days before the lockdown had been declared, should have invalidated that logic’; but that ‘we were beyond hope by then’; that ‘the thought that the disruption might have been unnecessary was too painful to contemplate’; that ‘by and large, we didn’t contemplate it’; that ‘just as politicians are susceptible to public opinion, so are their advisers’; that ‘they know they won’t get into trouble for excessive caution’; that ‘as long as the public continues to clamour for curfews and bans- and it is a fact that perceived threats make people more authoritarian – the various medical committees which advise the world’s governments will be reluctant to recommend liberalisation’; but that ‘with every day that passes it becomes clearer that the disease has not grown exponentially anywhere’; that ‘something checks it, pretty much regardless of the policies being pursued locally’; that ‘an increasing number of epidemiologists believe that that something is a partial immunity bestowed by exposure to past corona viruses which would explain why East Asia with its recent experience of Sars has fared so well’; and that ‘a recent survey in the BMJ notes that at least six studies suggest a high degree of pre-existing immunity’; and that ‘if that is the case – and it would fit the observed facts much better than the earliest catastrophic models – then most of what is being done by most governments is pointless’.
Again, I say, we must replace belief with knowledge before enacting any policy in future. Indeed, at this point, I ask, if infection does not produce immunity, how would immunisation produce it? 21/9/20.
Article 24Pre-Existing Immunity.
As an example of where the acquisition of knowledge for the replacement of belief would recently have been beneficial, I recall the earlier recognition of infection rates on cruise-ships having been limited to about 20%, and I now refer to an article by Dr. Uri Gavish, Prof. Udi Qimron, Eyal Shahar, Dr. Ifat Abadi-Korek and Michael Levit which appeared in The Daily Telegraph of 18/9/20. It began by recalling that ‘not long after the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the number of deaths ceased to be consistent with the exponential growthscare’; that ‘ittook the virus longer to find people to infect, which was unexpected since the virus should not have found it difficult to infect new hosts among a population of 9 million’. Thus, they recall that ‘this non-exponential growth was the first clue that pre-existing immunity to Sars-CoV-2 may be ubiquitous’; that ‘the pandemic never behaved as if the virus was foreign to most people’; and that ‘China registered under 5000 deaths and South Korea 300’.
Thus, we see that ‘the obvious explanation for these negligible mortality rates – pre-existing immunity – was widely ignored’; that ‘the world chose to believe that lockdown somehow eradicated the virus’; that ‘the miracle in South Korea was (mistakenly) explained by test and trace which for the first time in history, arrested the spread of a respiratory, often asymptomatic, infection’; that ‘Japan would later see about 1,500 deaths with no lockdown, nor much testing’; that ‘that was (mistakenly) explained by discipline, face masks, or bowing, instead of shaking hands’. The authors then stated that ‘by April, PCR tests for Covid-19 in small confined populations, such as on ships often did not exceed 20%’; that ‘similarly, an antibody survey in Gangelt, Germany, found only 14% infection’; that ‘again, pre-existing immunity was the likely explanation; that ‘levels of pre-existing immunity aren’t expected to be identical everywhere’; that ‘a rate above 20% was found in small groups, mostly living in atypical environments (jails, aircraft carriers)’; and that ‘nonetheless no single antibody survey exceeded 20%’.
The cited article also noted that ‘a high percentage of past infection was reported in several large populations’; that ‘these findings paradoxically point to a high level of pre-existing immunity’; that ‘our immune system fights infection mainly with antibodies and white blood cells, T-cells, but these act only on targets they recognise’; that ‘as early as April, studies found 30 to 80 % of people who never had Covid-19 had T-cells able to recognise certain parts of Sars-CoV-2, causes of the common cold’; that these T-cells – caused by the common cold – cross-reacted with the features they share with Sars-CoV-2’; that ‘normally pre-existing immunity would prevent the virus from replicating in the body so PCR and antibody tests would show negative’; but that ‘in a weakened body, infection might gain ground before elimination, resulting in positive PCR and antibody tests’; that the risk of dieing from an infection – the infection fatality ratio (IFR) – is the number of deaths divided by the number infected’; and that ‘this would not normally change even if a large part of the population is immune’; but that ‘when a susceptible population is weakened by poor living conditions and exposed to the virus, more people will die and the IFR will increase; that if a largely pre-immune population is weakened and infection spreads, the IFR will decrease, the more susceptible will indeed die, but many more among the pre-immune part of that population are weakened enough to show up as positive in the anti-body test, so the death-to-infection ratio becomes significantly smaller’.
The cited article then brings us to the recent exceptions to the 20% maximal infection rate. To this end it notes that ‘surveys in India, Brazil and Peru detected 25 to 71% in all of which the IFR turned out to be low’; and that ‘in every case to date where the infection rate passed 20%, the IFR was much lower than expected’; that ‘while one cannot claim that voluntary social distancing saved the day as the virus did spread widely in these countries: we can say that if immune systems can recognise Sars-CoV-2, it makes no sense for any government to treat the virus (Covid-19) as a new infection’; that ‘rational administrations should urgently invest in surveys of cross-immunity and other types of cellular immunity, which cost next to nothing compared with what is spent on PCR testing, contact-tracing and lockdowns’; that ‘in short, most of us are at least partially immune to Covid-19’; and that ‘we should now accept this and try to quantify it’.
Thus, the observations cited above tempt me to conclude that we now have an explanation as to why no previous infection has ever killed all of the populations exposed to it; that the cross-recognition identified above is the mechanism by which the human race and other species have continued to exist for as long as they have; and that had pre-existing cross-immunity coupled with the low death rates and their age-distribution been recognised in this specific case, self-isolation might have been restricted to the retired, and economically damaging general lockdowns might never have arisen. 19/9/20.
Article 23Politicians and Public Versus Bureaucrats.
Despite politicians having become the “fall guys” for the mistakes of bureaucrats as exemplified by Daniel Hannan and Charles Moore (c.f. Articles 21 and 22), politicians could nonetheless take command of public affairs, were they to become agents for the replacement of belief with knowledge in all future policy-making in compliance with electorate requirements to do so. Were this to happen in response to the public campaign now mounted by this website, both voters and politicians would wrest control from the current belief-only bureaucrats by confronting them with definitive cause-effect knowledge to the benefit of all three groups for the first time ever, rather than continuing to confront beliefs with counter-beliefs. To this end, this website shows in its preamble that this change from belief to knowledge is long-overdue, while my analysis of recent media articles shows that their writers are beginning to sense that all is not well with the bureaucratic responses to the Brexit referendum and to the Covid-19 infection, though these writers have yet to recognise that improvement is possible only if they and their readers to renounce their mistaken reliance on belief/counter-belief debate and to accept the benefits of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge wherever and whenever such is already available, or needs to be acquired prior to all policy formulation, let alone its implementation.
At this point, I repeat that none of the foregoing implies a single knowledge-only future. Differing party-specific policies will always remain selectable by voters. However, knowledge-only policies and knowledge-only means of implementation would deliver policies which would work in reality, in contrast to the belief-only policies and belief-only means of implementation which have never delivered their promises in reality, and will never do so whichever party is in power, or ever will be in power. Thus, I repeat that voters must require politicians to offer party-specific knowledge-only policies for electorates to decide which party will be elected in the knowledge that the thus chosen policies will deliver their promises in a beneficial manner if effectively implemented and delivered by the bureaucracy, and in the knowledge that belief-only policies have never delivered any benefits in reality.
Again, at this point, I repeat that both Brexit and the Covid-19 infection have been miss-managed as belief-consensual topics rather than as matters to be decided on available knowledge or held-over until the necessary knowledge is acquired. As to Brexit, it ought now to be obvious that, as always, when we don’t recognise knowledge or ignore its absence we have nothing but the debate of opinion/counter-opinion which is no more than the debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/ counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence, and news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; and that in such circumstances, as always, a vote is taken; and that with respect to Brexit we held a referendum which voted to leave the EU. However, it ought also to be obvious now that such an elective belief-consensus is no more than a coin-toss which is open to reversal at the next election, referendum, or coin-toss. Again, it ought now to be obvious that the EU did not and does not want us to leave and actively seeks to reverse the referendum as does the referendum minority and their supporters in parliament; and that consequently a counter-vote in parliament or another referendum could reverse the earlier result; and that it is this expectation which explains why no progress has been made towards agreeing the terms under which we will leave, despite the referendum having been four and a half years ago. Had we concluded on the basis of knowledge that the belief-only multinational EU is even less likely to solve its problems than is the single UK, we would long since have resumed our independence on the basis of the referendum itself, as was promised prior to it.
As to the Covid-19 response, it ought now to be obvious that this too has been treated as a topic for belief/counter-belief debate, and is thus mistakenly described as science-based; that all actions taken at the behest of the involved bureaucracies have been belief-only; that lockdown is not uniformly applied or even generally applied across the globe; that where it is applied it is for the first time ever; that thus far UK attempts to control the spread of infection have been by isolating the non-infected from the infected rather than by isolating the infected from the non-infected; that the latter option minimises the numbers isolated and correspondingly minimises the economic damage, while the latter maximises the numbers isolated and the corresponding economic damage; that there appears to have been no discussion as to the rationale behind the latter choice other than to save the national health service; that nonetheless, its PPE supplies were inadequate and its elderly patients were discharged to old-folks homes without any consideration of whether they had been infected in the hospital and were thus vectors for further infection; that bureaucratic control was thus belief-only rather than knowledge-only; and that the Brexit and Covid-19 fiascos more that adequately reveal the need for knowledge to replace belief everywhere in government. From this point onwards, I will intersperse my analyses of belief-only /knowledge-absent media articles, with examples of where benefits would accrue were knowledge/ absence to be rectified by recognition of already available knowledge or by future application of knowledge yet to be acquired. 18/9/20.
Article 22The Bureaucracies.
In a 29/8/20 article in The Daily Telegraph entitled “Whitehall mandarins have lost sight of what it means to be politically neutral”, Charles Moore recalls that ‘it is a basic doctrine of our system of government that ministers decide, and therefore account to Parliament for their decisions’; that ‘it follows that they – not civil servants or other advisers – take credit for success and the blame for failure’; that ‘in cases of iniquity or irredeemable systemic cock-up, they should resign’; and that any other system would evade the direct relationship that must exist between the voters and those who win the general election and then form a government’. He goes on to say with respect to the ‘confusion over the Covid-affected A-level and GCSE results, the case for Mr. Williamson’s resignation is marginal rather than open and shut’; and that ‘he wants to look at the extent to which ‘the structure and practice of the public service undermine its reality’. Thus, he notes that ‘in the case of this summer’s exams the body charged with making the decisions was not Mr. Williamson’s department, but Ofqual’; that ‘Ofqual is an “independent” regulator, a “non-ministerial government department”; that ‘it is supposed to be free from political control and thus to maintain educational standards’; and that ‘the famous algorithm was its and not Mr. Williamson’s’; that ‘he did not have the right to inspect it in detail’; but that ‘whenever things get difficult, the government comes under pressure to intervene and the non-ministerial departments somehow vanish’.
Charles Moore then asks ‘how often during the exams row did you find Sally Collier, Ofqual’s now departing chief executive, publicly defending what her organisation had done?’ He answers his question by saying that ‘she neither made the case for her policy, nor explained her errors’. He then states that ‘NHS England is the most glaring example of swerved responsibility’ that it ‘employs 1.2 million people making it the largest public-sector employer in Europe’; that ‘its chief executive Sir Simon Stevens is responsible for more than £120billion of annual spending; that ‘he has been almost invisible to the public since Covid-19 hit the fan’; that ‘we have little idea of whether he is right or wrong’; but that we have to listen to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, instead; that ‘these arms-length bodies become closed little worlds, invested with great power, hard to hold to account, and fiercely unwilling to take blame’. As to government departments, Charles Moore states that ‘in theory, the chain of command is clear’; that ‘Ministers answer to Parliament for their departments and protect them from attack’; that, in return, civil servants make sure that what ministers want, gets done’; that ‘the practice, however, now departs very markedly from the theory’; that ‘what is now considered normal practice is that defenders of officials often say “Remember they can’t answer back”. Nonetheless Charles Moore states that ‘nowadays they can’, that senior officials appear before parliamentary committees, as if they had an independent existence’; that ‘they make lots of public speeches’; that ‘last month, Jonathon Slater, the permanent secretary at the Department of Education, spoke at the Institute for Government where he declared that “I feel at my best when I genuinely feel accountable for delivering something”. If so, Charles Moore asks, ‘would he like to take some responsibility for the exams fiasco?’
Charles Moore then states that ‘it is increasingly common for a department to declare its own view on an issue which goes beyond government policy and sometimes even contradicts it’; that ‘recently the Tory peer Emma Nicholson, alerted by complaints from many parents, began to protest to the Department of Education about its new materials for Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) which become compulsory next month’; that ‘some of these “fact sheets” promoted by lobby groups with the help of departmental money, advise schools that they must, in the interests of transgender rights, institute mixed-sex lavatories, breast binders, padded trousers, puberty-blockers, cross-hormones and surgery all of which are advocated in the Trans Inclusion Toolkit’; that ‘another document for schools – an “ inclusive package for ALL young people” – circulated by an LGBT organisation, the Proud Trust, and backed with money from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, introduces the “Dice Game” in which each face of each die is a word (or words) such as “penis”, “anus”, “hands and fingers”; that “players are invited, having rolled the dice, to think of exciting things to do with the combination chance has thrown up’; that ‘none of the above is in the legislation though the pressure-group documents often suggest that it is’; that ‘Mr Slater, however, is an enthusiast for trans rights and tweets as the Civil Service’s “LGB&TI Champion”; and that ‘during Covid he has tweeted only once (as far as Charles Moore is aware) about the urgent matter of exams, preferring subjects such as Ramadan, Pride Month, and Windrush Day’.
Charles Moore then records that ‘the most striking recent example of departments going beyond their impartial remit is their reaction to Black Lives Matter, following the killing of George Floyd’ that in this connection, ‘several permanent secretaries including Mr Slater at Education and Sir Steven Lovegrove at Defence put out messages against “whiteness” or giving the hash tag for Black Lives Matter’ that ‘since then Mr Slater’s concern for what he calls “tackling the whiteness of senior Whitehall” has been fulfilled (I would say addressed) by his being retired early on ministerial insistence’; that ‘the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Sir Richard Heaton has been moved towards the door’; that ‘in June, he wrote’, on behalf of his department: “we must be clear in the workplace that racism and inequality are enemies we must keep fighting… Its why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important’. And that ‘it’s not enough to be passively anti-racist; we must take a stand and we must take action”. In response Charles Moore says ‘the point is not that racism does not matter, but that definitions and remedies differ dramatically’; that ‘many mandarins have failed to recognise – as they failed with Brexit – that other views legitimately exist’; that ‘they appear not to understand that their views, publicly expressed, undermine the neutrality of public service’. He asks, ‘what due diligence has been applied to the Black Lives Matter organisation?’ He responds to his question by saying that ‘while the title must be right, it does not follow that taxpayers’ money should be spent in its cause’; that ‘the mandarins are allowing HR departments to be used as a battering ram for political activism’s undermining of the Government’s right to make policy’; that ‘these trends suggest that the present government is right to try to recall the public service to its chief duty which is to stop striking attitudes and to make policy work’; and that ‘the coming reorganisation of the Cabinet Office, includes the search for a new Cabinet Secretary (now selected) and a new head of the Foreign Office’; and that ‘these are quiet but firm moves against these woke Sir Humphreys’.
Again, while I am grateful to Charles Moore for his timely analysis, I must say again that the rectifications he calls for will not occur through changes in personnel without an accompanying replacement of belief with knowledge, in all future policy-making as these terms are definitively differentiated in my book The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge, and applied in this website. However, at this point, I see that my original objective of encouraging voters to pressurise politicians to replace belief-only policies with knowledge-only alternatives can be expanded to the encouragement of politicians themselves to undertake this replacement in order to curtail the current freedom of bureaucracies to implement bureaucratic belief-only policies; and that voters and politicians could thus collaborate in the implementation of party-specific knowledge-only policies and in the suppression bureaucratic belief-only alternatives. 4/9/20.
Article 21The Failure of Bureaucracies.
Perhaps the most significant media comment thus far on the failure of bureaucracies was that of Daniel Hannan, entitled “We say we want politicians to be kept out of the picture, but we blame them when state agencies mess up” which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph of 23/8/20, and which opened by recalling that ‘clandestine migrants from France are able to enter (our) country without fear of deportation, but tourists making the same journey are subjected to two weeks of house arrest’; that when we ‘play the game by the rules and fill out the forms correctly, the system will pursue us’ while those who break into the country illicitly are eventually given leave to remain’; that ‘this is not deliberate policy, with every home secretary, Labour and Conservative, having sought to toughen our border controls’; that ‘the trouble is that all bureaucracies left to themselves, prefer easy tasks to hard ones’; and that our bureaucracies generally are left to themselves because that is what we, the voters kept demanding. “Stop treating everything as a political football!” we said, and “let the professionals get on!” Thus, he concludes by way of examples that ’we’ve got what we claimed to want, namely an administrative machine beyond the reach of our elected representatives’, that ‘our exams are run by Ofqual’(“keep the politicians out of the picture”); and that ‘our epidemic preparedness is left to Public Health England’( “listen to the experts”) . However, in contrast to Daniel Hannan, readers of this website now know that nothing will work as expected so long as those in charge, whoever they are, act on belief rather than on knowledge as I definitively differentiate these terms in this website.
However, Daniel Hannan unknowingly reinforces the need for my definitive knowledge/belief differentiation, in going on to state that ‘the public did not react to the current mess-up’ by pursuing Ofqual, with its armies of directors, strategists and press officers over the exam algorithms nor did it complain about the NHS’s calamitous decision to send unscreened patients into care homes in readiness for a tidal wave which never came’; and that ‘the public did not demand to know, as late as March, why PHE was still mainly fretting about unhealthy food preferences’, as it still does; and that ‘we suddenly called these agencies the government’. However, my reinforcement is to state that the reason for the absence of any such reactions is the failure of public, bureaucrats, politicians and commentators such as Daniel Hannan, to recognise the need for my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation, the absence of which results in every issue being a matter of belief/counter-belief and/or opinion/counter-opinion in the absence of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge and in the absence of any recognition of the need to acquire such knowledge when and where it is not already available; and to apply it when it is, or becomes, available.
Nonetheless, Daniel Hannan’s article helpfully recognises that ‘commentators and politicians have been abuzz all this week about an excoriating article in the US magazine The Atlantic which sets out why Britain fared so badly compared with other countries, by observing that ‘expert advisory committees proved too slow and ponderous though he and the quoted article mistakenly attribute these shortcomings to ‘not enough dissenting voices’; that ‘crisis response cells could not cope and had to be by-passed’; that ‘the Cabinet Office had buckled under the strain’; that ‘the NHS had no adequate way of sharing data’; that ‘authorities could not meet the sudden need for mass testing’; that ‘the Foreign Office could not get people home fast enough’; that ‘the Department of Health could not design a contact-tracing app that worked’; and that ‘the Government overall could not sufficiently procure key pandemic equipment’. ‘All true’, says Daniel in concluding that ‘every item on that list is an indictment of our standing bureaucracies; that ‘before the corona virus arrived the desire to overhaul the government machine struck most people as slightly wonkish’; but that ‘we can now see it to be an urgent national priority’. I agree, but I hasten to add that this overhaul will be unavailing if it is arrived at through the usual debate of belief/counter-belief, rather than on knowledge of what needs to be done and of how to do it, as the terms knowledge and belief are definitively differentiated in this website.
Again, Daniel Hannan unknowingly supports application of my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation when he states that ‘those who share the prejudices of our (belief-only) quangocracy – a fondness for high public spending, Europhilia, an obsession with identity politics, even to the exclusion of what is supposed to be their primary task – don’t see the problem’ which I see as the unrecognised absence of knowledge. Yet again he is unknowingly supportive when he adds that almost every minister who has struggled though the last six months now grasps what has gone wrong is that an imperium in imperio has grown up, self-appointed and self-sustaining, which pursues its own priorities even when they flatly contradict the Cabinet’s stated objectives, but which proves useless when called upon to discharge its notional functions’; that ‘the solution is to ensure that people on the government payroll work for the rest of us rather than for themselves’; that ‘in some cases this will mean scrapping quangos altogether, as with PHE and (one hopes) the deeply partisan Electoral Commission without which we managed perfectly well in the pre-Blair era’; that ‘in areas where MPs need to delegate authority, it should be done narrowly and contingently’; that ‘public bodies should be required to plead before the relevant parliamentary committee every year for their budgets and indeed their continuing existence’; that ‘where possible, the function of quangos should not pass to MPs but to local authorities’; that ‘Town Halls are not nearly so prone as Whitehall to waste gargantuan sums on consultants and software cock-ups’; that ‘county and metropolitan authorities be permitted to raise their own revenue and to reassume primary responsibility for poverty relief‘.
He adds that ‘they or their elected police commissioners should set local sentencing guidelines’; and that ‘residents should have a direct say through local referenda’; that ‘these changes are too extensive to be made piecemeal’; that ‘there is an overwhelming case, as we leave the EU, for recalibrating our constitutional arrangements’; that ‘as powers come back from Brussels, we need to decide which of them to pass directly to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, and indeed to local councils and we need to negotiate a high degree of fiscal autonomy for devolved assemblies – and for English counties and cities’. However, I say that while the foregoing might be beneficial, none of it is achievable in reality, unless available debate-terminating conclusive knowledge replaces the otherwise interminable debate of belief/counter-belief to this or that transient belief-consensus pending further debate; and unless general agreement is reached as to the need to make good any absence of knowledge before legislating.
Daniel Hannan’s article concludes by observing that ‘those who are happy with the soft-Left setting of the current administrative state will doubtless protest that all that he has said is a massive distraction from the epidemic and the consequent recession’; that ‘he, in contrast, points out that the past six months have made the opposite point; that ‘the corona virus squall has shown that our ship of state was in a lamentable condition, leaky and dilapidated; and that ‘an altogether rougher tempest looms’; that ‘our debt has risen to above two trillion pounds’; that ‘we are in the sharpest economic contraction in our history’; that ‘we cannot hope to navigate the coming storm unless we first caulk our hull and clear our rigging’; that ‘the sea water is flooding in’; and that ‘we have no more time to lose’.
Again, while I can only repeat that no positive and enduring change is possible without a formal decision to replace belief/counter-belief debate with debate-terminating conclusive knowledge by submitting belief as hypothesis to the reality-evaluation (cause/effect experimentation) which validates belief to positive knowledge or refutes it to worthless belief as advocated in this website. It is only by this means that the above and all other bureaucratic failures can be rectified and prevented from recurring. If the fiasco so ably described by Daniel Hannan is insufficient to ensure this replacement of belief with knowledge as of now, I hesitate to imagine the calamity which will ultimately ensure this replacement. I hope it can be achieved sooner through this website. 2/9/20
Article 20What’s To Be Done Now.
The Preamble to this website has shown that our political parties now need to replace belief with knowledge in all of their future policy-making; that this is achievable only by treating all socio-economic beliefs as hypotheses for evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with the reality in which we exist and which we experience through our five senses; that this reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge for respective acceptance or rejection, was first manifest in the direct observation of reality which created our craftsmanship in earliest times and which continues today whereby the craftsman observes his causal tool-use to have, or not to have, the desired effect on his work-piece; that this reality-evaluation of belief to knowledge became manifest in our subsequent scientific method of enquiry which reality-validates or reality-refutes all such cause/effect beliefs, while pseudoscience ignores this necessity for cause/effect experimentation; and that it is recognition of the presence/absence of reality-evaluation of cause/effect relationships by which I now definitively differentiate the dichotomies of knowledge/belief, truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong, good/bad and science/pseudoscience for the first time ever. However, at this point, I hasten to explain that none of the foregoing implies a single knowledge-only socio-economic future. All political parties would remain free to offer party-specific knowledge-only futures for selection by electorates, the benefit of this change being that definitive knowledge always works in reality, while past and current belief-only policies have never worked and while future belief-only policies never will, except maybe by accident.
As to gaining pubic acceptance of my definitive differentiation of the above dichotomies, I recognised that reality stimulates our imaginations through our senses to rational beliefs as to its nature; that these beliefs are transformable to positive or negative knowledge of this reality by evaluation of their wider compliance or their non-compliance with it, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond such reality-evaluation in principle or in pro tem practice, but which cannot be accepted as knowledge of reality. On this basis, my book The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge and this website have shown that reality-evaluation of specific beliefs produced the craft and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science, engineering and technology which enhanced our physical welfare from the seventeenth century onwards, while our knowledge-only development of social cohesion was variously disrupted by conflicting religious beliefs, by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs, or by the reactions of ignored reality in ways which belief is unable to anticipate and avert. As to the absence of my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation from all media commentaries on current affairs, I have been using it in the Commentary Section of this website in order to reveal the confusion which arises from its absence and the futility of all efforts to reach conclusions without it, in order to demonstrate that the debate of opinion/counter-opinion is never more than the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge of reality, and that all that is produced by such debate is an elective belief-consensus pending yet more debate.
To support the necessity of adopting my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy as set out in Chapter 1 of the above book and this website, Chapter 2 of the book went on to show the benefits of doing so by recalling how our innate capacity for this reality-evaluation of belief to knowledge created our craftsmanship and social structures from time immemorial to the Iron Age, while Chapter 3 outlined the futility of our search for knowledge through rationality alone. Chapter 4 then showed how contending religious beliefs beyond reality-evaluation in principle, were resolved to orthodoxies only by successive Imperial Roman Edicts, while Chapters 5, 6 and 7 showed how religious and secular beliefs which touch on reality were gradually resolvable by reality-evaluation, initially by direct observation of reality and later by the cause/effect experimentation which initiated and developed physicochemical science. Thereafter, chapter 8 showed how physicochemical science transformed craftsmanship to technology and engineering and provided other sciences with deeper knowledge than the directly observable, while Chapter 9 showed the extent to which physicochemical science has so far explained the evolution of Universe, Earth and Life and how it took technology and engineering to their current levels, while Chapter 10 showed philosophy to be belief in its rejection of reality-evaluation, and while Chapter 11 showed how the secular now legislatively implement arbitrary interpretations of belief in equality, freedom, rights and environmentalism to the extent of corrupting commonsense, general and specific knowledge and even the scientific method of cause/effect experimentation itself, in ways never attempted by the religious. Finally, Chapter 12 showed the extent to which knowledge could harmonise religion with secularism, environmentalism with science, technology and engineering, and economics with commonsense, and how belief-only politics could be replaced with its knowledge-only alternative to the benefit of all both at home and abroad, provided only that available knowledge replaces belief in all future policy-making and provided that belief-only policy is not implemented until the belief can be replaced with positive or negative knowledge newly acquired to this end. 31/8/20.
Article 19Where Are We Now?
Having spent my civil service career from my post-doctorate recruitment grade of senior scientific officer, to chief scientific officer and director of a former national laboratory which included seven years in a headquarters division in London at the senior principle scientific officer grade; and having been motivated throughout by my personal objective of providing the administrative grades with experiment-acquired knowledge for the replacement of their preferred beliefs and opinions, I have to record that while no administrator ever sought to refute my proffered knowledge by debate, they never adopted it in their policy formulations which continued to be belief-only reflections of their own interpretations of the beliefs and opinions of electorates, by which in turn, they sought to influence whichever political party was temporarily in power. Again, when in disgust, I requested early retirement to try my luck as a private-sector knowledge-only consultant, I found that private companies were also disinclined to accept knowledge which they did not dispute, but which they were reluctant to endorse for fear of offending administrators from whom they sought contracts and for fear of failing to gain sub-contracts from other private companies which themselves were fearful of offending administrators to the detriment of their own governmental contracts in what was and remains a competitive belief-only commercial/governmental world, run by fund-distributing bureaucrats through whichever political party happens to have an elective majority at any given time.
As to the beliefs/counter-beliefs and opinions/counter-opinions of electorates and of commentators thereon, I always return to Socrates who is reported to have observed that the demos was quite capable of voting one way after listening to two debaters on one day and voting the opposite way the next day after listening to two different debaters on the same topic; and to have demonstrated by question and answer sessions with his contemporaries that none of them held sustainable meanings for the terms (abstract nouns) which they had recourse to in their debates; and that consequently in my terms they could not sustain a differentiation of belief from knowledge. Again, when told that the Oracle had declared him to be the wisest man in Greece, he is reported to have said that his wisdom was that he always knew when and why he didn’t know. However, for such attempts to clarify the thoughts of his contemporaries he was accused of corrupting the young and obliged to drink hemlock. Perhaps, it is this fate which ensured a demotic preference for belief over knowledge ever since, a preference perhaps excusable when definitive knowledge was as limited as it was in the lifetime of Socrates, the knowledge-only stonemason, but surely it is not excusable in the era of twenty-first century science.
As to my own lifetime, I noted as a university student that scientists themselves were largely unclear as to the nature of their scientific-method of knowledge-acquisition in that they seemed to take its experimental source for granted, rather than describe it as our sole means of acquiring cause-effect knowledge of reality; that no history of science ever described the centrality of its role; that no such author ever saw his account of history as an opportunity to explain experimentation by reference to its essential role in each step of the history he was otherwise expounding; that consequently the readers of histories of science written by pseudo-scientists such as Karl Popper and indeed Charles Darwin, never recognise the absence of the cause/effect experimentation which they themselves never undertook and consequently they make no reference to it in their self-styled historical accounts of science which reveal their reluctance to acknowledge the work of Gregor Mendel (1822 – 84) who applied cause/effect experimentation in his investigation of character-transfer in successive generations of the pea-plant (1857- 69) or to Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa (1401- 64) who sought to eliminate all other causes in his investigation of air as the sole cause of weight-increase in growing plants and wrote a book on the use of the balance in his cause/effect experimentation. However, he was ignored until taken up by Jan Baptist van Helmont (1577- 1644) at which point the carbon dioxide content of the gas mixture which is air was recognised to be the material cause of the effect which is plant growth in general.
However, a general recognition of the need for cause/effect experimentation is not to be expected, if even those who practice it do not explain it to their general readers. Nor can we expect this absence of explanation to discourage the imagination of such entities as the subconscious which cannot be known to exist in reality. When I first read Freud in my student-day efforts to differentiate science from non-science (nonsense) definitively, I noted that while Freud purported to access the subconscious of his patients, he could not by definition access his own; and that his book was thus meaningless, as is confirmed by a Spectator article on Confirmation Bias of 15/8/20 which shows that training to eliminate the subconscious bias of racism does not work, though the author Lewis Feilder still fails to recognise that it doesn’t work because conscious access to the subconscious is make-believe. 19/8/20.
Article 18Forget Local Lockdowns . . .
In his Daily Telegraph article of 3/7/20 entitled ‘Forget local lockdowns, we should be lifting restrictions in the not spots’, Fraser Nelson expresses his sympathy for Sir Peter Soulsby ‘the energetic Mayor of Leicester who ‘has been told to lockdown again just in case’ and states that ‘this blunt tool has been used because Boris Johnson felt he had no other choice, Professor Ferguson having said at the outset that a quarter of a million people were going to die if he didn’t close the economy’; that ‘the list of mistakes then made, is long and humiliating’; but that ‘there has been one big success with Britain’s Covid-19 testing capability now pushing 300,000 a day’; that ‘we can now forget about the R-number which has been stuck in the same range (between 0.6 and 1) since lockdown began’; that ‘we now have firm tests to judge Covid-19 the German way, by looking at new weekly infections in local areas per 100,000 of population’; that ‘Germany’s danger zone is 50 per 100,000’; that ‘the only part of England which fails this test is Leicester at 130’; that ‘for the first time we have figures for the whole country with Bradford at 46, Barnsley at 35’ London at 3 and southwest England virtually Covid-19-free’; and that ‘last week not a single case was recorded in Bath, Portsmouth, Rutland or Torbay’. In view of this, Fraser Nelson records his surprise that ‘so many theatres remain shuttered, offices empty, and schools on a skeleton service’; that ‘ministers have not applied these results to abolish mandatory restrictions and to ask people to be careful as pubs and campsites reopen tomorrow’; that nonetheless so ‘much remains in deep freeze with no theatres, no spectator football, no swimming pools, no meetings of more than six unrelated people and with return to work being complicated by asking employees to avoid public transport and to stay at home if the can, despite the continuing economic damage’.
Fraser Nelson then notes that ‘a second spike has not been experienced on the continent’ that ‘this ought to embolden the Prime Minister’; but that ‘he still looks discombobulated – as if unable to understand why, if he implemented such a draconian and costly lockdown, he has so little to show for it’; that ‘meanwhile, the mood in the cabinet is still deeply cautious with at least two of its members wanting to go even further with Leicester to the closing of roads and the barring of trains from stopping at its station’; that ‘the past few months have been so traumatising for the Conservatives that they are minded to move at glacial speed – or just talk about something else’; that ‘it was easier, this week, for the Prime Minister to talk about turning the A1into a dual carriageway than to assessing and repairing the economic damage inflicted by the lockdown’; that ‘it is easy to see why No 10 is despondent’ but that ‘it ought not to overlook the power of the testing tool now in its possession’; that ‘we now know that Covid-19 is a regional virus’; that ‘it pole-axed Lombardy but not Naples which has had fewer deaths than normal this year’; that ‘it struck Stockholm but spared Malmo’; that ‘Paris was hit but most of France was as safe as Wiltshire’; that ‘even when lockdown ended and people started travelling over Europe again, the virus did not re-start’; that ‘Italy as a country did not need to lockdown’; and that ‘this is experience from which Britain can learn’. Thus, he concludes that ‘local testing means that London, the most powerful economic engine in the country can be put back in motion more quickly’; that ‘the new Covid-19 testing apparatus can provide an early warning system which can sound the alert if infections spike’; that ‘if they do, local restrictions can be added; and that ‘more likely (more realistically) people can be told about the local spike and can react accordingly’; that ‘this is not playing roulette with local peoples’ lives: lockdown does that’; and that ‘this local approach does not inflict pain in parts of the country where the virus has almost vanished’.
He then observes that ‘the pubs and restaurants which open tomorrow will do so wondering if they can make ends meet under this new system – or for how long it will continue’; that ‘others have given up already’; that ‘the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton said yesterday that it is closing for good’; that ‘locally there is no pandemic’; that ‘of the million people who live in the city, just one tested positive for Covid-19 last week’; that ‘the Prime Minister now has the power to speed up the recovery’; that ‘he can press ahead with partial re-opening tomorrow, while being more cautious in places like Leicester and dealing with flare-ups as they arise’; that ‘with much drama and great expense he has built a huge testing tool which offers a faster route out of lockdown’; and he ‘needs the courage to use it’.
I was very pleased to read Fraser Nelson‘s review. However, I would add that if I had been involved in the UK’s pandemic study of 2016 or in Sage, I would have recalled for my colleagues that response-options are either to isolate the infected from the non-infected or the non-infected from the infected; that the former minimises the number involved and the economic damage, while the latter maximises both; that the former is thus the only realistic option; and that adoption of the latter in the form of a generalised lock-down would be a grave mistake, unlikely to be publicly accepted in retrospect. 9/7/20.
Article 17A Question Of Tolerance.
In an article under the above title in The Spectator of 13/6/20, Douglas Murray states that ‘our public figures must rediscover the true spirit of liberty’. After citing a few examples of the absence of liberality such as ‘the Black Lives Matter actions of those who attacked the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill’; and of those ‘who want to rename the Gladstone halls of residence at Liverpool University because his father had owned slaves’; and ‘who have taken Gone with the Wind out of their streaming services’: he goes on state that ‘we are seeing nothing more or less than the death of the liberal ideal’, though he admits that ‘liberalism was always a broadly defined term; a definition made only vaguer by Americans making it synonymous with Left-wing’. In contrast, he claims that ‘in its truest political sense, it encapsulates most of the foundations of our political order, including (though not limited to) equality, the rule of law – including the freedom of speech that allows good ideas to win out’. He then proceeds to claim that ‘in our own country, the much more serious assault on political liberalism comes not from the conservative right, but from the radical left’; that ‘over the past couple of weeks, well-meaning people have poured almost a million pounds into the coffers of Black Lives Matter UK, in the belief that they are helping a movement that will help black people, when in fact they have funded a deeply radical movement, the fund-raising page of which describes its aims as to dismantle imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and state structures’. He then concludes the foregoing preamble by stating that ‘as well as dismantling a non-existent menace (imperialism) it intends to bring down the economy and completely alter relations between the sexes (negatively characterised as “patriarchy”)’; and that ‘this is not liberalism, but far left radicalism of a type that has become very familiar of late’.
In watching the events of recent days, he expresses his surprise and that of others at ‘how far and fast such intolerant sentiments have run’ as exemplified ‘by the sight of a mob in Bristol tearing down a statue and jumping on it’; ‘by a labour MP saying “I celebrate these acts of resistance” and expressing ‘the need for a movement which will tear down systemic racism’; and ‘by the ranks of British police who could find no way to respond to this behaviour other than (in a newly invented act of faith) to “take the knee” before it’. Again, Douglas Murray widens his comments to the media ‘which has chosen to provide cover for such violence and to purge from their ranks not just people who dissent from it but, in the case of the New York Times a few days ago, anyone who helps to publish someone who dissents’. He then quotes Bari Weiss of that newspaper who explained last week that ‘the over-forties in the news business (like so many others) imagined that the people coming up under them shared their liberal world view’ only to ‘discover that these young people believed in “safetyism” over liberalism and the “right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe” over what were considered liberal values like free speech’. At this point, Douglas Murray opines that ‘the divide is even bigger than that, and now encompasses nearly everything’; that ‘where the liberal mind is enquiring, the woke mind is dogmatic; that ‘where the liberal mind is capable of humility, the woke mind is capable of none’; that ‘where the liberal mind is able to forgive, the woke mind believes that to have erred just once is cause enough to be “cancelled”; and that ‘while the liberal mind inherited the idea of loving your neighbour, the woke mind positively itches to cast the first stone’.
Having provided the above analysis with which I agree, Douglas Murray then goes on to say that ‘when The Spectator first wrote about the Stepford Students, it was asked why its writers took this so seriously – surely the students would grow up; He answers that ‘they did’, but that ‘they didn’t change; that when the magazine wrote off the growing legions of diversity officers and their implicit bias training and the mandatory requirement in government to “prove a commitment to diversity” in order to be eligible for any public appointment, it was greeted with the same dismissal’; and that as the American journalist Andrew Sullivan (himself now seemingly muzzled if not cancelled) put it two years ago: “we all live on campus now”. Thus, Douglas Murray states that ‘step by step, the UK came to have a public and private sector dedicated to the implementation of views which are barely distinguishable from those of the protesters who took to the streets in the past week or two’; that ‘it’s an ethic which demands that our society play a set of impossible un-winnable games of identity and “privilege” which ‘not only subvert but end any idea of tolerance’.
However, while I agree with his analysis, I note as he ought, that it does not provide any resolution for what is no more than one side of a debate of belief/counter-belief and/or of opinion/counter-opinion which I have shown can be terminally concluded only by replacing belief and opinion with knowledge, as I have definitively differentiated these terms in my third book and in this website. 9/7/20.
Article 16Article 16: What We Knew About Pandemics And Could Have Applied To The Covid-19 Virus.
This article applies my definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy which arose from my recognition that our imaginations are stimulated by our sense-perceptions of reality to beliefs concerning it; that these beliefs are validated or refuted to positive or negative knowledge of reality only by evaluating their consistency or inconsistency with it by further direct observation or by designed experimentation as to their cause-effect relationship with it; that this reality-evaluation of cause and effect first gave arise to our craftsmanship and later to our science; and that the absence of this reality-evaluation of cause-effect relationships is the source of pseudoscience which thus remains belief pretending to be knowledge, its cause-effect parameters having been arbitrarily selected to suit the initiating belief of the pseudo-scientist. Thus, I conclude that nothing can be known without belief being reality-validated or reality-refuted as I advocate in my third book (2010) and in this website; and that consequently nothing useful can be achieved without government policy being based on cause-effect knowledge rather than on belief or at least on the recognition that such knowledge is unavailable and ought to be acquired as soon as possible by my definitive reality-evaluation of belief as hypothesis.
However, despite my definitive knowledge/belief differentiation having been published in 2010, it has been ignored as in the leading article of the Spectator of 13/6/20 which describes ‘the science’ relied on by government as being ‘as divided as are politicians and the general public on how to tackle Covid-19’. Thus, as with all media articles, it fails to recognise that science by definition is never divided other than with respect to hypotheses recognised as such; that these are resolved by being reality-evaluated to definitive, conclusive and non-disputable cause-effect knowledge; and that while this knowledge can be enhanced and expanded by reality-evaluation of successive hypotheses either by direct observation or by cause-effect experimentation, it can never be refuted or rationally disputed, whereas politics is the definitive realm of disputed belief/counter-belief and of opinion/counter-opinion, the latter being merely the former supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and news/false-news, no set of which ever amounts to conclusive, debate-terminating, knowledge.
So, in light of the foregoing, what do we know about pandemics in general? Well, for a start, we know from the historical record that no disease has ever infected and killed all of an exposed population; that no pandemic has thus far killed the global population; that if it had, we would not be here now; that while the Spanish flu killed more than were killed in the preceding world war, even the Black Death was unable to kill all of the exposed populations; and that some individuals have always had some level of innate resistance to new infections. As to the current Covid-19 pandemic, we know from what we have been told that infection levels in the captive environments of cruise-ships appear to have been limited to 20-25% of these populations, despite the passengers presenting a higher proportion of the less-resistant elderly than they do in the population at large; that the elderly are most prone to Covid-19 infection; that the proportion of this subgroup in cruise-ships is likely to be higher than in the population at large; that children seem to be largely free of symptoms; and that recent claims suggest that, overall, the number carrying the virus may be 10 times the number registered as having had it.
As to our previous social response to the need for infection-control, we know that in pre-NHS times we had isolation hospitals for the infected; that the NHS has no such provision; that to free its beds for increasing numbers of Covid-19 patients, it discharged the elderly back to care-homes without ensuring that they were not virus-carriers; that instead of containing the virus the NHS became a spreader of it; that, in addition, the government itself became a spreader by failing to provide its NHS staff with adequate supplies of PPE; and that one way or another the government and the NHS became virus-spreaders rather than virus-containers. Indeed, it has been reported that where separate staff-teams were established for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 patients, these teams were interchanged weekly.
Again, the incapacity of the government and its self-styled scientists to mount an adequate sampling and analysis system resulted in their inability acquire knowledge as to the infectivity of the virus. Such a system could have determined the percentages of population samples which were carrying the virus with or without symptoms, which had recovered from infection without reporting it, and which had not yet been infected for a constant number individuals (e.g. 10,000 in each sample) within areas of the country selected on their differing population densities and differing economic activities. Such an approach would have provided knowledge of infection levels, spreading rates and intensities of transmission as time passed, instead of, or in addition to, their current collection of national daily rates of reported cases and deaths from which little or no actionable knowledge is acquirable. 26/6/20.