The Commonsense Approach.
In the Daily Telegraph of 29/4/20 Allison Pearson took the commonsense approach to assessing the significance of the death toll registered for Covid-19 compared with those of more familiar diseases. Thus, she reported that cancer kills 165,000 people in the UK every year while nearly 170,000 people die of heart disease with 42,000 of those being classified as premature; that tragically those deaths are about to go through the roof because fear of corona virus has deterred thousands from going to hospital; and that it may well be that “excess deaths” will eventually exceed those attributed to the virus. Again, she reported that just 140 people under the age of 40 had died in this pandemic, while recalling that one gets absolutely no sense of these comparisons from the alarmist reportage of Covid-19 deaths. Furthermore, she reports that while the daily press-briefings continuously emphasise the numbers of new cases and deaths since the previous day, little to no attention is given to the economic impact of the lockdown in contrast to the significance of her foregoing comparisons of death rates.
As to ‘the science’ which underlies the current government assessment of this pandemic and justifies its lockdown response, the relative absence of media criticism prior to that of Matt Ridley and David Davis is surprising. However, their Daily Telegraph article of 10/5/20 simply asks ‘was lockdown based on crude guesswork?’ Nonetheless, while they answer in the affirmative, they would be more convincing had they properly compared non-science (guesswork) with science. Before proceeding, I will again describe the unique nature of science, which I first published in my third book in 2010 and which continues to be available from Amazon on the basis of print-on-demand. In this book, entitled The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge, I describe Science as cause-effect knowledge and its method of acquiring this knowledge as being to imagine the cause of an effect; to treat this belief as a hypothesis for evaluation of its compliance or non-compliance with reality by design of an experimental apparatus which enables the cause to be applied and the effect to be observed in isolation from all other possible causes. If the effect is observed, the cause is identified. If it is not observed, then the scientist must design an experimental apparatus which will enable a second cause to be thus reality-evaluated. When the scientist has thus identified the true cause, his experimental apparatus will enable him to vary its magnitude and to observe and measure the changed magnitude of the effect, from which couplings he produces a mathematical equation which enables quantified effects to be calculated from measured causes ever after, this knowledge having been acquired for all subsequent time.
As to mathematics, it can be concluded that equations are transformable to other equations by their rearrangement; but that such rearrangements produce no new knowledge, they merely make it possible to apply existing knowledge content in other ways such as to calculate effect from cause, all of the sequential equations in such mathematical analysis being restatements of the initial equation, this being the meaning of the repeated equals sign in all such transformations. As to mathematical modelling the knowledge mathematically inserted into the model is the knowledge which comes out. The only advantage of such modelling is the ability to apply computing-power to the intervening mathematical analysis. It is possible, however, to use computers to test the validity of a hypothesis by producing outcomes for comparison with reality. Thus, meteorologists interested in weather forecasting can test the effects in the atmosphere of measurable parameters such as temperature and pressure by modelling their effects in respect of their ability to predict the onset of such large scale effects as the trade winds or the monsoon in any given year; to observe the extent of the observed agreement in reality; and thus to evaluate the effectiveness of their current understanding of how such temperature/pressure measurements might relate to their ability to forecast weather more generally and more accurately.
It is clear from Ridley and Davis that the models used by ‘the science’ respecting Covid-19 predicted mortalities no better than guesses. Thus, in comparison with my foregoing analytical comparison, we see that instead of using the actual mortalities to evaluate their theories as to infection transmission, Ferguson sought to predict the actual mortalities. In confirmation of his failure to do so, Ridley and Davis report that Ferguson’s track record is that his modelling in 2001 led to the culling of 6 million livestock and was criticised by epidemiologists as severely flawed, while later in the 2000s he predicted 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu when the final death tolls in each case were in the hundreds. Again, they report that application of the Ferguson model to Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy predicted 40,000 deaths by 1 May – 15 times too high; and that according to Edinburgh University which ran the Ferguson model, the same inputs gave different results on different machines, and even on the same machine with different central processors.
9/6/20
Article 5Freedom Of Speech.
In The Spectator of 29/2/20, Toby Young announced the official launch earlier in the week. of his Free Speech Union which he had intimated in and earlier edition of this magazine. On reading this earlier edition, I had asked myself whether his intended Union would defend the freedom to express all opinions or only those of himself and his supporters, such as those named as ‘directors of his Union, Douglas Murray and Professor Nigel Biggar and of his various advisory councillors such as Sir Patrick Garnard, a former High Court Judge and the historians David Starkey and Andrew Roberts; the satirist Andrew Doyle, The Spectator’s columnist Lionel Shriver; a number of jounalists-cum-intellectualists, such as Claire Fox, Matt Ridley and David Goodhart; and 17 academics including a professor of history at Harvard, the behaviour geneticist Robert Plomin and the feminist historian Zoe Strimpel.’ In his article of 29/2/20 Toby Young states that ‘about 15,000 people have contacted him wanting to join since (he) first spoke about it in August (2019).’
He admits, there’s been some push-back which he discounts as ‘puerile’. Nonetheless, he now addresses my earlier question to myself posing his own questions, ‘what if (an opponent) does possess toxic views? Would we come to their defence?’. as to answering these questions, he cites the discussion in the Today programme in which the presenter Justin Webb set out what Toby Young calls the standard rational for restricting free speech, that ‘for too long the voices of straight white men have been allowed to drown out those of marginalised groups and by reining in people like Toby Young himself he is actually making it easier for others to participate in public conversation further to these However, his answers are inadequate; that people like Toby Young are actually making it easier for others to participate in public conversation; that his new Free Speech Union will actually encourage everyone to take part and will thus be counter-to its implied objectives; that those who insist in ‘safe spaces’ and trigger warnings aren‘t opposed to free speech, they’re helping to create a level playing field in which everyone feels free to speak; and that the Free Speech Union is incompatible with its own objectives in so far as its objectives can be judged from the known objectives of the founders listed as above by Toby Young himself.
In his Spectator article, Toby Young quotes Ira Glasser, ‘the legendary former head of the head of the American Civil Liberties Union as having said in a recent interview that it’s a mistake to think that the historical beneficiaries of free speech have been bigots and patriarchs. On the contrary, without the protection of the First Amendment, civil rights leaders wouldn’t have been able to organise protest marches in the 1960s. Defending free speech is in everyone’s political interest, he pointed out and the left would do well to remember that. Having cited this quotation, Toby Young states that his Union is hoping to protect people being mobbed on social media without appearing to be against free speech. After all when thousands of Twitter users joined a pile-on against someone accused of saying something the regard as offensive – which happened to Roger Scruton last year- aren’t they just exercising their speech rights? OK, he says, in Roger’s case his words were taken out of context and deliberately twisted to cast him in a bad light. But what if the person in question possesses genuinely toxic views would Toby’s Union defend him? If not, he asks where we would we draw the line? His proffered answer is his Union will use its judgement. My answer is that everyone on each side of every argument or debate is using their respective judgements and that no Union of thinkers including that of Toby Young will ever take us beyond such judgements/counter-judgements, beliefs/counter-beliefs and opinions/counter-opinions.
In contrast to Toby Young’s initiative, I simply ask what is the point of free speech if all that is spoken of is merely beliefs and counter-beliefs; and all that is ever achieved by way of resolution is a succession of transient belief-consensuses. In further contrast, my website campaign is intended to win public support for the replacement of belief with knowledge in all future government policy making on the basis of my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation, knowledge being the only means by which the debate of belief/counter-belief can be terminated once and for all.
Article 4Continuing Failure To Differentiate Knowledge From Belief.
Having obtained a much delayed Brexit through the belief-consensus of a general election, Dominic Cummings announced his belief-based opinion as to how such delays might be avoided in future implementations by the recruitment of ‘misfits and weirdoes’ to the civil service in such numbers as to overcome all opposition from existing and self-perpetuating establishment. In commenting on this proposal, Henry de Quetteville declared in The Daily Telegraph of 12/1/20 that ‘this dream’ arose from the success of the US post-war creation of its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). According to de Quetteville, Cummings wants his misfits and weirdoes to make the UK the best place to be for the production of totally transformative computer networks, GPS, self-drive cars etc. Indeed, for those who can invent the future by creating new industries and delivering £ trillions for the UK economy, ARPA/USA having created 35 trillion and counting for the US economy, while in comparison, Boris Johnson has vowed to double state funding of R&D expenditure from 34 billion per annum (2.4% of GDP) by 2027.
Meanwhile Dominic Cummings claims that no country in the world is better able to this as well as we can, but that to do so we need to overcome our tendency to short-term planning and our aversion to risk; that to reverse these tendencies we must hand our problems to the widest possible range of ‘brilliant minds’; and that to do so we must reform the UK civil service which he blames for our failures thus far. Thus, while the ARPA/USA was born of the Cold War and concentrated on defence, Cummings intends the ARPA/UK to be active across the board with no such remit or restriction; to be operative by the end of this parliament; and to be based north of the Oxbridge-London triangle. The de Quetteville article also indicates that this new approach will be scientific in character as exemplified by the centres set up last year (2019) at a cost of £5million each in Birmingham, Glasgow, Oxford and London. However, the article also included cautionary criticisms based on the nature of ‘scientific research which cannot produce on demand’.
My initial response to Dominic Cummings; to Henry de Quetteville; and to the public in general, is that their fore-going proposals and comments are further examples of the ubiquitous misunderstanding of science, of what it does produce, and of the means of its production, all of which I am seeking to correct by means of this website. To these ends, I go further in stating that while Reformation of the Civil Service is long overdue, its defects are not so much related to its alleged caution, as to its failure to recognise the available which already refutes the beliefs and opinions on which it bases its policy-formulations; to its consequent failure to utilise this available knowledge in these policy-formulations; and to its failure to recognise the need further specific knowledge to be acquired if not already available prior to formulating any future policy .
Thus, my proposal for Reformation of the Civil Service is that, it must be made to recognise already available knowledge wherever this is relevant to future policy-making; that it should reformulate existing belief-only/opinion-only policies on the basis of already available knowledge; that it should recognise the need to acquire further knowledge if existing knowledge is insufficient for the formulation of future policies; and that it should advise ministers on the basis of available knowledge and advise them against the implementation belief-only/opinion-only policies. In this way the political system as a whole will implement policies which will actually work in reality and avoid those which will fail in reality in the absence of the relevant knowledge.
For the convenience of my readers, I repeat here repeat my definitive differentiation of the knowledge/ belief dichotomy and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad, which I arrived at by observing that reality stimulates our imaginations through our senses to rational beliefs transformable to knowledge by evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with reality, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond reality-validation in practice or in principle, but which cannot be accepted as knowledge. Again for the convenience of my readers, I repeat that the reality-evaluation of specific beliefs as hypotheses produced the craft and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science and technology which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards, while knowledge-based social cohesion was variously disrupted by conflicting religious beliefs, by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs or by the reaction of ignored reality in ways which belief is unable to anticipate and/or avert.
26/5/20.
Article 3Saying It As It Is.
In The Mail on Sunday of 3/5/20, Peter Hitchens, as always, ‘says it as it is’. He opens this particular article by stating that for six weeks he has been saying that the Government’s policy on Covid-19 is a mistake. However, in going on to say that most people do not agree with him; and that others bafflingly don’t care about the greatest crisis he has seen in his lifetime while and regard the debate as a spectator sport: he reveals that he sees himself as being engaged in debate. Nonetheless, I have always seen him as being beyond debate whether or not he sees himself to be so. Either way, he is ‘saying it as it is’, rather than in the debating style of ‘it seems to me’ Thus, he goes on to say that the corona virus is not as dangerous as claimed; that other comparable epidemics have taken place with far less fuss and we have survived them; that the death rate is lower than the Government believed; that it passed its peak in this country on April 8, well before the crazy measures introduced on March 23 could possibly have affected matters; that the actions we are taking against it are gravely out of proportion and will destroy the lives of thousands and the prosperity of millions; and that this is not life versus money, but, it is life versus life.
In continuing to say it as it is, he goes on to say that there are already many cases in which the normal flow of money in exchange for work, services and goods has just stopped; that we are close to the time when a huge number of jobs are in danger of permanent extinction; and that already the government is a in a position from which it cannot reverse without having to admit that it was wrong to have put itself there in the first place; that having feared that population would ignore a lockdown, the Government now fears that the population has now be scared to the point of failing to comply with a freeing of the lockdown let alone its actual lifting; and that while the Treasury is beginning to regret the lockdown, it also fears the public response to any attempt to lift it Thus, as Peter Hitchens concludes, we face months of continuing idiocy as the wealth of centuries is frittered away for nothing, while we face a grim penury, made worse by the increasing lack of freedom and the insolence of authority. He further concludes that there will be an accounting for this, eventually; that it ought to be soon; that it will be important that protests such as his were made and heard during the course of the lockdown; that when the much needed enquiry eventually sits in judgement on these times and on those responsible, nobody will be able to say that criticism is just hindsight; and that nobody pointed out at the time that a grave mistake was being made.
In a footnote to the above, Peter Hitchens reported on the response he received to his enquiry of the Blood Transfusion Service consequent to his MoS article of the previous week. Thus, he reported that this Service has joined the general wave of bigoted prejudice against people who have celebrated their 70th birthdays. Again, he says it as it is, that it was, as it so often is with official bodies these days, like speaking to a computer. He states the response to have been that the ban on the over-70s is ‘for their protection’ and is based ‘on government advice’, which they seem to have accepted without a second thought, and he further states that this infuriating assumption of post-seventies doddering senility is just as bad a prejudice as all the others we rightly ban: and thus, he asks why is this one permitted?
For my part, I only add that everything Peter Hitchens complains about is capable of being dismissed as belief or a best opinion, while saying that it is observable reality would be closer to my definition of reality-validated knowledge than it is to being merely counter-belief. Thus, I am happy to state that saying it as it is goes beyond the interminable debate of opinion/counter-opinion which is merely the debate of belief/counter-belief partially supported by facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence or news/false news, no set of which is debate-terminating knowledge.
19/5/20
Article 2A Further Example Of The Failure To Differentiate Knowledge From Belief.
Further to exemplify this ubiquitous failure, I now refer to the attempt by Tim Stanley to answer the question ‘what does follow the science really mean? (Daily Telegraph, 27/4/20). He concludes that it means what questioner want it to mean. In support of this conclusion, he cites Drs. Dan Ericson and Artin Massiki of Bakersfield, California who claim that extrapolation of currently available test results shows that the number of those infected by the Corona virus is probably in the millions which puts the mortality rate as low as 0.1%; that the lock-down was a mistake; and that by staying indoors we are weakening our immune systems, while, in contrast, he cites the counter-claim another Bakersfield physician that social isolation has no effect whatsoever on the immunity system and in consequence he and asks rhetorically, ‘what does it mean to say politicians are following The Science? Tim Stanley himself then claims that science is all about the collection and observation of data while at the beginning of the epidemic hardly any data was available and little more is available even now; and that the public health consensus supported the lock-down, a few scientists did criticise it, as did the Standford epidemiologist John Ioannidis.
However, Tim Stanley does not describe the nature of the data cited. Nor does he define what he means when he uses the term, science, or the term scientist. Nonetheless, he goes on to quote Professor Gordon Dongan who poses himself the following questions on the Cambridge University website: can the Corona virus hide in patients who have no symptoms; will it burn itself out; or will it go away, to which he gives the following answers: ‘we do not really know; we hope not; and we hope so, but it is not certain’, and he asks ‘what is the value of experts like me?’ in concluding that ‘we are all trying to make informed guesses.’ Tim Stanley then goes on to opine that the point is that science is not a religion or an ideology with all the certainties these entail; that it is a method of analysis and as such it ought to be accompanied by doubt and debate; that science without data is just theory; and that some theories about what should be done are confusingly different from others- i.e. on his own analysis such theories are just more conflicting data. On this basis, he concludes by saying that we should not let the science become a shield for political decisions and political mistakes. However, by now my readers will now be aware we cannot let the science be a reason for acting one way or a shield for acting the other way without knowing what science actually is.
In response to the above, I can only repeat my Campaign message that scientific knowledge is indisputably acquired by evaluating its compliance or non-compliance with reality that this positive or negative knowledge; that this acquisition is achieved by experimentation designed to substantiate a hypothetical (believed) cause-effect relationship certified by experimentation designed to ensure that the hypothetical cause of the observed effect certified is the actual cause by excluding all other possible causes; that if the hypothetical cause does not produce the effect, then other hypothetical causes must thus experimented with until the real (actual) cause is identified; that in contrast pseudoscience does no such cause-effect experimentation; and that pseudoscience can thus be identified as the correlation of two parameters arbitrarily selected as cause and effect. Again, in contrast to pseudoscience, a scientific experiment enables the demonstrated cause to be altered in magnitude and correlated with the observed alteration in the magnitude of the effect; that this correlation of magnitudes is then expressed in a mathematical equation which enables the magnitude of the effect to be calculated from any measured magnitude of the cause ever after; and that this will remain true whatever other knowledge may subsequently be found by experimentation in its own or in any other field of science.
Indeed, despite my long experience of it, I continue to be astounded that scientific method of knowledge acquisition remains so totally misunderstood by the media of what is now the twenty first century.
12/05/20
Article 1:The Ubiquitous Failure To Accept Science as Knowledge and Pseudoscience As Belief
Having gone live with this website on 30/4/20, I now exemplify the above failure by referencing two articles in the Spectator of 4/4/20. In one, Rod Liddle opined in respect of corona virus that ‘epidemiologists are captured by their own paradigms and see only one small margin of what is a very big picture; and that they change their tune with every day that passes’. He then opined that ‘this is fair enough because that’s how science works’; that ‘it is practiced by fallible humans, however admirable its methodology’; that ‘it is never certain’; that ‘something new always comes along’; and that ‘we should always have our doubts’. Again, in the other, Mathew Paris opines that ‘we do ourselves down by putting experts on a pedestal by saying The Science must be obeyed’; that ‘we end up wiping away the doubts and debates which inform actual science’; that ‘we ought hear the professionals debate with each other; that ‘perhaps medical and statistical correspondents should question the experts’; and that ‘good scientists know the work of Karl Popper whose contribution to the philosophy of science was his statement that ‘no scientific hypothesis deserves the name unless it is capable of being refuted’. Clearly, neither are aware that scientists reality-validate or reality-refute hypotheses (beliefs) by experimentation to the non-debatable positive or negative knowledge which differentiates science from the beliefs and opinions of pseudoscience. Nor are either aware that this differentiation is the foundation of my Campaign for knowledge to replace opinionated belief in all future policy-making.
Indeed, it was clear to me as an undergraduate, that Karl Popper totally misunderstood the method by which all scientific knowledge is acquired; and that the ‘philosophy of science’ was and is an oxymoronic couplet as are more jocular examples such as ‘jumbo shrimp’, ‘young conservative’ and ‘military intelligence’. However, to reveal more fully the otherwise ubiquitous failure to differentiate science from pseudoscience and knowledge from belief in general, I refer my readers to Arthur Herman’s Book (2001) The Scottish Enlightenment, subtitled, The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World. While, as a Scot myself, I do not wish to argue with this conclusion of an American who claims German-descent, I do wish to draw attention to his failure to differentiate science from philosophy. He himself argues that while Scotland’s turbulent history from William Wallace to the Presbyterian Lords of the Covenant laid the foundations for this ‘Scottish Miracle’ it was harsh economic reality which compelled Scotland to accept Union with England in 1707; and that within decades of this Union, a remarkable circle of Scottish thinkers gave birth to the key assumptions which underlie modern politics, morals and cultural life. He identifies these thinkers as Adam Smith and such of his friends as David Hume, Allan Ramsay, Lord Kames, William Robertson, William Ferguson, John Home etc., and while Joseph Black is the only scientist thus listed, he fails to differentiate him from the non-scientists.
Again, in describing the contributions made by identified native Scots, emigrants, and their descendents to the creation of the British Empire and to the creation and development of the USA, he again fails to differentiate scientists, engineers and industrialists from politicians and administrators . Thus, with respect to America, he cites such as Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Carnegie who were of the former Group without differentiating them from such as John Witherspoon and Woodrow Wilson who were of the latter. Indeed, in the absence of this differentiation, he recounts that when Andrew Carnegie approached Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, with the intention of funding a scientific-engineering faculty to foster industry and commerce, the offer was rejected. As described by Arthur Herman, these two strands of Scotland’s legacy had met and retreated in mutual incomprehension, the outcome being that Carnegie donated funds for the creation of a boating lake in order that rowing might ‘take young men’s minds from the football favoured by Harvard and Yale’. However, I wish my readership to recognise that the incomprehension arose from the ever-present failure to differentiate scientific knowledge from beliefs/counter-beliefs and their respective opinions.
To further illustrate the failure of attempts to resolve debates of belief/counter-belief in the absence of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge, I remind readers of Woodrow Wilson’s failure to gain a Senate belief-consensus in favour of his League of Nations initiative in the aftermath of World 1.
5/5/20