On Peeling a Hard Boiled Egg Redux
Ramble on. I interviewed myself, so I may or may not make sense. Do I ever? It has the cadence of informal speech, not well polished prose. I did buff it a bit.
Introduction
I started this site years ago on another platform, and it was primarily devoted to epistemology. I jokingly called it Guerrilla Epistemology and named it Ephektikoi, which is an old ancient Greek term for a type of skeptic. By the way, I don't know if I pronounce that correctly, but this will be written, so it doesn't matter. In any case, for decades, I've been very concerned with knowing what to believe.
Evolution of Discourse
Decades ago, probably in the late '60s even, starting as a teenager, I would read articles, and I would read rebuttals to the articles. Back then, magazines would sometimes carry rebuttals in subsequent months; in articles, letters to the editor. I don't see that anymore, but in any case, there would be a chain of two or even three letters on a given topic or articles on a given topic, letters or articles both. And I would read the skeptic magazines and be amazed at the varying positions that were taken by the skeptics, (the organized skeptics) who I believe to be pseudo-skeptics, and the people that they were criticizing. They would provide space occasionally for rebuttal articles, and there would be many letters to the editor.
I have always read the letters to the editor. Sometimes I'll read the letters to the editor, and I won’t read the article. Bad me.
Modern Information Landscape
Nowadays we have electronic media and YouTube and various publication sites. Articles get published, videos get made, Tweets get Tweeted. Discussions rage on sites such as Quora and Reddit and Stack Exchange, or Stack Overflow, Amazon book reviews and assuredly others, and the one thing that is a commonality is that people's opinions vary all over the map. Each person seems to be convinced that they have understood the issue and they give their opinion.
There's a very rude expression about opinions, body parts, smells, and who has them, but I won't go into that; I’ll let you figure it out.
Everybody has opinions, and it doesn't mean they're right. There's a law in logic, the law of contradictions that says if there are two contradictory opinions, they both can't be right. Now a logical extension of that is that it may be that neither of the conflicting views are right. When you read opinions on any topic, that could even be peeling hard-boiled eggs, you would find a variety of views, and they contradict; they can't all be right. Sometimes they agree; they may agree in one part and disagree in another, but on the whole, the contradictions are apparent, and each person seems to feel that they understand the situation asserting it quite forcefully in some cases, getting mad even. They can't all be right. So the problem reduces to one of epistemology, the study of knowledge, knowing what is true.
Challenges in Knowing the Truth
Short answer is in a lot of cases we probably can't know. We can think about it probabilistically, and that might be useful, and a lot of modern mathematicians, statisticians, and scientists try to do that, but on many, many issues the truth is never obvious. The world is inextricably confounded.
This sometimes has life-important consequences, particularly in terms of nutrition and medicine and when you reach the end of life you realize how important that stuff can be; expertise does suffer from the same failings. You can't rely on experts actually knowing the truth; they can tell a really good story, they can use big words and they can give you explanations, but it doesn't follow that what they've come up with is true. Same thing for science; science is subject to paradigm shifts routinely and there's a lot of evidence that most published research findings are false. John P. Ioannidis wrote about this, but two former editors of major journals, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, said that a good percentage of what they published is false. From the UK journal, The Lancet, Richard Horton, a former editor said this1. From the American journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell, a former editor, said this2
So there are any number of critics of science now and particularly of medicine, and so many opinions rendered and so many contradictory opinions. It often becomes important to know the truth because it can be life critical, but we can't know who is right; we just see that there are opinions about this, opinions about that.
The Truth in Different Realms
On any topic, when you start to look beyond the safe and conventional, you find views that are diametrically opposed, and YouTube has brought that out. There are videos with hundreds of comments.
I know that the authorities want to constrain the narrative to what they consider true, but they're not more likely to have the truth. I think that's just an authoritarian tendency that exists in the world: and leaders and bureaucrats. The politically correct now think that they know the truth and they want to deny other people the opportunity to express their opinions.
So I titled this article "How to Peel an Egg" and I think if you look up on YouTube or the internet for advice on peeling hard-boiled eggs, you'll find quite a number of conflicting opinions. The fundamental issue about peeling a hard-boiled egg is that sometimes the shells come off easily, and sometimes as little pieces at a time. It's very hard to separate the shells from the egg. However, in the end, the method is simple. You crack the shell and you pull off chunks. After that are detailed views on how to do it most efficiently. In the end, it works in any number of ways.
Certainty in Concrete Realms
So there's all kinds of realms where we cannot be sure that we know true belief. I think science is probably beyond its sell-by date, in many cases; I did worship science as a young man. I actually went to school and had the goal of becoming a scientist. So eventually I settled on experimental psychology, which is arguably a science. Maybe not a very good one, but a science. And I made it to graduate school before I decided that wasn't for me.
Our Species has Survived
So there are areas where we can be pretty sure that we know what's going on because our species would have died out if we weren't able to predict the truth or understand the world. It has pragmatic consequences. You know, when you are trying to figure out what plants to eat and what waters to drink and whether to run away or stay in fight when invaded or how to knap a flint or how to bind a spear point onto a shaft; there are all kinds of things where we're pretty good.
Hallmarks of Stuff we can be More Certain of
And the characteristics of things we can be reasonably sure of include these things at least:
· It's concrete. We're dealing with stuff that's readily observable.
· Human scale and amenable to our sensorium.
· Low variability, repeatability, consistency.
Most important, it's concrete. We're dealing with stuff that's readily observable.
Also, it's human scaled and amenable to our sensorium. So human scaled in terms of time, not too fast to perceive and not so slow that we can't see it. In terms of space, not too small to see, although we do have tools to extend that range and not too large to see as in cosmological stuff. And we do have tools to extend that range. But with an energy or a sensory modality that we can use, so we can see within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We've extended that with some of our tools so we can see infrared with certain devices and we can use radio waves to transmit information and radar and so on. But without these technological advances, none of that is possible without the human scaling.
Another thing is low variability, repeatability, consistency. If you have something that works reliably every time or just about every time, depending on the situation, then you come to think that you have knowledge about it. So for instance, when you lift a stone and throw it, it travels through the air and falls down. That's pretty repeatable.
You can peel an egg. Well, that's repeatable. Maybe not precisely repeatable, but repeatable.
You can hammer a nail or you can knap a spearpoint. Well, that's not so repeatable. I've tried that, cut myself. Obsidian is very sharp, very sharp; they use it for scalpels in some rare places or rare situations. In any case, repeatable for those skilled at it.
You hit a walnut with a hammer it cracks. I think I might have done that. You might find some exceptionally hard walnuts and you have an exceptionally wimpy hit, so it doesn't crack, but in general, you hit it with sufficient force. Well, you use the amount of force required to make it crack, don’t you? But you can't be too wimpy.
However, consistency and low variability are the keys to seeing things that are probably true, are almost certainly true. We can understand the world and without that, out species would have died out long ago.
Abstract Realms of Opinion
But then you get into more abstract realms of opinion on politics or even how to best peel a hard-boiled egg even, and opinions will vary and they cannot all be right. And it doesn't follow that any are right.
As my work colleague Robert told me years ago when he questioned a narrative I was giving him, he said, well, a lot of people can tell a good story. That perplexed me and bothered me, but stuck with me. And I think that his observation is true. I think he was full of it on the topic we were talking about as he was on a number of other things, but nevertheless, a lot of people can tell a good story. It doesn't mean that the story is true. It might be a story that's well told, very articulate, seemingly supported by facts, but it's wrong.
Ramble off.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness”.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine”