A Layperson's Guide to Adjudicating the Credibility of Scientists and Scientific Claims
What are the Characteristics of Someone Acting in Good Faith?
Regrettably, experts seldom recognize the limits of their expertise, and vis a vis covid seem unaware any exist altogether.
How is a person supposed to figure out if a claim regarding something that he has no experience or knowledge of is valid or true? Or, as applied to science: How can a person figure out what the ‘science’ ‘is’ regarding any particular question?
Firstly, “science” is a misnomer. There is no entity ‘science’ that communicates to us humans. Our collective scientific knowledge is in reality nothing more than the historical accumulation of logic applied to human observations, much of which has been borne out by real-world experience or trials.
Obviously, a layperson cannot generally ‘know’ a scientific fact on the basis of their personal scientific inquiry. Something basic like the existence of gravity, yes. Or if I throw a baseball 100mph at your head, you’ll sustain major physical trauma to your skull. But 99.99% of people never looked through a microscope or telescope, never worked in a lab, and never studied the abstract mathematical concepts that describe how physics and chemistry actually work. The only access a layperson has to any specific scientific knowledge is through the testimony of the people who perform the scientific inquiry or are literate in the subject matter (and Google, if Google happens to not be feeling particularly censorious about the topic of your inquiry that day).
This distinction is critical: People faced with a dilemma whether to accept a purportedly “scientific” claim that is not clear-cut or self-evident are not adjudicating whether inferences from observations, facts, and logic are a legitimate basis for determining reality – in other words, whether they believe in the logic of the scientific method – people are adjudicating whether the scientists who announce the findings of their scientific inquiry are credible and trustworthy. This is very rational - when you can’t adjudicate science directly on its merits, you can resolve it on the basis of the credibility of its purveyors. Put differently, the choice to reject the pronouncements of scientists is not a rejection of “science” or the scientific method, but a rejection of the scientists as untrustworthy individuals whose pronouncements are not honest and/or accurate representations of genuine scientific inquiry.
Fauci – his unhinged narcissism aside – was in fact accurately capturing the base instinct of many scientists when he declared himself to be the living embodiment of SCIENCE itself. To laypeople, there is often little distinction between science and the scientists who articulate what the ‘science’ is.
(Insecure scientists can feel threatened by the peasantry questioning their espousals, because rejection of what they’re saying by the illiterate masses is a de facto rejection of the scientists themselves as dishonest and/or incompetent and thus not a credible scientific authority, the ultimate slight to their fragile egos.)
Thus, a rejection of perhaps the most prominent scientist is indeed a rejection of ‘Science’ as it institutionally exists in society – because for laypeople, capital-’S’ “Science” does not possess an objective character separate from the minds and claims of its scientist spokespersons. Laypeople are completely beholden to the scientists to inform them of what scientific inquiry has yielded in much the same manner as the illiterate peasantry of medieval times were beholden to the local priest to inform them what the word of G-D was as written in the Scriptures they lacked the ability to read. Laypeople therefore correctly intuit that scientific experts should be subject to deep and abiding skepticism because of this radical imbalance of power, especially those who hold their credentialed status as a “science” authority above the unenlightened hoi polloi.
In truth, there are two other basic proxies that people use to assess the validity of scientific claims besides for the credibility of the people making a claim on behalf of Science - the characteristics of the claim, and how it performs in the real world. These I will (hopefully, when I have the time) address in separate articles.
Regardless, the upshot of all this is: Anyone who frames the rejection of “experts” and/or their claims as a rejection of the proper application of the scientific method is a repulsive and manipulative liar engaging in propagandistic intellectual thuggery.
So how do laypeople assess the credibility of experts or scientists?
In acknowledgement to the reality of human biases and limitations, there exist basic institutional rules by which scientific and academic inquiry and study are performed. This is both a quality control measure – scientists generally don’t want propagation of “bad science”, as it is not beneficial in the long run; plus the vast, vast majority want to succeed in making genuine scientific progress – and necessary to maintain institutional credibility in the eyes of the public, who would otherwise warily regard anything emanating from the halls of academia as likely corrupt in some measure. Basic rules and guidelines are not exclusive to the ivory towers of academia, but are a ubiquitous guardrail integrated into the structures of most Western societal institutions.
Clearly, the notion that one can question and entertain the possibility of professional malfeasance and dishonesty is a normal and routine part of societal discourse and a functioning polity of engaged citizens (at least those not mindlessly killing zombies all day in their parent’s basement).
The main point of this article however is to flesh out some the characteristics of someone acting in good faith - rules of thumb for how you can tell if an expert is probably a real expert acting on the basis of their expertise or if an expert is probably a fraud who is using the façade of his or her credentials to push an agenda.
The reason I am using “good faith” as the description of a legitimate expert acting on the basis of clinical expertise and judgement is that this is what we are directly adjudicating for the most part, i.e. does person “X” behave in a way that suggests he is acting based on objective/rational and thorough analysis as much as is practically possible. Or conversely, we infer from behavior that suggests a lack of acting in good faith that someone is being guided by something other than rational logic and thorough analysis in conducting scientific research or in determining what is in the best interests of the public.
On that note, the goal of any public official - or expert - must be to make the best possible decisions and policies on behalf of the public (if it isn’t, we have a corruption problem). Therefore, us laypeople can use that as the yardstick for figuring out if they are indeed acting in good faith - or ‘following the science’ as they like to put it. Obviously, if we can determine that the officials and experts are not trying in good faith to “follow the science”, then we should assume that their public policy making is not guided, or even meaningfully influenced, by rational scientific calculus; rather it is being run according to the very astute and equally rational discipline of ‘political science’.
The following are a series of characteristics that collectively will generally be manifest and readily identifiable in those acting in good faith. They are derived from universal principles - universal because they are universally self-evident and agreed upon - and are fairly standard conventional wisdom that we all instinctively incorporate in our daily lives without even necessarily realizing it. And they are all things that would greatly help with the production and implementation of policies and actions by government officials, that is to say that failing these “tests” is ultimately detrimental to your own stated policy goals. Significant failure to adhere to them is therefore rightly interpreted as an indication that you are not really interested in the official stated policy rationales, which at a minimum are presumed to not be the result of faithfully adhering to “the science”.
This list is not exhaustive. I chose mostly things that I firstly thought of, secondly are generally objective and so are easier to apply, and thirdly are helpful for assessing the "covidacracy" of pandemic experts.
Obviously, any one of these by itself is not automatically dispositive that someone is corrupt or compromised. The idea is that if someone fails the overwhelming majority of these “tests”, then it is pretty obvious - and certainly rational - for us mere peasant laypeople to reject them as not faithfully applying the scientific method, but rather following whatever perverse and corrupting incentives exist to distort “the science”.
The Characteristics of Honest Experts & Public Officials
Professional Capacity
Solicits Contrary Opinions
The back and forth of debate is a critical part of fleshing out any topic. Failing to have anyone presenting contrary or alternate views is not just negligent, but deliberate malfeasance.
Willingness to entertain they are wrong
Obviously, someone who is unwilling or unable to entertain the possibility that they may be wrong is unfit to be involved in public policy making on any level, because they are not remotely objective. Furthermore, such an individual in a position of influence is particularly dangerous, for others beneath him will be wary of suggesting that he made a mistake.
Accountability
Does anyone face any accountability for mistakes or malfeasance? Is there a mechanism for enforcing accountability? Without the incentive of being accountable for your actions and decisions, human nature is for people to allow themselves to pursue other objectives, or simply be lazy -- if you aren’t accountable for the results, you aren’t invested in the outcome; if you’re not invested in the outcome, you don’t care as much what the outcome is. And if you’re not going tp be held accountable, then you could even try some things you’ve always wanted to test out but never had the chance….
Solicits Input from stakeholders, especially those most adversely impacted by your decisions/policies
This is another fairly routine but important characteristic of good faith - that you make sure to have as full a picture as possible of what all the effects of any course of action will be - especially the negative effects. If you don’t bother to find out how people will be impacted by a potential course of action, than you are obviously not even trying to chart a careful and prudent policy. This undermines your credibility as the public who is adversely impacted will naturally and legitimately assume that at best you don’t care about them and at worst that you are their enemy.
Minimizes the adverse consequences as much as possible
This is important for two reasons. The first is the same dynamic as the previous characteristic. The second is that if you truly wanted to succeed with the implementation of a public policy, then you need to get the people whose compliance you need in order to ensure the success of the policy to buy in. If you are asking people to assume a substantial burden, the least you can do is to mitigate it as much as possible, and surely not needlessly antagonize the very public whom you need. This is 1,000 times as true for public health where population buy-in is especially critical to the success of a public health policy. So someone who doesn’t attempt to mitigate the negative effects as much as possible by definition does not genuinely believe in whatever policy they are trying to implement.
Carefully avoids the appearance of any impropriety
One of the most praiseworthy customs in Western societies is that we formally codify that the appearance of something untoward - such as conflict of interest or corruption - is prima facie disqualifying. (Yes, in practice doesn’t always live up to the ideal.) There is a very simple but profound reason that this is such a critical feature. If the appearance of corruption etc was not in itself disqualifying, then we would be perpetually suspicious every time there was the appearance of a potential conflict of interest. Yet it is usually quite difficult and impractical to adjudicate whether the appearance is just that, or if there really is something corrupt going on. Were this the case, there would be little if any institutional credibility - a problem endemic to third world countries where everyone tacitly understands that naked corruption is just “how the game is played”. By enshrining a prohibition against even the appearance of impropriety, then the appearance itself is by definition corruption, which makes it much easier for us to tell if someone is corrupt. This also disincentivizes corruption and makes it harder for it to be carried out, because even the appearance of corruption will be proof of corruption.
The upshot of this is that someone who disregards the appearance of foul play is by definition presumptively not acting in good faith whatsoever, for only someone who does not care much about the public would be willing to forfeit crucial institutional credibility in order to promote or implement a policy or agenda.
Does someone’s opinion always seem to align with the prevailing political winds
Because if it does, that sure tells you what the primary consideration is to them…
This isn’t the most objective metric, because it isn’t exactly obvious to everyone what the “prevailing political winds” are at any time exactly. And sometimes, the winds are actually a Cat 5 hurricane that even the bravest official would correctly surmise are not worth fighting against and would therefore just go along and live to fight another day. (I can think of a few examples, but it is not worth the consequences to spell them out explicitly. Yes, this is both ironic and proving my point.)
Is Someone Nakedly Political
Bringing politics into domains that are supposed to be politically neutral and nonpartisan is an obvious sign of bad faith for public officials or experts who must be above politics as an inviolable condition for maintaining their credibility. Attacking one’s opponents on a political basis, or framing one’s opponents as deriving from a political persuasion, is powerful evidence that you’re sublimating “science” to political considerations.
Engages in Ad Hominem Attacks
One of the hallmarks of a consummate professional is that they never engage in outright insults or disparagements. (In fact, academic language is so overly sanitized that a deep insult in academic parlance can actually sometimes come across as friendly to the uninitiated. True story.) Someone who stoops to levelling insults (even if they are justified) is unlikely to be acting in good faith at minimum.
Claims that “the Science” “demands” to choose policy “X”
Policy choices are by definition about much more than just the technical information describing the factual reality such as it exists. For example - even assuming that we could know this with certainty - scientific analysis can a most indicate that if we don’t lockdown under specified parameters, “X” # more people will get infected with covid. Science cannot tell us that locking down is therefore the right policy choice, because that involves things like value judgements (and involves the scientific analysis of a few other disciplines besides modeling epidemiology).
No genuine scientific expert would confuse science with policy judgements. The conflation between the two is a favored tactic of corrupt authoritarian experts who seek to exploit the prestige accorded to the rigorous application of the scientific method as coverture to lend support to the decidedly unscientific whims of whomever is currently wielding the most power and influence.
Personal Capacity/Behavior
Character Traits
People acting in good faith tend to have virtuous personality traits in proportion to their “good faith-ness”, among them the following:
Humility - critical to be objective about one’s own limitations and be at peace with the possibility that you may be dead wrong.
Cool-Tempered - people with hot tempers generally instill fear in others - others who then refrain from saying anything they think will provoke said temper - meaning that a hot-tempered person will not have the benefit of wise counsel or contrary opinions, which are obviously quite important, especially to realizing one’s own errors etc.
Diligent - the importance of not being lazy is self-evident and (hopefully) does not require elaboration.
Compassionate - you care about others only to the extent you have compassion. Caring about others is an irreplaceable motivation that leads one to make a proper effort to avoid unnecessary negative effects of their actions or policies, or to sacrifice or endure the hardships necessary to maximizing positive impact. (Do you really want to spend an extra two weeks travelling around the country to talk with people on the ground to get better firsthand information?)
Backbone/Courage - if you lack the moral fortitude to stand up for the truth/etc., then you cannot be trusted to stand up for the truth.
Forgiving (as in NOT being vindictive) - Public personas especially will take more than their fair share of abuse (although to be honest, most of the abuse probably is well-earned), so the ability to shake it off and not care is quite important. Conversely, vindictiveness (or resentment, hatred, or deep and abiding anger) severely distorts a person’s moral compass and intellectual judgement.
Shame - this is more important than it may seem at first glance. Someone who lacks a sense of shame lacks a pretty elementary force that restrains people from acting with impropriety, and certainly from really egregious behavior and audacious lying or malfeasance.
Honesty - easily the most significant of all of these enumerated traits. The necessity for honesty is so obvious as to be practically a tautology.
Benefits personally from society’s misfortune
Someone who benefits from a the existence of a crisis - be it in their finances, prestige, power, reputation, or anything else - cannot be trusted to truly want the crisis to end, for that would mean the end of their personal good fortunes. Also, this is about as blatant a violation of “the appearance of conflict of interest” as you’ll ever get.
The threat of accountability for the failure of your policy or claim
Does someone try to thwart every and any attempt at real accountability? How do they react viscerally to the suggestion that they should be accountable, or worse the threat of being held accountable in practice? If your actions are vulnerable to being exposed as inappropriate, negligent or worse so that you will suffer serious indignities and losses should this happen, then you will fight like a cornered hyena to make sure that your actions or decisions are never recognized as being wrong.
Being more definitive than is warranted
If you put your neck on the line, then you will warp the line to save your neck. Being definitive is doubly disqualifying, for it signifies that you are reckless and not restrained by the actual facts, data or logic; and it means that you are very exposed, for it is likely that you are wrong, and being wrong usually leads to doubling down on the wrongness instead of admitting it and correcting course.
Being unjustifiably definitive also is a fairly reliable indicator that the plain old facts and logic won’t support what you want to do, which is why you are definitive in the first place despite there being unresolved ambiguity.
Relies on Charisma
This one can be a bit tricky, but someone who relies on their charisma to push an agenda that would otherwise be unpopular - not merely someone who is charismatic - is usually doing so because they can’t win on the merits. This is tricky because charisma isn’t intrinsically an evil trait at all. But someone who uses charisma as a manipulative force is generally doing so in bad faith. Consider some of the feckless fawning flamingos that are our esteemed mainstream media.
Does an expert speak out against policies that are based upon a distortion of his or her opinion?
Say for instance an expert explains that wearing masks when in close proximity to others is a critical intervention to mitigate disease spread. Then a bunch of jurisdictions go ahead and mandate wearing masks even when you’re by yourself surfing on the ocean. And some really enthusiastic folks decide to wear masks alone in their cars. Do the experts say that this is stupid? Or do they tacitly endorse such profoundly anti-science behavior by their silence? (Or do they actually come out and explicitly defend or even endorse it…)
The mark of an objective individual is that they call balls and strikes in both directions. If they only criticize “anti-science-ness” in one direction, that usually means that they are not objective to put it mildly.
History of being a liar (or is currently amidst an ongoing fit of mendacity)
Yeah, we might want to care about this just a little…
Quality of Expertise
Speaks/writes with technical precision
This is a hallmark of a (honest) genuine subject matter expert - they articulate the subject matter with technical precision.
‘Technical’ means detailed and specific, as opposed to general statements that are vague and ill-defined. For example, someone who says “masks work” is not being very technical versus someone who says “an N-95 respirator on average will filter out 95% of particles 1 micron or bigger” - they are worlds apart. Notice how in the second statement provides specific parameters that define what is being alleged, and actually tells you what is going on.
‘Precision’ means that the statement is worded so that it does not communicate untrue or unfounded things, even if the gist of the statement is true. For example, compare “remdesivir will probably kill you” vs, say, “remdesivir is a very toxic drug that kills a high percentage of those who take it” (I don’t remember offhand the specific data parameters for remdesivir) - remdesivir has not been established to kill the majority of people to whom it is administered, but it is highly toxic and dangerous with an unacceptably high mortality rate.
Can comfortably articulate complex points with clarity and precision in regular layperson English
Another hallmark of a genuine expert is that they have a command of the subject matter that allows them to distill it into clear points and arguments that non-experts can readily understand with ease.
Institutional Indicators of Bad Faith
Unanimity
As General Patton put it: “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking”. Unanimity is a very reliable indicator that a consensus is not the product of the individual judgment of the participants, but rather is the result of a corrupting external influence.
Claims of unanimity (or overwhelming consensus) as an argument in itself are an even stronger indicator that the referenced consensus does not represent the informed or carefully considered positions of expert minds, because the only reason that you would think that making such a claim is useful and necessary is that you need to eliminate or hide from view the contrary expert opinions (or malign contrary common sense) against your manufactured consensus, but you cannot do so on the basis of logic and facts. Thus the claim that “all experts agree” is presumptively an attempt to thuggishly force a view or opinion upon others that is not legitimately warranted based on the available evidence.
Tolerance of corrupt or compromised officials
If clearly compromised, incompetent, or corrupt people are allowed to remain in their positions of influence and power, it is a good indication that policy is not being guided by what is best for society, but rather what is best for the people making the policies.
Incentivized to act in good or bad faith?
This is pretty straightforward - what are the incentives facing people in any given position? On the whole, people in general will act in accordance with the incentives they face. If the incentives are to be a good public servant, then people will tend to be better public servants. If however the incentives are, say, to be a shill for corporations or special interests, well…..
Incentives come in a variety of forms, including financial pressures/inducements, social pressures, political or cultural pressures, reputation, and even one’s sense of morality (yes, pretty much everyone with exceedingly rare exception genuinely desires to think of themselves as a good person who was a positive influence upon the world).
Conclusion
It is no wonder that so many people look at the state of our illustrious experts and conclude that they aren’t, well, illustrious, or even legitimate experts. They are so terrible that making the above list was fairly easy - just write down some of the reasons that these fellows look and feel so corrupt and inept. Which leads to one last but critical character trait:
Do the experts have any capacity for self-introspection
As in do they ever entertain that maybe, just maybe, they at least have made a few mistakes in how they tried to run their policy decision making and implementation?? A genuine admittance on this - genuine only if it is accompanied by some actual changes in how they do stuff from here on out - would be significant, because someone who can admit to making a public mistake that had consequences can eventually come to realize & admit they made other worse errors.
Experts and officials who do not ever show any real introspection or self-awareness, however…
So go and judge for yourself: How do the public officials and medical experts who are vaunted by the mainstream institutions stack up?
Brilliant. Will share far and wide. Thank you!