Principles of Applied Epistemology (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

I decided it was time to post up on Medium some principles of Applied Epistemology--I allude to it from time to time on the Medium medium medium. I worked on it sporadically but over a period of time and put my final thoughts up four days ago. Nobody read it! Three people from outside Medium read it--possibly you folks--but that will be it now. Was it worth it? Well I treat my whole medium career as a place to try out stuff so... probably. Anyway, here it is spread over a few posts. I can amend it so feel free to criticise either in detail or in whole.

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World problems and how not to solve them.

A problem only exists because we don’t know how to solve it. Since that is a problem in itself we tell ourselves ‘we’re solving it’. We hunt feverishly for a solution but, while that’s happening, we create temporary ‘workarounds’ and assume in the fullness of time we’ll find out what’s causing the problem, solve it and ensure it won’t happen again. Meanwhile the workaround does the job. In the fullness of time, we have a tendency to assume the workaround was the solution.

The technique, effective though it is, carries a grave danger. In applied epistemology, it is called ‘careful ignoral’. Ignorance may be bliss but if ‘careful ignorance’ is necessary it could be storing up trouble. Take the latest Big One to hit us, the COVID pandemic. We still don’t know what caused it but we’ve dealt with it. We worked around it. Are we busy looking for what caused COVID so it doesn’t happen again? Mmm…

Having dealt with COVID, we’re not all that bothered about pandemics in general. We weren’t much bothered about them before COVID, so pandemics are unlikely to hurtle up the world’s agenda now we’ve dealt with the one that was. We have tacitly adopted a policy of ‘next time it happens, we’ll know what to do’ even though we’re not sure what did happen or what we did.

We’re not bothered about it, that’s the important thing.

[Mick Harper]

It is the benchmark for all ‘world problems’. We can be ludicrously complacent about ones that might polish us off but go into total meltdown about ones of almost-nil importance. (Don’t ask, one of them will be your pet peeve and I will have made an enemy for life if I dismiss it as relatively insignificant.)

This is not necessarily a bad strategy. It may be a case of ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’, a nostrum that should otherwise be approached with extreme caution. Pandemics, for example, come and go and we ride them out. The human race, we have discovered, has plenty of spare capacity so even the worst one on record — the Black Death — was scarcely more than an actuarial blip in the relentless advance of humanity. To be honest, the Black Death helped rather than hindered the relentless advance. As long as you weren’t around at the time.

By the by, we still don’t know what caused the Black Death. We have chosen to believe it was pathogens carried by fleas and spread by rats but is that true or is it just careful ignoral? Let’s ask the two contending authorities:

[Mick Harper]

We reached our COVID position in much the same way, as can be illustrated using that applied epistemological standby, the ten-step programme (there is a technical reason why there are ten, which I’ll tell you about some other time):

(1) COVID is being studied with great intensity by the best scientific minds all around the globe. Except what caused it. That is being carefully ignored. Or being blamed on Chinese intransigence since nobody likes to admit they’re not doing what they should be doing.

(2) When we say ‘the best scientific minds’ we are referring to people trained and grown to eminence in western-style universities and research institutes. That means they have all been trained in the same way, using the same data sets and operating to the same paradigms and parameters.

(3) They won’t necessarily all come to the same conclusion but the conclusions won’t vary much and gradually, thanks to the magic of peer review, they will coalesce into one ‘generally accepted explanation’.

(4) Since academia operates by internal recruitment, promotion and promulgation, has no external supervision and is the highest authority for these kinds of questions, this will become in due time the only explanation. Students are not typically taught more than one in the brief time available for COVID explanations, they are taught the generally accepted one.

(5) When those students become in their turn academics they will teach it not as ‘the generally accepted explanation’ but as the ‘cause of COVID’. This is not dishonest, it is just the way universities, the human mind and reliance on old lecture notes operate. Suffice it to say, within a single generation there will not only be a single explanation, it will be the ‘known explanation’. If it is already known, there is no reason to consider alternatives.

Only three sets of people will be interested in exploring these alternatives.

[Mick Harper]

(6) The first is dissident academics — yes, they do exist. And they are damned dangerous. They speak the language, they know where the bodies are buried, they might easily acquire a standing in the world beyond academia. Nor do they have to be right, the mere news that accredited academics are searching for alternatives undermines faith in the Standard Explanation. “If the experts are having doubts, why the hell should the rest of us give it the time of day?” That is why dissident academics are treated as heretics and cease to be academics ASAP.

(7) The second set of alternative-seekers is a much larger group and wholly divorced from academia. From polite society in general. They are the crazies with their conspiracy theories, bad science and reluctance to use joined up thinking. Or rather join up any stray thought that happens to occur to one of them and off it flies on internet wings to take its place among the others. However, the looney-tunes are useful because of their tenaciousness in amassing data and their fecundity with off-the-wall theorising. Like spaghetti, one of them may stick.

(8) The third group consists of what we might term ‘metathinkers’ (and includes applied epistemologists). People who are aware, for one reason or another, that ‘the known explanation’ is in reality a ‘best guess hypothesis’. They know from study and experience there is no guarantee it will be the correct solution. Indeed, they know there is good reason to suppose it won’t be. Correct solutions tend to have quite dramatic effects as they cascade through the intellectual firmament; incorrect ones just sort of ‘hang around’, being taught and learned without much cognitive traction. It is not difficult to recognise the difference.

(9) But beware! Successful Best Guess Hypotheses have been arrived at not because they were nearest-the truth, but because they were best fitted to act as ‘workarounds’. For example, global warming being caused by the greenhouse effect is a Best Guess Hypothesis and that has produced immense traction. It has caused the whole world to change its ways. Whether that means it has mended its ways remains to be seen.

(10) Yes, well, that’s why we use the ten-step technique. It’s always the tenth one that’s important. The one that leads to some real head scratching. I hope to God it isn’t fleas.

[Wile E. Coyote]

I actually think that rival paradigms did develop during Covid.

Once it became clear that Covid was a critical moment, and could not be solved in the short term, it was a case of how best to manage. The world divided into camps, those that opted for the Chinese/WHO European lockdown model, ie, it's the governments job to look after the people, the country, the health service, and let's say those that didn't, or in many cases (poorer nations) couldn't.

Perhaps the most interesting in the latter camp was the South Koreans, who were an example of "Cities First". Unlike in Europe where we have a suspicion of technology, Koreans (fearing a catastrophic wipe out) in the big cities, saw track and trace as the best solution to their survival, so logically demanded more and more track and trace from their government, whilst also demanding that this was then done nationwide.

It will of course eventually happen here. The Lockdown is a primitive desperate response. It's only because we oldies, townies and country folk have a catastrophic fear of modern information technology infringing our privacy that we don't take advantage of the tech now.

Let's give a free smart phone to all, and then stand and clap, track and trace.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Another in my rolling programme to bring applied epistemology to the masses via medium.com

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Donald Trump And The Lowest Common Denominator

Applied epistemology specialises in things everyone (else) gets wrong. We don’t make a lot of progress because when everyone’s getting it wrong together, anyone who says different is ipso facto a looney tune. And we get it wrong ourselves sufficiently often to give that belief plausibility.

This also applies when there are two groups of people saying the same (but opposite) things. Should applied epistemologists intervene to point out error, each group assumes they belong to the rival group. Since lots of questions have only two answers, yes/no, they are often right in this assumption. On this question. But once you’ve been placed on the wrong side for anything, that’s it for you, chummy. You’re not allowed to pick and choose when it’s the righteous vs the ungodly.

It is though possible to set up a situation under controlled conditions where not only is everyone wrong, it can be demonstrated they are wrong. It is instructive to see how individuals react when it is demonstrated to them. Here’s an example. [You have to spot the error.]

[Mick Harper]

I have deleted this story from Medium. I chose quite the wrong example since, as two people pointed out, the Lowest Common Denominator could be applied to the mass of Trump supporters as opposed to the arguments. Shame because the LCD/HCF confusion is universal.