Facts and Fables: Try listening to experts

Do vaccinations cause autism, do we get sick from 5G radiation, does the Loch Ness Monster exist? Only an expert can tell us how something really works, writes philosopher Herman de Regt in this Night University essay. ‘Science is the answer to everything. If science does not have or provide an answer you may believe whatever you want.’

Lees dit essay in het Nederlands.

‘God made the Earth, but the Earth had no base and so under the Earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues and feet.

But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.’ Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerro quote the orientalist Lane here in their Book of Imaginary Beings (1967).

It is not easy to be an expert these days – someone who is knowledgeable professionally or through experience. It seems that many no longer accept the authority that belongs to the expert. As a result of the vaunted critical thinking, the magister dixit (the master has spoken and therefore I believe it) no longer sounds like a valid argument for putting someone’s opinion above your own.

It is often said about expertise that it is ‘just a bundle of opinions’ and that even the best expert must admit that there is never one hundred percent certainty that the next prediction will turn out true – ‘Right?’ As an expert, it is not easy to hear more and more often that our knowledge does not see further than the earth itself, and that human knowledge does not extend at all to the darkness under the water where Bahamut swims.

At the same time, we are inundated by an almost endless array of know-it-alls claiming what the dark sea beneath Bahamut really contains. ‘That’s really how it is!’, ‘This is really going on!’, or ‘What they don’t want you to know!’: clickbaits that we naturally find difficult to resist. The Truth seems to sink into the bottomless darkness beneath Bahamut as soon as we notice – if we notice at all – that the myth traps we are swimming in are the pipes of the algorithmic duck decoy.

The anything-but-virtual cager smilingly collects the advertising revenue we leave behind with every bit of lost privacy and autonomy, and we stare disappointedly into the dark with a nagging feeling that our knowledge is very short-sighted and does not see into the depths of the divine darkness above which Bahamut swims.

Because we once fought, with good arguments, for the importance of freedom of expression, everyone is permitted to vent their opinion for truth. Not just those who in fact know, but also those who merely think they know, and even those who do not know. Everyone’s opinion seems to carry the same weight!

How else do we get out of this Maelström of information than by jumping overboard from the creaking ship of beliefs, tying ourselves to a lighter floating vessel of dogmas and hoping for a more friendly digital sea around the binary Lofoten? When we enter calm waters, we will undoubtedly have to pay for our adventure with gray hair, but we do not even enter calmer waters – Bahamut still swims beneath us in the divine darkness.

‘All men by nature long for knowledge,’ says Aristotle in the first part of his first book of his Metaphysics. We naturally desire to know what’s going on. No wonder we seize every opportunity to gain knowledge, and no wonder we are disappointed when a source that promises such knowledge does not deliver. No wonder that we seize every opportunity to at least get the feeling that we think we know what is going on and no wonder that we do not want to give up this feeling of understanding. Giving up a feeling of understanding is downright unnatural.

That’s why it’s complicated. Not only are we naturally drawn to the blissful feeling of understanding what’s going on when we dive deep into the myth trap, we also don’t allow ourselves to be corrected by an expert afterwards. That natural refusal to believe what an expert tells us can have painful and dramatic consequences.

The most obvious recent example is awfully close to home: the percentage of very young children (2020 birth cohort) who participated in the full National Vaccination Program for infants in annual report 2023, in which babies are vaccinated against whooping cough and measles, among other diseases, is declining and stands now just above or even just below 70% in several Dutch municipalities (VZinfo.nl and CBS).

Take the municipality of Tilburg. Vaccination rate in 2017: 93.6%, vaccination rate in 2023: 73.8%. This means that the protection factor that results from a high percentage of vaccinated babies in those places is no longer self-evident. A veiled way of saying that it is an utter disgrace that in the fifth largest economy of the European Union, babies can die unnecessarily from whooping cough. Parents suddenly seem to feel that ‘nature’ protects against measles. Suddenly they seem to feel that ‘nature’ is protecting their children from whooping cough.

These are fables, but attractive fables. I quote the national Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant’s reporter Haro Kraak (March 28, 2024): ‘When Britt Ditmar recently saw the news about the declining vaccination rate, she was not surprised. In fact, her first thought was: ‘Great, we’re going back to basics. More and more mothers are choosing to put their own feelings first and not allow themselves to be persuaded.’

Ten years ago, Ditmar (33), who works as a self-employed person in healthcare and as a sports instructor, was the only one in her area who decided to no longer inoculate her children. Now she knows many people who make the same choice, she says. ‘I hear it more and more from friends and mothers at school.’’ We will return to Mrs. Ditmar in more detail.

In short, no one wants to float on a sea of uncertainties, so we use every buoy to keep afloat and keep life largely predictable – but we float on a sea of threats, uncertainties, and risks. Over there! Bahamut! From the bottomless ocean it rises and swallows up the explorers who were looking for the dry promised land under their feet. How to proceed!?

؏

What do you mean, ‘How to proceed’!? Science, of course! Facts, of course! Truth, of course! Unmasking fables and fairy tales! Mapping the world! Make reliable predictions! Show what happens here when you do that over there! Correct errors! Reveal prejudices! Test hypotheses! Conduct experiments! Teach probability rules! Believe experts! Disenchant the world! Teach kids science! Prevent avoidable suffering! What do you mean, ‘How to proceed’!?

But this is exactly where the trouble starts, some say. What is truth? What is science? What is a fact? What is a fable? What is probability? What is an expert? What is progress? What makes the world better? These questions are all legitimate questions.

What is not right, however, is that people then sigh, grumble, and complain that we do not know the answers to these questions. In fact, we have pretty good answers to all these questions, although it takes energy to understand these.

When I say that an expert is someone with a successful empirical track record – i.e. someone is an expert in plumbing if that person is successful in solving plumbing problems – then again, there is room for a lot of questions. There are also good answers here, but they also cost a lot of energy. When I say that science is our most powerful tool for solving problems, which also makes the relationship between expertise and science obvious, numerous questions follow.

If I say that only a statement can be true or false and that a statement is true when that statement corresponds to states of affairs or facts, then there are more questions to ask. If I say that the scientific method of doing research can be any kind of research if the research is done under the assumption that the nature of the world is independent of my personal beliefs about that nature of the world, many people will probably already be turned off.

Saying that this makes sociology as a science more difficult than biology and psychology more difficult than quantum field theory does not help anything. If I say that a fact is a state of affairs, that doesn’t say much – but further explanation takes time. When I say that a fable does not refer to states of affairs, but to a representation that does not correspond to those states of affairs, many sigh. What do we all mean by those terms?

Well, if you see me as an expert in these issues, then I must be able to explain and illustrate everything – and I rarely get the time for that, but in principle I can, just like others. And I think it demonstrably leads to a world in which we pay more attention to the regular relationships between the facts and run less risk than when we believe in fables.

As Barack Obama once quoted the politician Moynihan: ‘You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts’. As soon as we are able to also philosophically argue this insight, we can effectively counter cynicism and relativism. It’s all about the facts: science is a progressive and fact-based perspective that serves us.

؏

If we defend science as the only source of reliable information about ourselves and the world we live in, it won’t be long before someone asks rhetorically, ‘That’s all fine, but doesn’t science presuppose an open mind? And don’t researchers often lack an open mind? Isn’t science just a mere opinion or an implicit tunnel vision, then?’

Such a person can happily continue to offer alternative views on numerous events: ‘The 2020 US election results are fraudulent.’ ‘The world-ruling elite that someone like QAnon refers to really exists.’ ‘Vaccinations cause autism in children.’ ‘The 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001 were committed by the American government itself.’ ‘People can have a clear consciousness without brain processes.’ ‘The attack on the audience in the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Moscow is the work of Ukraine.’ ‘There are already aliens on Earth.’ ‘Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed John F. Kennedy.’ ‘The theory of evolution is incorrect because in nature we find ‘Intelligent Design’.’ ‘The Holocaust never happened.’ ‘The Apollo Moon landing was staged.’ ‘The Earth is flat’ (according to the Flat Earth Society; see the great documentary Behind the Curve (2018)). ‘SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus) was created in the laboratory and spread deliberately.’ ‘There is a monster in the Scottish Loch Ness’ (most recent spectacular photo (Chie Kelly): 2018).

‘Princess Diana was murdered by the British royal family.’ ‘5G masts produce sickening radiation’. ‘Aircraft vapor trails are chemtrails (planes deliberately release chemical or biological substances).’ ‘Water remembers what was once dissolved in it.’ ‘Thierry Baudet (Forum for Democracy) is a reptile’. ‘There is an all-powerful, all-knowing invisible person to whom you can turn in prayer and who can intervene in your personal life.’ ‘The idea that global warming of Earth’s atmosphere is caused by humans is a hoax.’ ‘Homeopathy is an effective medicine, outperforming placebo.’ ‘People are more than their physical bodies.’ ‘People make choices, but they could also have chosen something else.’ ‘Ernest Louwes is the murderer in the Deventer murder case.’ ‘Russia is more democratic than the Netherlands’ (dozens of Dutch people want to emigrate to Russia, including a Hilversum councilor who has since resigned, because Russia would offer more freedom than the Netherlands). Etc., etc.

؏

We can only counter these claims with expertise – always in one way or another the result of scientific research. In the first and last instance expertise is the result of empirical ’trial & error’ and the successful solution of very practical problems that challenge us.

Of course, there is freedom to cherish your beliefs, but also try to listen to experts, to people who know their stuff – people who have an understanding that is evident from the state of affairs: experts actually solve problems! It is true: ‘Yes, it pays to have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out’.

‘Try listening to experts.’ Why is this so difficult for so many people today? It is here that Mrs. Ditmar’s case is telling. She decided to no longer vaccinate her children. Why not, actually? Reporter Haro Kraak noted this: ‘Eleven years ago, Britt Ditmar had her daughter vaccinated against known infectious diseases. ‘I was young and did what I was told. Immediately afterwards my daughter became ill, her lungs were inflamed, and she was very short of breath. That was very scary. Doctors said it was no big deal. But a few months later, with new vaccinations, it happened again.’

She especially hated that the medical world denied that the vaccinations had anything to do with it. ‘After that I chose the natural route and never gave my daughter and later my son a jab again. I started reading more and considered this: what risk do you want to take?’ Ditmar concluded that the chance of her children becoming seriously ill is ‘negligible’. […] ‘The measles is severe, but a child becomes so strong if it is exposed to such a disease naturally.’

She finds it terrible that four babies have recently died from whooping cough, but it does not make her think otherwise about the vaccine, which according to several studies offers 90 percent protection, but whose effect she considers ‘unproven’. A bigger problem is that people eat and live unhealthy, she believes. ‘When I see the average shopping trolley, I understand why children are so affected by a disease like measles.’‘ (Volkskrant, March 24, 2024)

This puts the case of ‘Mrs. Ditmar’ in a different light. She noticed that her daughter developed a serious lung disease after vaccinations and interprets these cases as evidence for a causal relationship, if only because this conclusion gives her a strong reassuring feeling of understanding and a guideline for her actions: no more vaccinations. The experts, on the other hand, emphasize that the vaccinations have nothing to do with the lung disease.

Because the experts go against Mrs. Ditmar’s own feeling of understanding, and because Ditmar’s feeling of understanding (like everyone else’s!) is super strong, she rejects the experts. In other words, the reason that fables (‘vaccinations cause serious diseases in the vaccinated’) can have such an enormous influence on the beliefs we cherish is that those fables initially give us a strong feeling of understanding, given natural, psychological mechanisms, and that illusory feeling of understanding is very difficult to correct by listening to experts.

The fact that Britt Ditmar is not believed by the experts makes her an easy prey for the social media channels that spread conspiracy theories. Think of initiatives such as (the Dutch) Café Weltschmerz, which has developed into a full-fledged conspiracy factory during the corona epidemic – conspiracies for which there is no reason to believe them.

(When I was once asked by this Café to explain how difficult it is to learn to think critically, and what its limits are, my interview was subsequently doctored and abused to promote the 9/11 conspiracy theory that the US government secretly committed the attacks in 2001.) Ditmar is offered the resources to strengthen her feeling of understanding by believing there is a vaccination plot.

According to the long-term research program European Social Survey (2023), 21% of Dutch people believe that all important decisions in world politics are secretly made by a small, undercover group of people. And the next 20% are neutral towards such a world conspiracy: maybe it’s there, maybe not.

And regarding groups of scientists, many Dutch people also believe in conspiracies: 17% believe that groups of scientists distort, invent or conceal evidence to mislead the population, and another 18% don’t know – maybe no, maybe yes. Mrs. Ditmar is not alone in saving her feeling of understanding by dismissing experts…!

Believing in conspiracies generally feels good because you have the feeling that you understand why the things you experience happen and you think you can successfully anticipate what is yet to come. Who are experts to take away people’s blissful feeling of understanding?

؏

As a mother, Britt Ditmar reasons according to the post hoc, ergo propter hoc principle, ‘after this, therefore because of this’. In everyday life it seems to be a reliable knowledge principle, but is it also in the case of vaccinations?

Suppose someone learns that a child shows symptoms of autism immediately after vaccination. Suppose this happens in the US. The American figures (number of children born, percentage of vaccinated children, percentage of children who develop autism, percentage of autistic children between 6 and 24 months old, number of days between 6 and 24 months, number of times children are vaccinated in that period) immediately show that because of statistics it is expected that 1079 children will show symptoms associated with autism within a week after vaccination (see the clear sum on the web page of The Logic of Science).

An expert can explain this to you. The ‘after this, therefore because of this’ principle tricks the human brain into believing that vaccinations cause autism, but this is not correct given the expertise gained in vaccinating children.

How do we get Britt Ditmar to reconsider her beliefs after she noticed that lung disease followed her daughter’s inoculation? How do we do that in general with people who have a strong but unjustified feeling of understanding? How do we get people to align their beliefs with our most reliable information?

The difference between facts and fables is a difference that is mapped out by experts by empirically showing, exposing, and revealing the relationships between states of affairs. Once again, to be knowledgeable shows in what you do, and therefore in the state of affairs. An expert is not an expert because the person declares himself to be an expert. An expert is also not an expert because others see or designate the person as an expert.

No, the expert is an expert because the person achieves empirical success in solving practical problems. The expert has a positive track record. The more positive the track record, the higher the confidence we should place in the expert’s opinion. Sure, an expert’s opinion is still an opinion, but it is an opinion that carries much more weight than an opinion from someone who is not an expert – it can tip your balance.

Everyone is probably familiar with the balance or scales of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Montaigne understands very well that human nature makes it impossible to keep the scales in balance. He approvingly quotes from Cicero’s Academica: ‘As a scale inevitably goes down on the side where a weight is placed, so the mind must yield to what is evident’.

And although Montaigne, the skeptic and relativist, believed that for every piece of evidence in favor of a claim there is equally strong evidence against the claim, and that the balance always remains in balance if you investigate hard enough, in our century we must admit that the results of experts, first and lastly scientists, ’tips the balance and forces the mind to yield to what is evident’.

Science is the answer to everything, and if science does not have or provide an answer you may believe whatever you want. When people believe things that are false or improbable and act on them, we are constantly running a real risk of folks causing more problems than experts can solve. How do we get people with a strong but mistaken feeling of understanding to reconsider their beliefs and align them with science?

The important questions for our time are, therefore, I think, these: How do you recognize an expert? When there are multiple experts, which expert do you believe? And the most urgent question: How do you ensure that the expert determines the belief you hold? Answering these questions is not easy, but here too there are some pretty good initial answers.

؏

Start from the practical problems you are confronted with and ask yourself how urgent it is that someone solves these practical problems. If you have a practical problem and you feel that it needs to be solved, inquire which expert is available to solve your practical problem. The information available to you tells you that there is (for example) a person in town who has a very good track record of solving the practical problem that concerns you. You try to get that expert to solve your problem. If that works, you celebrate the solution! If it doesn’t work, you’ll have to look further.

Our society thus creates a network of mutually dependent people with a track record in solving practical problems, whereby it also becomes clear which problems are very persistent or even unsolvable. Reasonably robust relationships between facts take the place of fanciful fables about how things might (or ought to) be at the deepest level.

By the way, this search for practical solutions to problems also continues to a certain extent on a university campus. When evolutionary biologists make the claim that we have found a solution to the problem of how natural species arise, that solution (evolution by natural selection) must demonstrate its empirical validity to be believed justifiably.

Naturally, people are most interested in expertise that helps them solve the urgent problems they experience. Here lies the opportunity to align people’s beliefs with expertise and science, but precisely here the limits of what experts can mean for the set of beliefs that people cherish reveal themselves. We can convince people by showing them how problems disappear when we use expertise. So, we can give them the experience in which the unpleasant feeling of doubt about what to do disappears and makes way for a justified and happy feeling of understanding.

Spreading the word about the expert’s success does what you would expect: people point out that they experience the same problem and therefore want that expert to come and fix it. This seems to work psychologically, leading up to acquiring scientifically justified beliefs. But when something or someone else gets ahead of the expert, or the result is not what was promised, then we lose people, like Britt Ditmar, for a long time! That is why it is so important that experts do not overplay their hand and make false promises.

Humility and prudence are important guiding principles for an expert. The loud call for solving major problems often requires a group of experts that is anything but complete – not all expertise has been brought in to tackle the problem – and people become disappointed or frustrated. The result is that we lose those people for the time being: they have acquired an unjustified feeling of understanding in some other way and it will be very difficult to get rid of it.

It is therefore not to be expected that we will quickly get large groups of disappointed and frustrated people with an illusory feeling of understanding back into line with expert beliefs, but we are seeing increasingly better, precisely because of scientific research, how we can let people experience that there is expertise, and therefore let them experience a justified sense of control, something people so naturally long for. Science, properly understood, is the way to go, starting in all schools.

And yet. Yet there are people who come to me and ask the well-intentioned question: ‘But what if the world and we ourselves are very different from what science, with its discovered regularity in the relationships between facts, keeps saying?’

My answer is: time for a fable!

؏

I have previously quoted from the work of the blind Argentine poet Borges. There is also a terrifying short fable by him under the title ‘Blue Tigers’ (1977). The gist of it is as follows. The academic and Spinozist Alexander Craigie, who keeps seeing a blue tiger in his dreams, tries to catch that blue tiger in Punjab, where there are rumors that a blue tiger roams the country. However, the only thing he finds are stones of the same blue color.

The identical smooth and circular discs shine in a crack in the ground and Craigie takes them away. To Craigie’s dismay, these blue stones appear to have no order: one moment there are 11, the next moment there are 33, and then 3 again. When he marks stones with a scratch, they disappear unexpectedly and can suddenly reemerge. Then there are 42 stones – they cannot be counted…

Science has no grip on this rocky chaos. There is no mathematical model that can predict the behavior of a ‘blue tiger’. This is Blake’s terrifying ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night’! Everything that science claims about us and the world we live in, seems illusory with these blue stones!

Craigie panics: ‘If I were told that six or seven unicorns on the moon could be three, I would declare a priori that such a thing was impossible. The man who has learnt that three plus one are four doesn’t have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that’s that. He cannot conceive a different sum. […]

‘I, Alexander Craigie, of all men on earth, was fated to discover the only objects that contradict that essential law of the human mind […] If three plus one can be two, or 14, then reason is madness.’ That is Craigie’s problem. The stones always have a different number and do not show any mathematical pattern or order.

Soon Craigie suffers from nightmares about a Piranesi-like place: ‘The dream was always more or less the same; the beginning heralded the feared end. A spiral staircase – an iron railing and a few iron treads – and then a cellar, or system of cellars, leading through the depths to other stairways that might abruptly end, or suddenly lead into ironworks, locksmith’s forges, dungeons, or swamps. At the bottom, in their expected crevice in the earth, the stones, which were also Bahamut, or Leviathan – the creatures of the Scriptures that signify that God is irrational.’

Ah, there’s that fish again! Always a bad sign for people who believe in science. What if the universe is irrational? What if there are facts, but no robust relations between those states of affairs? What if there are only fables that can really touch us, but on which nothing solid can be built? Craigie picks up his irrational, chaotic blue stones and unexpectedly gives them to a beggar asking for alms: ‘I want you to know that my alms may be a curse.’ [says Craigie]. And the beggar answers: ‘I do not yet know what your gift to me is, but mine to you is an awesome one. You may keep your days and nights, and keep wisdom, habits, the world.’

Like Spinoza – the philosopher he knows so well, Craigie, after giving away the ‘blue tigers’, continues to live with the now illusory idea that he inhabits a world that is lawful, of which he himself is a part, which can be captured in mathematical models, and which is predictable, understandable; one which he can understand, and which gives him a wonderfully reassuring feeling of understanding.

To anyone who says that the fable ‘Blue Tigers’ beautifully illustrates that we should not glorify science, that we should not extol expertise, and that we should not praise experts, because we must never forget the fabulous, God-created Bahamut, I respond with a simple request: ‘First show me blue tigers.’

؏

_Advertentie.