Life in the Pandemic X: Exacerbating uncertainty

 Many things in life are uncertain (apart from death and taxes obviously). And many things are uncertain in science. Indeed identifying, controlling and quantifying uncertainty is a key aspect of the practice of science. We’re so keenly aware of uncertainty that we try to dissuade students of talking about science “proving” things, as though in any given situation absolutely all uncertainty can be removed. We don’t think that it can be, and we can therefore never be “certain”. What we seek to do is accumulate evidence supporting a particular explanation for a given phenomenon so that it moves from being highly provisional (a hypothesis), to being fairly probably the correct explanation (a supported hypothesis), to being the best and most highly supported explanation we have (at which point it’s  usually elevated to the status of a theory). This takes time and effort. Even so, we also accept that the most accepted theory, with apparently lots of supporting evidence, can always be superseded by a new theory. This might be an extension of the original theory, or indeed a contradiction of it. But this whole approach raises  problems. It is tricky to explain (as you may have noticed), and it’s not the way most people think or speak most of the time. These problems (and why they matter) have been amply exposed by the pandemic.

Let’s start with the language problem. There are situations where certainty is conflated with clarity. In a startling reversal of form for the particular bunch of politicians currently running the UK, the pandemic mantra has been “We’re following the science, therefore….”. This is a reversal because it suited them in a previous situation (ie the Brexit debate), to downplay the view of “experts”. But as I’ve noted before, in the pandemic, this has changed. Experts are in; but uncertainty is not out.

Politicians and the media, are very keen on what they call clarity. But COVID19 is a virus new to  humans, and therefore new to science. Nothing was known, indeed could be known, about it (although things could be inferred). Early in the pandemic, at the time when many key decisions were being taken, the science was more than usually uncertain, and therefore the scientific advice to politicians had to be highly caveated (this is an assumption on my part, I wasn’t privy to it). But this doesn’t make for snappy press conferences. And it almost certainly guaranteed that the advice would change, and therefore the instructions issued by politicians would have to change (example: face masks). The media don’t particularly help in such situations. Their stock in trade is the language of u-turn and climb-down. It might have been wise to clearly communicate from the start that the course of action being embarked upon was based on a consensus of what, given the evidence at the time, was reasonable. Not certain, but reasonable. Problem is, would any of us reacted as we need to if the politicians had spoken this way?

To be fair to them, there have been some sceptics and deniers who have been happy to jump up and down and accuse them of exaggerating the danger of the situation for nefarious political ends. They have pointed out that for all the talk of half a million UK dead and the NHS overwhelmed, this was not the disaster that developed. But this is to miss the point. The one experiment that could not be done was the one that involved doing nothing and essentially letting COVID19 run its course. So on the basis of (suitably caveated) advice, we had our lockdown. And while we can’t be certain (that is, after all, the point I’m making), the difference in case and death curves (eg see here) between most EU countries (including the UK) and others like the US and Brazil, suggests that this was indeed a sensible course of action. As an aside, we have to now hope that we don’t blow it, and revert to the earlier trajectory that could lead to disaster. However, at least some of the critics seem to suggest that with all the uncertainty involved, essentially nothing should have been done. Action should only have been taken once all doubt had been removed. But then that would have meant nothing would have been done. And many thousands more would have died, deaths that we have almost certainly avoided. It will perhaps be possible to demonstrate this statistically, once more  evidence has accumulated. But at the point the big political and economic decisions had to be taken, actual evidence was scarce.

We have heard this sort of call to wait for certainty before, both in another contemporary context and historically. And it’s here that the language problem, and the complexity problem intersect. Climate change, its cause, effects and what we should do about it (if we can do anything about it), is undoubtedly complex. The idea that it is caused by human activity (primarily the burning of fossil fuels from the industrial revolution on, increasing atmospheric CO₂) has been a matter of overwhelming scientific consensus for decades ie we’ve gone beyond hypothesis, supported hypothesis, and theory to consensus. Even still, scientists in this area will probably be unwilling to say they have no doubts, that the relevant theory/theories have been “proved” in some absolute sense. That’s just not the appropriate language of science. But that allows others to come along and say that the science is uncertain, there are alternative explanations or the whole thing is just a hoax. Here, a legal analogy might help.

I served on a murder jury some years ago. We were faced with the weighty decision of whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. Notice that you can still convict and have doubt. The question is whether the case is proved beyond reasonable doubt. One can always come up with lots of “could be’s” and “might have beens”. But if they fly in the face of the evidence, or are not supported by evidence, then they are not reasonable. And if they are not reasonable, they is no reason to pronounce the defendant “not guilty”. If the scientific consensus around climate change were a defendant in the dock, although there are doubts and uncertainties, they would be ruled out by the evidence as unreasonable, a guilty verdict handed down, and the jury would go away and sleep soundly, their duty done. And yet the uncertainty, complexity, and the language of science conspire to provide a space for those who say we should do nothing because we are not 100% certain, precisely at the time when action has to be taken.

At least some who operate in this space are following in a fairly inglorious tradition that has been exposed several times. They seek to foment doubt and increase complexity, obfuscate evidence and exacerbate uncertainty. They explicitly seek to sow doubt, of the unreasonable sort. The approach was famously summarised by a cigarette company executive in the 1960’s in a now infamous memo which stated “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”(1). What followed was essentially a well funded disinformation campaign of epic proportions. Meanwhile, cigarettes continued to be manufactured, sold and consumed and contributed to the early deaths of millions. The story of this and similar campaigns is expertly revealed in its gory detail by David Michaels in his books (2,3). And there’s evidence that there are commercial and other interests playing the same game with climate change. Stir up doubt, exacerbate the uncertainty, and the public will conclude that either the issues are so complicated and unclear that it would be premature to take action (like ban smoking or increase tax on gas guzzlers), or that the inconvenience of action is not worth uncertain benefits.

This kind of thing is happening in the pandemic. Reasonable people are not taking reasonable actions because, particularly in the US, misinformation is being spread and uncertainty is being exacerbated. The scary bit is that when the much hoped-for vaccine becomes available, we all know it’s likely to start over vaccination against COVID19. But, to resort to some unscientific language, you can be sure that wearing a mask and washing your hands frequently at the moment, and getting vaccinated once one or more vaccines have passed through the requisite trials, is a really good idea. I don’t doubt it.

 1. Michaels D (2005) Doubt is their product. Scientific American 292(6):96-101 (available on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7806937_Doubt_Is_Their_Product)

 2. Michaels D (2008) Doubt is Their Product. Oxford Univ. Press

 3. Michaels D (2020 )The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception Oxford Univ. Press

It’s (not just) about the facts, stupid

James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, gets the credit (blame?) for coming up with the phrase “It’s the economy stupid”. This was designed to keep the campaign on track by keeping everyone’s attention focussed on what really mattered. Now you might think that an appropriate version of this in science might be “It’s about the facts”. After all science is all about facts – discovering and communicating them. It’s not about stuff like feelings. This is not to argue that facts are easy things to work with. It can be really hard to prise them out of the universe. Just think of the time and expense, trouble and complexity, involved in finding the Higgs Boson, of establishing as a fact that it exists. However, it turns out that even in science it’s not that simple. And beyond science, in the rest of life, if the last week in the UK has demonstrated anything, it’s that a lot of things besides facts are critical.

Definitions of the word “fact” abound. Let’s assume we mean statements about things, situations, objects, processes or people that are true. Just being able to state something (eg “Trump is a chump”) doesn’t make it a fact. Although, as an aside, it’s interesting that in the social media age, it seems that the secret to establishing something as a fact is simply to say it often enough, or to have it said by enough people. But to establish a statement as a statement of fact, there has to be some interaction with evidence, with how things actually are. This moves a statement from being an opinion to being a fact. So if a Trump did or said lots of chump-like things, then we might feel happier concluding that the statement was a statement of fact, not of opinion. Of course we have the practical problem of identifying, gathering and analysing the evidence. And this all turns out to be quite tricky.

What is going to count as relevant evidence, and who is going to decide? We tend to depend on various types of institution to decide what is and what is not relevant. So we have courts and judges and lawyers with rules to decide what’s relevant in the criminal sphere. In science, different disciplines tend to act in a similar institutional way deciding what’s relevant to a given issue. So it was particle physicists who decided the rules in determining what sort of, and what degree of evidence would be required to show that the Higgs existed and had been found. They would claim that they were guided by theories that laid out mathematical criteria for deciding what was what. But it was still a community effort. And even in physics, there’s still scope for a degree of interpretation.

But when it gets really interesting is when you realise that even once you’ve got a stone cold fact, that’s when the fun really begins. Because facts don’t exist in isolation. Every fact comes embedded in a whole bunch of contextual stuff. And it’s when both are taken together (the fact/facts and the context) that we determine whether we’re going to take a fact seriously (believe it, rely on it, act on it). Take the simple fact that “it’s raining”. If you run in to my windowless office (it’s not actually windowless, but bear with me) shouting that it’s raining, just before I leave for home, then you might expect me to pick up a brolly or put on a coat. But if I know you are a regular prankster, and you are known for never quite telling things as they are and for always having your own agenda (and if your name is Boris), even if it really is raining I might actually leave my office unprotected.

There’s also the issue of deciding between facts. It turns out that how we might interpret the same fact differs depending on context. Even in science, deciding which facts to go after, is rarely a matter of the facts themselves. Experiments guided by provisional theories (hypotheses) will prioritise some facts over others. So some are discovered, others remain hidden. And prior views (beliefs and theories) can be so powerful, even in science, that we have to guard constantly against things like confirmation bias – prioritising the facts that suit our views. Our prior commitments to theories, it turns out, can lead us to interpret the same facts in different ways. It can be so bad, that we become incapable of even communicating sensibly with adherents of other views. This has happened in science in the past, even (or perhaps particularly) in physics, the hardest of hard sciences.

This sort of thing is going on now in UK politics. We have just had a referendum that was in part about facts. Facts about the economic impact of Brexit. Facts about the numbers coming into the UK from both the EU and further afield. But how those facts were interpreted, or even whether they were accepted as facts, depended very much on the prior commitments of people. And during the campaign there developed a kind of mutual incomprehension between Remainers and Brexiteers. For many on both sides, the facts were so obvious and powerful, that communication became almost impossible. But it turned out it wasn’t just about facts at all. It was about a lot of other stuff too.

So when we come to other important facts, facts like an empty tomb for example, there’s no warrant for instant dismissal on one side, or a feeling that its implications should just be obvious on the other. There’s investigating to be done, evidence to be engaged with and carefully weighed. And an awareness of background biases and prior commitments. And if you’re tempted to feel that the facts are just so obvious that you cannot conceive of how someone can come to view that differs from yours given those facts, then go sit in a dark cool room and think again.