About

Introduction: What I Believe You are Not.

“Power is a knife, a dangerous terrible knife that can’t be wielded without cutting yourself. We joked about stupidity, but in reality most people aren’t stupid. Many are simply frustrated at how little control they have over their lives. They lash out. Sometimes in spectacular ways…” (Wit, “Oathbringer”, Brandon Sanderson)

We now confront an age-old question—one Pontius Pilate himself asked: “What is the truth?”

Do vaccines cause autism? Do viruses actually exist? Was chloroquine merely an attempt to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic? Is putting fluoride in the water actually worth it? Is marijuana really addictive or dangerous? Is psychoanalysis just pseudoscience? Regardless of your answers, I doubt you’re stupid or malicious. I also wager you know people whom you don’t consider foolish or evil yet hold wildly different views on these questions. By the end of the day, we are all trying to navigate a world that challenges us with an ever changing set of questions and potential answers.

I do not believe I have all the answers, or that I can be truly unbiased, but I value correcting my mistakes and deepening my understanding of reality. In this blog, I intend to bring you with me on that journey. I am sure I will not be an infallible guide, but I will strive to do my best with the evidence and resources I have.

To do so, I will follow a these rules:

1. If I have a hypothesis I will, as a good scientist would, try to prove it wrong before assuming it is right;
   1. Physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynmann once said “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” This means that a scientist can only do Science because he believes his hypothesis can be mistaken. Therefore, the scientist asks himself “what piece of evidence would convince me I am wrong?”
   2. To illustrate this, immagine a set of cards, each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. Suppose I claim, “Every card with a vowel on one side has an even number on the other.” I lay out four cards: 8, A, Z, and 7. I then tell you to flip two cards to test my hypothesis. Which cards would you choose?
   3. Your first instinct might be to flip the “8” card and “A” card. However, flipping the “8” card can’t falsify the claim—if you reveal a consonant, the claim says nothing about consonants; if you reveal a vowel, the claim holds. Thus, the “8” card doesn’t test the hypothesis, since it could never provide evidence against it.
   4. Flipping the “A” could reveal an odd number, disproving the claim; flipping the “7” could reveal a vowel, also disproving it. Hence, these two flips provide a valid test.
   5. If you flipped the “A” card and found an even number behind it; and you also flipped the “7” card and found a consonant behind it, you would consider that my hypothesis is likely to be true. The more sets of cards you test finding analogous results, the more confident you’d be in my hypothesis.
   6. This mirrors good science: observe, hypothesize, then try to disprove your own hypothesis through targeted experiments
2. If exploring controversial issues, I will classify hypotheses in a spectrum from extremely unlikely to extremely likely. Certain or impossible are not contained in the range of possible outcomes of my scientific investigations. I will, under "Evidence and ideas", explore philosophical ideas that are compatible with the evidence available.
   1. Note that, in rule number one, I never said you would be sure, because, science pre-supposes we can always be wrong –our samples may mislead us, experiments can fail, or contexts can change, etc.
   2. But if you’re never sure, why bother doing science in the first place? Because we can still gain actionable knowledge by assigning high confidence to well-supported claims until new evidence forces us to update our beliefs. This is what the philosopher Karl Popper called the “falsifiability principle” meaning all scientific claims are only scientific if they can be falsified.
3. If I am to talk about a so called “conspiracy theory” I will not even begin before knowing its origin;
   1. Distilled lies tend to wither away and die fairly quickly. All we know about Socates’ opposition is the fact that they opposed Socrates. On the other hand, we know a hell lot of what Socrates said, because what he said mattered and pointed towards important truths. On that note, I do not believe in the spontaneous generation of “conspiracy theories”, every one of them comes from somewhere, and that origin is very often reasonable, even if I don’t happen to believe in the theory as a whole. If I do not understand why the theory can at least sound reasonable –and it certainly can, otherwise no one would believe it– I cannot start to evaluate how reasonable it sounds for me.
4. I will look into scientific evidence prioritizing primary sources and systematic reviews;
   1. If you haven’t noticed, I am a scientist at heart and therefore, I tend to base my opinions on most matters, though not all, on concrete evidence. That said, not all evidence is created equal: experiments, reviews and observational studies differ in their quality and methodology. In that sense, if I use data from a study, I will endeavor to search for the original study, using it instead of a paper citing it. In case I use data from a review, I will look for a systematic review, meaning a review that followed a standardized procedure for including studies and reasonable concrete criteria for excluding studies. Reviews can be very good when they merge data from multiple well conducted but smaller studies (giving us more cards to flip, so to speak). However, reviews that are not systematic (e.g.: narrative reviews) are at a greater risk of being biased, because they allow the author to pick studies based on subjective criteria.
5. If in an important matter better evidence comes around, I will update my view on it;
   1. As I have pointed out, certainty is not a possibility, however, continual refinement is. Besides, if a topic is a matter of confusion, blind spots (or, as scientists call them, “information gaps”) are very likely to exist. Therefore, when I get hold of neevidence that bridges an important gap I will endeavor to look into it and will, if necessary, update the relevant blog post, or create a new one altogether.
6. I reserve the right of not knowing;
   1. It is perfectly possible, and even likely to reach a question about which the evidence is questionable and I reserve the right of declaring I do not feel confident even in making an educated guess. It is also possible that a certain answer is context dependent, in which case I will say I believe the answer to be context dependent and go on to explain what I mean by that.

In sum, my working premise is that reality is not dependent on my beliefs and wishes and, consequently, my ideas need to be constantly corrected by reality. I want to avoid the trap of imposing my personal preferences on the structure of reality. That does not mean I believe we should not strive to improve on reality, it does mean that if we are to maximize our effectiveness when doing so we cannot act as masters of truth, we must instead assume the position of its humble servants. Here I express beliefs I deeply hold and that are not evidence based, it is instead, what philosophers and mathematicians would call an axiom: “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” I believe, ultimately, that reality is knowable in the sense that our comprehension of it can become more accurate and that the pursuit of such knowledge is good and brings about freedom.