The Science Party

Note: I wrote all but the last two paragraphs (and much more I cut for length) in January and tabled it, unaware that how one experiences reality would become almost completely determined by on who they want to be President. Thus, no mention of the current pandemic.

Recently a friend and I had a polite disagreement on the credibility of a particular PhD in the field of neuroscience. She finds his views on more nuanced and political issues distasteful, and we were mostly in agreement there, but we diverged sharply on whether or not these opinions discredit him in his distinct and unrelated area of expertise.
Of course, neither of us challenged the premise of our discussion: that two people without remotely comparable credentials should be an arbiter of whether or not a scientist knows what they’re talking about.

A illustrative anecdote from my experience getting laser corrective surgery on my eyeballs several years ago:

“I can see where he made the flap, here. I won’t be able to re-use that, so we’ll need to use a different method. Don’t worry, it's just as effective and safe as LASIK,” the surgeon reassured me.
I found this doctor the same way I find everything from mechanics to Thai restaurants: Yelp. 10 years ago, I had my Mr. Magoo level myopia corrected by a Virginia Beach surgeon. It lasted for a few years, but time and genetics went to work on me, until my need for glasses progressed from night driving, to all driving, to all the time. Now, here I was once again, in an exam chair trying to cheat Mother Nature, which obviously did not design me to make it this far.

The doctor delivered a blunt and thorough assessment of the previous doctor’s work. Despite living on the opposite side of the country, he actually knew the man personally. He deftly toed the line of assessing the error made while not blatantly shit-talking the guy. I dismissed it partially, knowing how often one in his position will display their knowledge by pointing out their predecessor’s mistakes, but his diagnosis made sense, and fit what I’d been experiencing.

I underwent the procedure a few weeks later and returned home to convalesce, which consisted of lying on my couch for most of 3 days listening to hours upon hours of Hardcore History. I returned three days later for an exam. I was feeling a lot more discomfort than I expected, but was assured everything was healing perfectly, and that my regenerative abilities were JUST shy of qualifying me for The X-Men.

Then, our conversation shifted to personal topics which provided a small crack in which he could insert his foot to his mouth and talk about the upcoming election (this was in Sept of 2016). He spoke to me with misplaced confidence, perhaps of what he knew about me (white veteran from the Midwest and South). His view of Trump did not (remotely) match my own, nor did his expectations of him as a President seem to have any basis in reality.

It occurred to me almost immediately that “JESUS, I just let this man shoot a LASER in my eye.”
I chased that thought away, and reminded myself that he could still be an excellent doctor and also believe in things that I don’t, or even things that are demonstrably false. Maybe that seems obvious to you, and maybe it doesn’t, but despite the good doctor being tragically misinformed about The President, it’s 3.5 years later and my vision is the best it’s ever been.

As tempting as it is to look at half the country as hopelessly misled, it’s more accurate to place that figure very close to 100%, it’s just that the topics on which we’re confused vary.

Society is struggling with the question of “what is true?” right now, because during the past few decades as journalism quietly died and then was replaced by our uncles’ Facebook posts, not everyone was aware that we need to be the ones fact checking our own news, and so few of us do, because “Hey, that’s my guy/gal talking! I love them.”

My skeptic nature and contrarian personality disorder has prepared me well for this. I intend to make more of a contribution to sifting through the BS to figure out what’s behind the messaging, as I figure out what’s the best method to do so.

Most likely much more frequent, and shorter blog posts about news of the day.