Previous articles in this series:
Assaying Entropy II: Dying During Covid
Assaying Entropy III: Thinking about Covid
Assaying Entropy IV: Covid and America
Assaying Entropy VI: Democracy in America
Assaying Entropy VII: American democracy
Assaying Entropy VIII: Education in America
Assaying Entropy IX: Reading, writing, and arithmetic
Science
The word “science” originally meant knowledge. Our modern usage of “science” developed when people who studied nature wanted to distinguish their methods of deriving conclusions out of physical evidence (i.e., experimentation) from other non-empirical ways of knowing such as philosophy. So, even in our modern usage, science is still knowledge, but knowledge formed by experimenting with the natural world.
In this sense, human history is nothing more or less than the history of science, the accumulation and changes of knowledge that informs our physical relation to the world around us from the moment we first tried picking up a pebble using our opposed thumb to the debates over Covid vaccinations. That history demonstrates one undeniable fact about knowledge (science): it changes. Scientific truths (facts) are not fixed but change; they are moving targets. Scientific research intends to operate progressively on the front edge of that change. This reality has several consequences important to what has happened to reading and writing as part of public discussion in America culminating in the impasse of discussions about Covid.
First, front edge research deals with uncertainty rather than certainty; therefore, it is always involved in controversy and debate. Scientific debate, however, is not just made of rebuttals and responses (the discursive debates in law), nor is it just critical (the discursive debates in philosophy), but is empirical, meaning, based on experiments and their results. The arc of scientific debate is long. If you disagree with the conclusions of someone else, you redo the experiment or run a different experiment to demonstrate a counter thesis. This reality means that anyone, lay or expert, using primary research materials in a public discussion about the Covid pandemic must be aware of misusing medical research either by attributing certainty to research results when their intention is tentative and hypothetical or by isolating research out of the communal effort that is science by not recognizing the context of collective debate that surrounds every individual conclusion.
Most modern scientific research concentrates on tiny bits, details, of a much larger problem. Its narrow focus means that a researcher often spends a whole lifetime working with a single problem, say a single chemical reaction. Being so focused, what an experiment resolves may not have immediate application or even general meaning until other research on other parts of the larger problem is done. These are all necessary considerations when we try to introduce cutting edge research into public discussion, as people, both lay and expert, keep doing during Covid.
Non-writing
In my last essay on entropy, I discussed a report on antibodies reacting to Covid vaccines, and I disputed a reader’s understanding of that report. The article is called “Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations.” It appeared in December in the publication Science Immunology, an online journal directed at immunology specialists. Do we lay people know what “class switch” means? The authors say that they themselves know very little about it works in humans. I assume that is why they work on the subject.
Why in the world are we being asked to read this technical study in a new field (called systems virology), which requires readers be familiar with the components and functions of the biomolecular world of immunology and be able to assess what can and cannot be deduced from the many laboratory procedures used in this study? The study doesn’t address the day to day needs of doctors caring for patients. How does it further public discussion on the Covid vaccine here in Sierra County?
Does the commenter who suggested this study think that citing such a technical and narrowly focused study show his familiarity with expert knowledge, a bit of self-promotion? Then he had better get his reading right. Is he appealing to expert authority since he claims it supports his disapproval of the Covid vaccine? Then he had better understand what those authors say. Or, is he just counting on no one checking up on him, so that it is all fakery?
If he throws out the link to this article just for show, then the commenter doesn’t intend us to read it even while saying we should. I call that non-writing, that is, a pretense of saying something by following a pattern, like computer writing. The reference follows the practice of scholarly writing to elucidate an argument but here does so thoughtlessly because done without consideration of what it says, how it is said, its limited aim, its uncertainties, its own assessment of the limits and uses of its conclusions, and its scientific context as a miniscule part of a larger enterprise, and most important, the reference is made without a function in an argument, without reason, without a writing for which the citation is a referent.
Expertise
What I am saying about referencing science generally is even more important when discussing medical knowledge. In recent years, medical knowledge has accelerated exponentially. Today, the amount of new (but always tentative and always temporary) truths double every 73 days on estimate. This phenomenal growth widens the gap between our collective knowledge and what any individual can know. A medical student could find her education outdated when she graduates. After graduation she will be too busy to keep up and at best will have to depend on summaries of research in her specialty rather than reading original research.
Furthermore, these increases in medical research are mostly in sub-cellular/molecular micro-biological studies which are distant from the actual, clinical needs of a doctor dealing with his patients’ care. So, again, while doctors are clearly experts in what they do, they do not necessarily speak with authority on all aspects of medicine. This is not to impugn doctors. No expert in any field of knowledge can speak with authority on all specialties in her field simply by being an “expert.” That is, we are all equal in a public discussion about public matters, and how we use what we know demonstrates the extent to which what we know, as experts or as laypeople, is useful for furthering the discussion. Public discourse is one thing and practicing medicine is another, and I hope everyone can participate in public discourse.
By chance, another reader also trying to attack Covid vaccination sent me a wonderful example of the difference between public discourse and practicing medicine: “Just saying . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3MPnBpfrRk main stream news, the wheels are coming off!” Dr. Aseem Malhotra posted this video of himself being interviewed by Tucker Carlson. All the “factual” details about the vaccine that he mentions in the interview and his personal history relative to the vaccine repeat what he published as Part I of an article in a professional journal. In Part II, he published his views of the role of pharmaceutical companies in rolling out vaccines. I will try to show that the doctor plays two very different roles in the written version (Dr. Malhotra) and in the TV show (Mr. Malhotra), although he intends to blur the two roles.
First, there are vast differences between spoken language and written language. Written language is more rational, more considered, more deliberately sequential in following a narrative, and, since this is scientific writing, more evidence based and with appropriate citations of sources (therefore, open to examination by the reader who can consider his reading and check the sources for accuracy). Spoken language is more immediate, more emotional and spontaneous, has the added information we watchers glean from our feelings towards Mr. Malhotra as a man. We sympathize with a well-spoken, intent, nice looking, nicely dressed human being.
Since Mr. Malhotra has his own text in mind, his presentation in the interview is more continuous and connected than normal oral speech giving what he says an aura of reasonableness. We find him more sympathetic face to face. Therefore, in the interview we feel much more strongly his personal trauma of his father’s death as a sympathetic reason for his turning against the vaccine. In the article, his father’s death is also the starting point of his story of questioning the vaccine’s safety, but there it simply follows what I earlier described as the subjectivity, the personal point of view, which all essays now require. It does not have the persuasive force of the interview. As a result, Dr. Malhotra does not claim that his father’s death was caused by the vaccine because that violates the rationality of evidence basic to medical writing, but Mr. Malhotra can strongly leave that impression in the interview without having to say so.
But the most serious difference between the Dr. Malhotra of the article and the Mr. Malhotra of the interview lies in the treatment of evidence. Every number used by Mr. Malhotra is simply a proven fact. For example, he says that 1 in 800 vaccinees have a serious adverse event. Etc. These are blunt, absolute, and unsupported assertions in the oral presentation; but because he is presented as an expert, they have the authority of truth and are in an eminently quotable form. In the article, because Dr. Malhotra properly cites his source, these numbers are seen in the context of tentative research results thereby putting them in their proper perspective.
The source article is a 2022 retrospective study of data from Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Phase III trials from 2020 before the emergency authorization of the vaccines. The numbers are, therefore, way outdated. The most recent study of vaccination’s effect on the population of a whole northern Italian province (a data set roughly 8 times that of the data Dr. Malhotra cites) showed that over 18 months the “Covid-19 vaccines did not increase the risk of potentially related serious adverse events.” Looking at the study Dr. Malhotra cited, where the “1 in 800” is calculated, shows those numbers to be uncertain: they represent an average increase calculated from a hugely varied body of numbers (the deviation was huge). The risk of a serious adverse event among vaccinees was, on average 12.5 per 10,000 higher than among the placebo group, but the spread of data was 95% between 2.1 and 22.9 meaning that 12.5 is a very shaky average. In fact, in the Moderna trials there were risk differences that were negative, meaning that for those medical conditions the risk of serious effects was less if you were vaccinated than if you were not.
The authors of that source study did not conclude as Mr. Malhotra suggested in the interview that the vaccine caused more harm than the SARS CoV-2 virus. Instead, they said that their study showed that more research with more data needed to be released by Pfizer and Moderna and that more research had to be done on the possible harm the vaccines might cause, and that their harm-cost analysis was hardly conclusive but such a procedure had to be done so that a full harm-cost estimate could be found. Dr. Malhotra agreed in his print version, but Mr. Malhotra in his interview pushed a causal interpretation on the viewer by stressing the Big Pharma conspiracy that supposedly, without evidence, sold us the vaccines for their profit rather than our benefit. In both the written and the spoken presentation, Mr./Dr. Malhotra is completely without evidence in making that claim. We all know that Big Pharma controls the game, but that, in itself, does not make the vaccine dangerously unusable.
Comparing Dr. Malhotra with Mr. Malhotra reminds us that in the article Dr. Malhotra speaks for himself, but Mr. Malhotra in the interview speaks for Tucker Carlson. Carlson (or Fox News) pays him. Carlson approves before-hand the topics and course of the interview. Carlson subtly manages what is said by his questions, underlining certain points by his surprised interjections, amplifying what Mr. Malhotra says by his comments. He controls the interview and the message that the viewer gets. Nowhere in this interview does he engage with Mr. Malhotra, questioning, analyzing, criticizing. It’s not an inter-view but just a view, and the view we get is the image of Mr. Malhotra Tucker Carlson wants us to see, and the message we get is manipulated expertise.
Unfortunately, that message is what is being waved at us by the reader who sent us the link. Again, the discussion is not advanced by this reference. Again, we have a bit of non-writing, a pro-forma citation that is unvetted, not viewed critically, and simply presented as a truism without an argument into which it can fit.
Discussion
My idea of discussion – whether of my articles or of Covid – is pretty simply its normal meaning: investigate, talk over, debate. It is decidedly different from sitting around a circle in elementary school doing show-and-tells; that is, discussion is not just talking, but talking with and about others. Discussion is not self-expression. I keep using the term “engage” to describe discussion. The gears have to have cogs that engage in someone else’s gears. Discussion means taking people seriously: analyzing, criticizing, suggesting unrecognized points that either help or hinder the other person’s argument. Those require following the reasoning and evidences of others. Discussion is essential in public discourse.
Water Alternatives, an international journal on water, politics, and development, runs an online blog called Water Dissensus where people discuss water issues all over the world. I want to quote their statement about discussion, which is itself a quotation from the French sociologist Michel Callon, who specializes on the interactions between kinds of knowledge:
“Controversy allows the design and testing of projects and solutions that integrate a plurality of points of view, demands, and expectations. This ‘taking into account,’ which takes place through negotiations and successive compromises, unleashes a process of learning (Callon et al., 2001).”
Yes, discussion is controversy, and that controversy demonstrates equality. To just take a position and stick to it, unable or unwilling to engage in discussion except expressing passionate anger, demonstrates radical individualism.