Seventh day, Truth. Amazing how even with careful journalistic or scientific approaches, we can all fall prey to mistaking noise for signal. Maybe the formality of the process and need for corroboration, attention to detail and systematic examination makes some more susceptible, so that after digging and digging, when we find a datapoint that is surprising, or confirms or contradicts the bulk of data, we elevate to falsify the actually significant but conflicting data. This falsification is indeed a central technique in the process of science, but in rigorous practice such results would need to be repeated so as to rule out the noise or experimental error. Our current moment transitioning to instantaneously shared citizen journalism mediated by an attention economy based on advertising allows these incomplete truths to virally expand to crowd out fuller truths and become the conventional wisdom.
The pandemic response, especially the criticism of the public health/safety actions of the government’s, and Fauci’s in particular, are a tragic example. Here’s an anecdote as analogy. I am, or at least used to be, a powerful swimmer who swam in the ocean almost everyday. I studied oceanography and have felt comfortable in the ocean in all sorts of conditions, but I have been ordered out of the water on numerous occasions by lifeguards, which has always felt unfair and angered me. These occasions are often because of rip tides. About 100 people in the USA each year drown in riptides and they are responsible for about 80% of beach rescues, so it’s not surprising that lifeguards are cautious and that authorities close beaches. But with my skill and knowledge, I am at zero risk from riptides, which are always localized phenomena that can be easily evaded by just moving up or down the beach to escape the outward flow before trying to swim to shore. I’ve argued this to try and convince lifegueards to let me finish my workout or exploration of a favorite reef, and I often huff away when they refuse to let me re-enter the water,. But however false their warnings are with regard to me, however unfair it may feel, they’re actually correct even while not completely true.
This is the essence of this public health dilemma. It is not true that I am at any risk from a riptide, but it is true that if other people the majority of whom are at risk, see me swimming on a closed beach they may discount the danger and decide that it is safe for them to swim as well, risking, even losing, their own life. So as much as i grumble on my way off the beach, I understand that I am giving up some of my joy and freedom, giving credence to a falsehood about the danger of riptides in order to help protect others and serve the greater good. The lifeguard, and indeed all public health officials, have to make and enforce more generalized rules based on likely, even worst case, conditions.
Vaccines face similar problems of generalization and collapsing of the fullest truth to overly simple claims. In many ways, the anti vaccine stance of folks like Mayim Bialik is rational. Her kids do face a risk, albeit very small, of deadly reactions to vaccines, and in their Bel Air bubbles they probably do face less risk from the diseases they would be vaccinated against. Public health vaccination policy can always allow some percentage of unvaccinated but still maintain effective community immunity. She chooses to be among that percentage, and IF, enough of the rest of us comply, her kids will be okay. But her stance is a gamble. Her celebrity causes her anti-vax rhetoric to be broadly and credibly publicized. If enough folks to join her, at some point the immunity fails and people will start dying. This happened here in Rockland County near my home, where some orthodox jewish Rabbis and moms began an aggressive anti vax campaign including frequent conference calls with hundreds of other orthodox moms to warn of vaccination dangers. When a measles-infected traveler from overseas attended a service at one of their synagogues, the highly contagious measles spread through the sparsely vaccinated community, resulting in 3000 cases.
Noise in a system is not a phantom or error, it’s real data or phenomena, just that are statistically insignificant and do not reflect the behavior of the system as a whole. Health officials’ “lies” about the efficacy of masks or the vaccine or… are just the inevitable effect of public policy needing to be aimed at the signals not the noise. Truth may be our foremost guiding value, but the universe is an emergent phenomenon with lots of noise and data out on the thin edge of the bell. We need to avoid following the nit of truth we are picking at down rabbit holes where we may lose sight of the forest in our examination of a single tree.
HOLLY DAYS 