Knowing You Are On To Something Real: Part IV

I admit it; I’m an epistemology buff.  It turns out that my passion for this topic rarely (if ever) makes me popular at parties. I have often found myself barging into a conversation about Michael Bolton and asking “but, really, when you think about it, how do you really know that Michael Bolton exists at all?  George Berkeley would say…” and then poof! They are gone, mid-sentence.  They run from me like I was a T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and I didn’t even use the word “epistemology”!  I mean, if I actually say the word “epistemology” at a party, people generally look at me with a bemused expression that seems to mean something like this poor fellow is drunk and must be trying to sing ‘Achy-Breaky Heart.’ If only he had a mullet!

All the same, the question “how can we know that we know anything?” has long fascinated me.  And today, we end a four-part series that lays out some very broad ideas about that topic.  This series was, for the record, never intended to be a conclusive list of principles – only to sketch out some thoughts for the interested budding epistemologist to ponder.  For those desiring a more serious and comprehensive discussion that tackles these questions, I’d suggest reading St. Thomas Aquinas – I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten closer to the truth since he wrote about the topic.  Except, if I actually suggested that and you actually followed it, you might accuse me of a kind of torture – St. Thomas was smart but notoriously dull.  Maybe rather read G.K. Chesterton’s delightful little autobiography of the famous philosopher, to get the sense of what he said.  After all, that’s all I myself really know about St. Thomas’ epistemology – enough to convince me that his common-sense approach is probably the best thing on the market.

Meanwhile, we should really get to principle number four.

Principle #4: Trust Wikipedia

I am more inclined to trust commonly-used sources of knowledge than I am to trust specific ones targeted to a particular audience.  Why?  Last week we discussed an idea called triangulation:  That you should trust something more when different kinds of sources agree; and the more different the sources are from each other, the better. 

That same idea comes into play here.  In particular, commonly-used knowledge sources are read by people of all types and belief systems, and thus serve as a natural check against abuses.  If I write an article proposing the “health benefits of nose-picking” during which I cite my own research demonstrating that “picking your nose three times a day decreases your risk of colds,” that research is much less likely to be challenged in a meaningful way if I submit it to that beloved periodical The Nose-Picker’s Journal than if it is submitted to the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

That’s why in some sense I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the New England Journal of Medicine.  Read that sentence again before we move on, ok?  Because I mean it and I want you to get the full import of it.  The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, written by the world’s top scientists, while Wikipedia is…Wikipedia.  It is written by…anybody.  Or everybody.  But I meant what I said all the same.

Is Wikipedia perfect?  Of course not.  I sometimes find it infuriatingly wrong on issues that I know enough about to know better.  For example, I know for a fact that it reported one of my colleagues as dead when he was still very much alive and kicking, and that it kept saying that he was dead for years…despite his best efforts to make himself alive again. 

But Wikipedia did…eventually…report my colleague as alive; and that is exactly my point. Wikipedia is everybody, and everybody reads it and has access to it and can (if necessary) correct it.  Whereas the New England Journal of Medicine is written by a particular group of people who have a very homogenous set of beliefs to the same group of people who share the same set of homogenous beliefs.  They are doubtless a sharp set of folks who make very few grammatical errors – but they view life through the very narrow lens of the rich, mostly-white, mostly-secular, mostly-liberal persons that they are; a lens that defines only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the rest of the world.  They might write very fine articles on cancer through that lens, but most of them likely have never experienced what a poor, religious, conservative person goes through when they actually get cancer. 

The energy could be good, or it could be refer as the ample medication that helps the person to cialis price overcome the impotence pretty easily. slovak-republic.org levitra 20 mg You will see them do a lot of implied shots as well as a lot of lingerie. The hormonal issue such as the failure to produce the mature eggs, malfunction of the hypothalamus and overnight shipping viagra pituitary gland into producing more sperm. levitra 10 mg slovak-republic.org In scientific tests, gentle to modest augments in liver enzymes have been noticed in about 15% entities going for accutane. Doubtless there is great value in what they do.  I, being a scientist myself and sharing a lot of the lens, certainly find value in it.  But that value ought to be carefully scrutinized when considering the larger questions of life.  The folks who write those articles have an agenda, a perspective, and that agenda goes entirely unchecked in their own circles.  Whereas if they tried to write a Wikipedia article, it would be checked in some sense by…almost everybody.  The whole literate world.    

Remember the Great Chain of Bias?  Remember how I said that you should trust your own eyes more than you should trust what other people say, because the farther you get from your own eyes, informationally speaking, the more the possibility that at least one of the people in the informational chain didn’t get the story right?

Well, consider that there are two possible conceptual ways to overcome the Great Chain of Bias.  One way is to trust yourself (principle #2); another way is to trust everybody.  The bias in the Great Chain of Bias is dependent on Grandma telling Mark…who tells Curt…who tells you.  If that happens, then you have to consider that Grandma might be biased, and Mark might be biased, and Curt might be biased.  The bias multiplies badness at each link.

So far, so bad.  Hard to trust that Mark’s Grandma really saw an alien when you hear the story fourth-hand.  But now imagine a different scenario.  Imagine that Grandma, Mark, and Curt all claim to have seen the same alien…at different times and places.  And their descriptions of the alien all match exactly.

Do you see that their independent agreement on the alien, far from making bias more likely, actually makes bias less likely?  Because if people all independently report the same alien, increasing the number of people who say the alien exists actually helps overcome the Great Chain of Bias and not contribute to it.  So there is a big difference in (1) 40 people passing along information in a chain when only one person claimed to see it originally, and (2) 40 people all independently claiming to have seen the same information.  In the first case, adding people makes bias more likely; in the second case, adding people makes bias less likely.

We can’t all possibly see everything – our experiences are too limited.  But you can still be really curious about some things, even if you haven’t seen them.  Maybe you want to know if aliens exist, and you haven’t seen one yourself.  Well, it would be awfully stupid to disbelieve in aliens just because you haven’t seen one (never believe evidence by absence)…it would be like disbelieving in Tahiti because you haven’t been there.  So how can you cut across the Great Chain of Bias? 

And what I’m suggesting to you is this: If you can verify that everyone in the world has seen the alien in question, then you ought to believe in it, too.  Or at least, you ought to think it more probable that it represents a real thing than you should if only one person claims to have seen it, or than if you merely read about it in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

Which brings us back to Wikipedia.  It may seem like these two pieces of advice – trust your own eyes and trust everyone else’s – are in contradiction.  But in actual fact, they work together towards the same goal.  Let’s go back to our little alien parable.  How do you trust that everyone in the world does, in fact, believe they saw an alien?  Well, if you could interview them personally – see them at least with your own eyes – then that would be better than just hearing about it from a friend. 

But you can’t really interview everyone personally.  So how should you go about figuring out what people actually agree on?  Well, that brings me to my point: There is no perfect way to do that, but I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the New England Journal of Medicine for that purpose.  Because if you make up something in the New England Journal of Medicine that is not medicine-related, it is highly unlikely that anyone will notice it.  But if you make up something on Wikipedia, well, it’s read by everybody…and it’s at least possible that it will be corrected.