ELEMENTAL FAULTS

ELEMENTAL FAULTS...What are these?

Decisions are made from a set of assumptions. Most assumptions are derived from a set of generated hypotheses for driving those decisions, others are based on prior experience and understanding and still, others are based on all three. In the confluence of such adventures one learns new things and generates still newer ideas to create newer paradigms, to change the world. 

The Wrights Brothers had a set of priors from the unpowered flight and the motor vehicle that they applied to the Wrights Brother Flyer. The process of learning was by experimenting with their model aircraft.

Today we have modeling generated by a set of assumptions based on previous assumptions. Untested in the past they become the models for a future. Any future. All such models have a fallacy stored in them. The fallacy of unknowns, unknown being the variables. Since priors are rarely used in certain unique circumstances that do not comport to priors, assumptions are heavily weighted in the direction to where the creating entity wants to divine the potential future. The surface is clear to see, albeit it is quicksand. Further, ascribing virtue to such assumptions, augers complete obedience, a difficult bridge to cross. Crossing that bridge means you are a heretic or a radical rebel without the requisite finesse of understanding.

These elemental faults have long been the bane of human existence ever since such practices began to take hold of “scientific rigor.” And scientists became comfortable in talking about science rather than experimenting in the blind with their hypotheses. Life has become easy for the armchair crowd. Using a set of pre-existing patterns, they plug in the numbers and the computer spits out a set of probabilities that soon through an elaborate web of followers, becomes gospel.  We have endured many such ethereal flows of intellect couched carefully in some dense and difficult scientific papers that over time prove these flows to have failed to hold ground. The quicksand is forever unforgiving.

Common sense has been relegated to idiocy, stupidity, and ignorance by those touting the benefits of their new and shiny models. Models that sometimes, even the creator does not understand, as happened to Neil Ferguson’s graphic depiction from the Imperial College of London regarding the COVID-19. When tinkering did not fix a certain divined prophesy, but a much different one than expected, he, the modeler is known to have said, “that should work.” The old adage “garbage in, garbage out,” seems valid at all times when dealing with numerical assertions based on flawed algorithms, resident in the CPUs. Such manifestations cannot be good. It cannot be bad. If good, then why do I take such venom to them in my own mind. Why does the future, these manifestations predict never comes true? If bad, then why do those with supposed wisdom continue to promote such meaninglessness with abandon? These questions are timeless and recurring and are answered only with silence.

Decisions regarding life and death as are made by physicians in the Emergency Rooms and hospital floors every day, take into considerations the priors and the fund of accumulated knowledge and experience to drive a potential outcome and are a whole different matter. Success is never guaranteed, but the pursuit of success is never in question. Yet some folks who have never seen the light of such burden grow deep, soft, and comfortable armchairs around themselves and pontificate the hypotheticals without an ounce of priors or understanding. A perfectly coined phrase exists for such, it is: “they have no skin in the game.” They seem to look at the future without looking at the past. And that brings into the fore, the question, Is the past worthless for any assessment of the future, as they seem to suggest? The answer that comes to our minds differs based on our own personal priors. Yet the past is the constant and the future is well, an undiscovered ground. History teaches if one wishes to learn.

So, what is to be done about the confusion that unfolds for those of us in the fields of science? Perhaps a breath, a memory of the past, a tincture of silence, a drop of solitude, a fragrance of thought, and a large dollop of reason, might come in handy making decisions for the future. Perhaps?

We need more awareness rather than building an army of guideline-following robots. We need more critical thinking in medicine and science, but especially in medicine. We need reason and logic based on priors and a good deal of basic fundamental knowledge. We need skeptics. We need questioners. We need thinkers. We need real educators. We need teachers that give a damn. And we need real scientists and doctors who desire to ponder, to provoke and to prick the bubble of comfort that endlessly surrounds us!

When we solve this problem that has plagued the very essence of the underpinnings in science and medicine, then and only then can we begin to call our skepticism as “scientific inquiry.” It then becomes a real inquiry into the fundamentals of science and equally into the nature of a patient’s illness. A diagnosis is not a patient, and neither is the patient illness. Until we can reconcile that, we will continue to exist in a carefully crafted bubble of IFTTT (If this then that).