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Ian Underwood's avatar

One of the things that happened to me during COVID is that I started making a hard distinction between facts and data.

A fact is something I can verify: If I drop an item, it will fall to the ground. If I throw a switch creating an electric current, it will deflect a magnet. Stuff like that.

Data is something that is reported to me, that I have no way to verify. The number of people who died of X last year is Y. The number of transgender soldiers in the U.S. military is Z. Stuff like that.

I now no longer trust data at all, no matter who it comes from.

This breaks my heart a little, because the fact that government was able to enlist so many scientists as propagandists has destroyed my faith in science -- or more precisely, my faith in so-called scientists. (I still believe in the scientific method.)

But it's also a little bit liberating, because it means that I no longer have to take cost-benefit arguments seriously. They always come with numbers attached, and in the post-COVID world, an argument that depends on numbers can be dismissed. ('If the numbers were reversed, would you change your mind? No? Then STFU.')

Which means we can focus on moral arguments: Not what would be 'better' (for some group of people, at the expense of another group of people), but what follows from the moral premises we choose (e.g., that people have an absolute right to self-defense, have an absolute right to free speech, have an absolute right to be presumed innocent), even if they sometimes lead to results that we don't like.

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