Who Can We Trust?
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
FAUCI-GATE
Last week I pulled all-nighters so I could read all 3,234 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails. Actually, I’m lying. That’s about 3,230 pages more than I could take. And I don’t do meth. News outlets, however, have apparently scoured these emails. From their coverage, a kind of political Rorschach test has emerged. Depending on one’s political bent, Fauci is either a lying, Machiavellian hustler or just one helluva guy.
I don’t envy his position.
SCIENTISM
Those calling for Fauci to be fired cite as chief among their reasons his marginalizing of the lab leak hypothesis, which was a position taken by lauded scientist Donald J. Trump.
In an essay for Unherd, in which he recalls his own ungloved work with bats, and asserts that human error may even be preferable to natural origins, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein offers the following description of what we might call scientism, positing that for some time now there have been drunks behind the wheel:
As it stands, science is plagued by a system of perverse incentives in which scientists are condemned to constantly compete for jobs and grant money just to stay in the game. The repercussions of this have been clear for decades, as scientists exaggerate, distort and mislead in order to get their own work (or their field’s work) funded.
If we are mostly safe from devastating zoonotic spillover pandemics, why were we told otherwise? The answer is simple: because the scientific method has been hijacked by a competition over who can tell the most beguiling stories. Scientists have become salesmen, pitching serious problems that they and their research just so happen to be perfectly positioned to solve. The fittest in this game are not the most accurate, but the most stirring. And what could be more stirring than a story in which bat caves are ticking pandemic time-bombs from which only the boldest and brightest gene experts can save us?
