Black Box Empiricism
Modern science's »holy contradiction« is a gateway for the manifestation of Schmittian exceptions
The holy contradiction is a concept introduced in Zero HP Lovecraft's series on religion to refer to the tendency of religious memeplexes to contain logically contradictory propositions in its core belief-cluster. This paradoxicality is tied to the concept of sacredness – groups of agents cluster around stores of sacredness, sustained by costly signals of loyalty, and what better way to demonstrate loyalty than sacrifice common sense? This point dates back to Yarvin's notion that nonsense is a better organizing principle than truth – any social grouping is incentivized to sacrifice »rationality« to increase cohesion, with the initial sacrifice setting the foundation for a store of sacredness.
Yarvin is also among the first in the online right to point out the intertwined nature of modern »science« and politics, rephrasing Schmitt's axiom of sovereignty to »sovereign is who selects the null hypothesis«. Modern science ostensibly operates according to Popperian falsificationism – science doesn't »prove« true beliefs, it merely rejects »untrue« beliefs – meaning that science merely asymptotically approaches truth as time goes on, inching closer with the falsification of every possible erroneous belief – which is obviously also why Cthulhu always swims left.
Of course this is merely the idea, the post-hoc rationalization that attempts to explain-away the true functioning of modern science. The problem is of course that, in practice (i.e. in politics), it's impossible to operate under a falsificationist framework, because a political decision is the affirmation of a positive, not the negation of a negative. In other words, while you could argue that in theory »vaccines are safe and effective« actually means that »there is no evidence vaccines aren't safe nor effective« (implying that there was no way to predict the negative fallout), you can't hide behind the double negation when this conclusion guides political action, such as vaccine mandates. As soon as a tentatively accepted consensus position (a temporarily settled article of Science) is used as justification for a positive political decision, it has been de facto transformed into proven truth. In other words, once you have made a decision (in the Schmittian sense), you can no longer hide behind the impersonal framework that supposedly computes optimal courses of action.
1. Null hypothesis: vaccines are safe and effective
2. Alt hypothesis: vaccines are not safe, nor effective
3. Set the parameters which must be satisfied for the null hypothesis to be rejected arbitrarily high
4. Fail to reject the null hypothesis
5. Create a tentatively accepted consensus based on your failure to reject the null hypothesis
6. Justify a political decision with reference to the new consensus
7. The de jure tentative consensus, as implemented in sociopolitical life, becomes de facto truth
This demonstrates a key gap between the theoretical functioning of science as an epistemic tool and its practical functioning, as revealed in its role as the modern political formula. The reality is that all of these philosophical notions as to how science supposedly functions are merely post-hoc rationalizations, band-aids that serve to justify the fallout of scientifically justified decisions.
What is even more interesting, however, is that science is only ever presented in the falsificationist framework when the regime is put on the defensive, when a previous decision is proven to have backfired. When operating on the offensive, the regime always presents science as the source of infallible, absolute truth – the Science is Settled, as they say. This simultaneously reveals the existence of the holy contradiction within Science as political formula (i.e. within the political theology of scientific »rationalism«), as well as the fallacious argumentation employed in the regime's rhetoric. Scott Alexander coined the term motte and bailey to refer to the rhetorical tactic of jumping between two versions of the same position: a mild one, serving as a defensive backbone and a radical one, serving as the offensive vanguard.
Let's examine this contradiction in more detail. The Covid narrative relied on two key talking points, which imply two fundamental propositions:
1. The Science is Settled, implying that scientific knowledge is absolute truth
2. The Science has Changed, implying that scientific knowledge is always up for revision[1]
These two propositions are obviously contradictory, as absolute truth cannot be subjected to revision, but this problem is neatly resolved by a motte and bailey style pivot, which asserts a much milder form of 1, proposition 3: scientific knowledge is not actually absolute truth, we just treat it that way because it most closely approximates it. Basically, the absolute position is reconciled with relativism by an appeal to pragmatism. These three propositions form the epistemic foundation of most modern narratives, the (un)holy trinity of scientistic rhetoric. Importantly, this paradoxical trifecta is not at all arbitrary, but an impeccably designed philosophical framework for the implementation of a pure decisionism.
In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt criticized the rationalist conception of the state for its inability to conceive of the exception – an arbitrary suspension of the established legal order that is nevertheless legitimate – because of the rationalists obsession with abstract codification and systematization. The rationalist seeks to fully classify and categorize, thus being unable to understand the inherently unclassifiable exception, since a true exception is by definition not included in the legal order. I would argue that this problem is neatly resolved by using the above trifecta as the basis of the legal order, because legal contradictions serve to post-hoc rationalize decisions, acting as a loophole through which exceptions can be induced. Modern »scientific rationalism« is thus an impeccable political formula, as it perfectly disguises the underlying absolute decisionism behind a veneer of pure, disinterested empiricism. The phrase "experts say" or "new study claims" is the magician's sleight of hand (one of the system's neatest tricks) through which an arbitrary decision is portrayed as the result of a purely formalized procedure. Manipulating procedural outcomes indeed.
I've been scare-quoting the term scientific rationalism because while it is often used to describe the modern metaphysical outlook (scientific materialism is another term), it doesn't really capture its essence very well. It's better to refer to it as black box empiricism. In my last essay, I talked about Selectively Settled Science – the fact that science seems to only ever settle itself when it is politically beneficial, while also un-settling itself when the time comes. This is portrayed, in the narrative, as science updating itself in response to »new data« - the science was settled, but that was based on old data, now that the data has changed it has un-settled and re-settled to account for it.
What this means in practice is that »the data« at Time 1 (T1) can yield different results to data at T2 or T3, with the caveat that one is only correct in one's predictions or inferences if they match what the data supposedly indicates at a particular point in time. For example, the conspiracy theorists warning people about the negative consequences of vaccine uptake at T1, when the data was indicating that vaccines were both safe and effective were wrong, despite data at T3 demonstrating the reality of negative consequences related to vaccine uptake. You don't get points for being ahead of the curve – it is only possible to be correct if your conclusion exactly matches the inference made based on »the data« at every point in time. While Scott Adams has come a long way in the past year, his meltdown about »the data« being »so bad« that only people who were guessing made the right decision is a perfect example of this thought process.
I think black box empiricism is a good name for this worldview because it obviously rejects both intellectual intuition and independent reasoning as valid paths towards the acquisition of knowledge. The only valid source of knowledge is data acquired through scientific research, which is the equivalent of societal sensory experience – hence, empiricism. The black box component stems from the fact that in principle, inferences at each point in time (at T1 to Tn) and their relation to each other should also be considered as data points when making an inference at Tn+1, but the modern outlook rejecs this idea. Inference is a black box, it is impossible (or forbidden) to examine the way »the data« produces specific conclusions, only the data and conclusions themselves may be subjected to scrutiny.
For example, if I conclude that vaccines are safe and effective at T1, but at T3 »the data« shows they are in fact not, then I should note the discrepancy between my two inferences and attempt to improve my inferential process. Ideally I would like to reach the »correct« conclusion with as little data and in as little time as possible. As such, I am incentivized to look at secondary data – examine my »priors«, update my heuristics, identify blind spots – meaning data that isn't directly related to the thing being examined, but rather to the examination itself. This obviously doesn't happen (and if it did, its implications would very quickly become apparent).
As such, we are looking at black box empiricism – knowledge acquisition (or rather, construction) follows the process of INPUT (data) – BLACK BOX – OUTPUT (conclusion). Since the technology of knowledge acquisition is fully opaque – meaning sufficiently advanced to be considered magic – I think it's safe to say that most people alive today believe in magic and miracles. And since miracles are the theological equivalent of the exception in politics, the modern political formula of science is – rather than being the perfect, impersonal and rational arbiter of truth – the perfect legal framework for the justification of absolute decisionism. The fundamental premise of science is that it is never truly settled, it's always just one miracle away from changing, at which point the established legal order must necessarily follow suit.
[1] Obviously this new “changed” science is once again absolute truth.