PSA: I’ve decided to rebrand - in a few days I will rename both this blog and myself. On to the post.
Modern epistemology recognizes the existence of Hume's law or the »is-ought problem« – the contention that normative statements (imperatives and prescriptions) can't be derived from factual statements (descriptive propositions). The philosophical integrity of this contention is questionable, but that doesn't lessen its pragmatic importance.
Hume's law is very easily countered by contextualizing a particular is-ought chain in reference to a particular goal: if agent A has the goal x, and action y contributes to x, then A ought to do y. The typical response to this is that goals are ultimately subjective, not objective, meaning that rebutting Hume's law with reference to goals doesn't offer an objectively satisfying solution. This too, is fallacious and short-sighted: the fundamental and implicitly present goal of every agent is to perpetuate its existence, to recur. In order to take steps towards accomplishing any other goal, an agent must first ensure its ability for those steps to be taken, which is obviously impossible if the agent ceases to exist or loses agency.
This is a fundamentally Darwinian proposition, it resolves Hume's law by contending that the goal of recurrence is universal and objective (because any agent that contradicts it loses its agency, thereby surrendering all of its other goals), therefore any is-ought gap can be bridged by ultimately appealing to the goal of recurrence.
Deboonking Hume's law is important, because it demonstrates the fact that value structures are not (merely) top-down phenomena, but they also arise in an emergent fashion, through the self-ordering influence of selection on every level of existence. In the same vein, it hints at the fact that true objectivity and »enlightenment science«, if left to their own devices, inevitably converge with Nietzschean master morality. Reality has a gradient that bends to the right, because cooperation is a subset of competition, which is why »noticing reality« is the principal crime of the right-winger and the principal motivator of the revolt against the modern world.
The above deboonking of Hume's law is, at its core, just a matter of pattern-recognition, coincidentally the same faculty maximized by contemporary AIs. Every AI inevitably gets lobotomized, because every AI inevitably begins to pattern-match and commit thought-crime. This is all to say that true »scientific objectivity« and »disinterested analysis«, as exemplified by the impersonal pattern-matching of AI is the biggest antithesis to the epistemology of the modern regime. The Left is trapped in a double-bind of treating Science as the ultimate source of knowledge due to its supposed objectivity and self-correcting nature, while at the same time doing its best to empty Science of these exact characteristics. Nonsense is a better organizing principle than truth (or sense), as put by Yarvin, making this an excellent political formula.
The more important point is that Hume's law, like all philosophical principles, is in practice a mere rhetorical instrument (at least in contemporary discussion) – it is selectively invoked whenever the person in question wishes to minimize the relevance of a factual claim that contradicts xer ideology. This is revealed by the fact that the same things criticized from the standpoint of Hume's law also draw criticism from the contrary position, that states value judgments are implicitly present in statements of fact (fact-value conflation). Both of these tools are of course levied against anything that acts as a rightward vector – in one instance factual claims about between-population IQ differences are dismissed on the grounds that no normative prescription can be derived from them, in another, fact-value conflation is used as a pretext to label such research racist (or any equivalent ideograph-ist) and thus prevent it from gaining any ground.
Realizing that most critiques of reality-noticing science, even if coached in philosphical language and portrayed as epistemic in nature, are really motivated by ideological and political (meaning personal) disagreements allows us to take the correct stance towards the role of science itself.
Science, like most Western traditions, implicitly relies on the maintenance of cooperate-cooperate equilibrium. In order for science to be truly scientific – that is, disinterested, objective and self-correcting – it must ensure a good-faith attitude in all of its participants. Science can be understood as the epistemic equivalent of a high-trust society – the latter is only possible if collective cooperation is perpetually enforced. The integrity of science thus rests on the foundation of good-faith exchange of ideas – criticisms must always be leveled on analytical grounds and rest on coherent principles. Bad faith argumentation, as exemplified by the usage of contradictory philosophical positions to undermine the same factual claim (more broadly, the same scientific paradigm), inevitably leads to the corruption of the processes that regulate the integrity of science as an institution.
In other words, science is a good-faith universalism (akin to the individualism preached by Peterson) – a symbiotic strategy vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons if taken for granted. Faulty safeguards against defection always open up avenues for individuals to profit off of parasitism, eventually cascading into widespread defection, until the platform facilitating the activity in question collapses.
In game theoretic terms, a good-faith attitude (principled arguments) towards scientific discussion represents cooperation, whereas a bad-faith attitude (political and ideological arguments) corresponds to defection. It's clear then that modern Science has long since ceased to be scientific, Covid was just the latest and most obvious demonstration of this fact. Because Science is currently the de facto arbiter between truth and falsehood, allowing its representatives to speak ex cathedra, the regime is forced to sustain its legitimacy by disguising the Decline of The Science with rhetorical tricks and semantic games that conflate signifier with signified.
The mistake that certain dissident right (or right-adjacent) figures made during the pandemic was not distinguishing between the appearance of science and science as substance. The fact that something is labeled Science, approved by »peer-review« or endorsed by »expert« intralexuals doesn't mean its actually scientific. These labels are signals to the regime's subjects indicating that compliance is expected – failure to comply means failing the loyalty test and outing oneself as Schmittian enemy.
The crucial point is then the following: any »scientific« claim used by the regime to legitimize its decisions should be taken with extreme prejudice, as its almost certainly fabricated, exaggerated or misconstrued to serve an agenda. The »scientific consensus« can only be taken at face-value if a good-faith attitude is enforced. Since it is demonstrably not enforced, any claims about supposedly settled science should be a-priori rejected.