How Do We Know Anything... Ever?

Epistemology. Logic. Data. Inference. Knowledge. Have you ever wondered how it all fits together? I have. A lot. Here's a start at my take. I hope you give these thoughts your brief attention.

Epistemology is the study of how we learn and know things. After decades of study of this problem, formally and informally, I am happy to report:

1. There is no single valid way to learn and know.

2. Many ways we think we are learning and acquiring knowledge routinely fall short of providing reliable information we can call “knowledge.” These are invalid ways of learning and knowing. They add noise to the process of science, and they can sometimes even be positively misleading.

3. Belief has nothing to do with knowledge.

4. Understanding has everything to do with knowledge.

5. The crisis in Science is due to a combination of earnest and dishonest differences in the understanding of people who conduct science and fraud designed to manipulate public perception. Fraud is not a version of science—it is simply fraud. But labeling fraud science can be used to pry dollars from the public’s bank accounts regardless of whether the activities have anything to do with estimating or understanding reality.

6. The politicization of science, while not new, has reached epic proportions in areas that affect public health and medicine - with no end in sight short of a federal ban on for-profit medicine. The end of regulatory capture is essential for reversing the abuses of the public trust conducted in the name of science. Politics can be a mortal threat to science - but not in the simplistic way that scientists fear. The right is not anti-science; they are anti-fraud. The left has won much power by acting as though they, and they alone, support science. There can be no confusion about this.

7. Due to the feedback of bad medicine making people sicker who apparently need more medicine, leading to “Big Medicine”, numerous changes in the finance of medicine may only be able to delay the inevitable consumption of our entire society by a medical system based on fallacious economic models that assume infinite growth. It’s a complex system worthy of objective dynamical systems modeling.

8. The goal of science should be valid, generalizable inferences given prior understanding, observation, experimentation, and data, and understanding the exceptions. In other words, the goal of science should be understanding.

9. Science can only “self-correct” if perverse and misaligned incentives in science, mainly clinical and biomedical science and public health, are reoriented by everyday people. They cannot self-correct on their own. That means we must recruit or develop an army of citizen scientists who understand why the statements are so important. The public needs the power to control how they structure the conduct and funding of science.

10. The public must learn logic, reason, and the tenets of science if they hope to hold science and medicine accountable to their own higher ideals. Those who understand science in its most profoundly fundamental ways must vastly outnumber those who would continue to abuse the public trust. Thus, IPAK-EDU LLC.

I’m spending all of my curriculum development time and energy this summer developing the course Logic, Reason, and Knowledge. We will study the structures of epistemology. At the end of the course, you will be reminded to re-read the statements above and marvel at how you can relate more deeply to the mission we have all chosen.

We’ll meet twice per week: A lecture on Tuesdays, and a companion Causality Coffee on Thursdays. Causality Coffees are like a lab recitation for the main course. After this course, don’t be surprised if you start doing puzzles and math problems for meditative entertainment.