This is a slightly modified version of a speech I gave at the inaugural meeting of the Icelandic Free Speech Society on Saturday January 7th. You can watch a video of me giving it here.
In the run-up to Christmas, the journalist Christopher Snowdon posted a lengthy Twitter thread that reproduced the projections of various U.K. modelling teams in December 2021, many of them linked to SAGE, showing a range of outcomes in terms of infections, hospitalisations and deaths the new Omicron variant was likely to result in if the British Government failed to lock down over Christmas. These were, in the jargon of the modelling trade, ‘reasonable worst case scenarios’, or, as the U.K. Health Security Agency put it, “a range of plausible scenarios”.
As Christopher gleefully pointed out, none of these scenarios materialised, even though Boris Johnson held his nerve and refused to impose another lockdown (although, to the consternation of Lord Frost, he did impose ‘Plan B’, making masks mandatory in some indoor venues, access to large venues contingent on a negative test result and advising people to work from home). Not only did these ‘plausible scenarios’ fail to materialise, but the actual numbers of infections, hospitalisations and deaths that did occur weren’t even close to the lowest end of the range.
Neil Ferguson, for instance, told the Guardian that “most of the projections we have right now are that the Omicron wave could very substantially overwhelm the NHS, getting up to peak levels of admissions of 10,000 people per day”.
The U.K.HSA released a report on December 10th that included a model showing daily Omicron infections reaching 1,000,000 a day by December 24th.
In fact, only two million people were infected in the whole of December and hospital admissions peaked at less than 2,500 a day.
SAGE submitted a report, based on the work of its modelling subcommittees SPI-M and SPI-M-O, showing a ‘range of plausible scenarios’ in which deaths from Omicron would peak at between 600 and 6,000 a day.
In the event, deaths peaked at 210 a day.
Christopher’s reason for posting this thread, I suspect, was to encourage people to ignore the drumbeat for another lockdown in the run-up to Christmas 2022. If the doom-mongers had got it so badly wrong last Christmas, why should we take their projections about this Christmas seriously?
But, from the point of view of the lockdown lobby, this wasn’t a knock-down argument. Yes, the infections, hospitalisations and deaths from Omicron at the end of 2021 weren’t even in the lower range of SAGE’s ‘reasonable worst case scenarios’, but that didn’t prove the models had been wrong or that the Government was right to ignore them.
The definition of ‘reasonable worst case’ is not the scenario that will probably emerge if the government does nothing, merely a ‘plausible’ one, if the assumptions plugged into the model are correct – although, to confuse matters, the modellers do sometimes describe the outcomes they’re projecting as ‘likely‘ if the government does nothing, or only imposes light-touch restrictions, as Neil Ferguson and his co-authors did in Report 9.
But the scenarios set out by SAGE in December 2021 were only ever billed as possibilities, not probabilities, so the fact that the actual figures for Omicron at the end of 2021 were far lower than those envisioned by SPI-M and SPI-M-O doesn’t mean their models were wrong.
The job of the modellers is to sketch out a range of ‘plausible’ scenarios in the event of the Government doing nothing, or not doing enough, so policymakers are aware of the risks. That’s why the modellers are so insistent that the output of their models are ‘projections not predictions’.
In the eyes of those clamouring for Boris’s Government to lock down at the end of 2021 – like Independent SAGE, which called for an “immediate circuit-breaker” on December 15th – it was his responsibility to do whatever he could to mitigate the likelihood of the ‘reasonable worst case scenarios’ materialising, even if the probability of that happening was low.
Case in point: Professor Graham Medley, the Chair of SPI-M, said in a Twitter exchange with Fraser Nelson in December 2021 that the outputs of the models were “not predictions” but designed “to illustrate the possibilities”. When Fraser asked him why his models didn’t include more optimistic scenarios, e.g. probable rather than possible outcomes if the Government didn’t change course, he seemed perplexed. “What would be the point of that?” he asked.
In an article about this exchange, Fraser asked: “What happened to the original system of presenting a ‘reasonable worse-case scenario’ together with a central scenario? And what’s the point of modelling if it doesn’t say how likely any of these scenarios are?”
The answer is that, when it comes to these extreme risks, the consensus among senior scientific and medical advisors and their academic outriders is that policymakers should not be asking what’s probable, only what’s possible. As they see it, politicians have a responsibility to safeguard populations against ‘reasonable worst case scenarios’ and if they were to accompany them with less apocalyptic projections – and pointed out they were more likely – the politicians might be tempted to ‘do nothing’.
In light of this, the fact that the Omicron wave in the winter of 2021-22 turned out to be relatively mild even though the Government didn’t impose a lockdown is neither here nor there. It was still irresponsible of the Government not to lock down – at least, in the eyes of the lockdown lobby.
By the same logic, the lockdown enthusiasts are unimpressed when sceptics point to the fact that Sweden had, according to some estimates, fewer excess deaths in 2020 than every other country in Europe in spite of the fact that the Swedish Government eschewed lockdowns that year.
In a particularly candid moment, the enthusiasts might even acknowledge that the harm caused by the lockdowns in the rest of Europe was, in all likelihood, greater than the harm those lockdowns prevented.
The relevant counter-factual here is not what in all likelihood would have happened if European countries hadn’t locked down in 2020 – so Sweden is irrelevant – but what could have happened in a ‘reasonable worst case’ scenario – a projection, not a prediction. Given that European governments couldn’t rule out these scenarios coming to pass, it would have been irresponsible of them not to mitigate that risk by locking down, even though it was foreseeable that the harm caused by those lockdowns would probably be greater than any harm they prevented.
That’s why the British Government believed it was right not to waste time carrying out a forensic cost-benefit analysis of the impact of the lockdowns before taking the decision to lock down, which we know it didn’t. Had it done so, that analysis would have shown that, in all likelihood, the cost of locking down outweighed the gain. (For the benefit of those who haven’t been paying attention for the past 21 months, I’m thinking of the economic harm of shuttering businesses, the medical harm of suspending cancer screenings and other preventative health checks, the educational harm of closing schools, the psychological harm of shelter-in-place orders, etc.)
All that was beside the point, as far as policymakers and their scientific and medical advisors were concerned. The point of locking down was not to avert the likely harm resulting from doing nothing or doing less, but to mitigate the risk of far greater harm that was within the range of possibilities. That’s why there was no point in carrying out expensive, time-consuming cost-benefit analyses. Even if those analyses showed the lockdowns would likely cause more harm than good, locking down would still have been the right thing to do.
Pascal’s Wager
The logic policymakers applied in March of 2020 is the same as that used by the 17th Century French mathematician Blaise Pascal in his famous ‘wager’.
It goes like this: God may or may not exist, but it’s rational to behave as if he does and become a believing, observant Christian, since the cost of not doing so if he does exist and the Bible is true is greater than the cost of doing so. You may think it improbable that God exists, but that’s not a rational reason not to believe in him and obey his commands since the cost of disbelieving and disobeying if he does – eternal torment in the fires of hell – is so astronomically high. Given the imbalance between these costs – given that the cost of not being a pious Christian is higher by an order of magnitude than the cost of being one, just in case God exits – it is rational to adjust your behaviour even if you think the probability of him existing is very low.
This ‘Pascallian logic’ didn’t just inform the response to the pandemic of most Western governments, it’s also the rationale for mitigating the risk posed by climate change.
Just as policymakers around the world thought they were justified in curtailing our liberty on an unprecedented scale in 2020 and 2021 to mitigate risks that were plausible but not probable, so those policymakers believe they’re justified in reining in our freedom to mitigate the risk of catastrophic climate change. The cost of imposing top-down measures designed to curb our carbon emissions – the increase in deaths from cold weather as a result of rising energy bills, for instance – is low compared to the potential cost of not reducing our emissions if the apocalyptic warnings of climate activists turn out to be true.
The analogy with Pascal’s Wager might not be immediately obvious because advocates of net-Zero and other policies designed to mitigate the risk of catastrophic climate change often present their case as if the probability of that risk materialising if we ‘do nothing’ is not just higher than 50%, but close to a 100%. Greta Thunberg, for instance.
Indeed, exaggerating the probability of the most apocalyptic scenarios materialising – and introducing ‘tipping points’ or ‘points of no return’ in the near future, after which the effects of climate change will be ‘irreversible’ – has been adopted as a deliberate strategy, not just by climate activists and climate scientists, but by ‘responsible’ journalists as well. For instance, the BBC reported in 2019 that “one million species” were “at risk of imminent extinction”, a claim based on a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). I dug down into that claim for the Spectator and discovered just how tenuous it is. Among other things, over half the species categorised as being “at risk of imminent extinction” had a 10% chance of going extinct within the next 100 years (and even that claim was dubious). As I pointed out, that was like saying that because Manchester City faces a 10% chance of being relegated in the next 100 years, the club is “at risk of imminent relegation”.
Exaggerating these risks is partly informed by game theory and, in particular, ‘collective risk social dilemma’ or CRSD. Psychological experiments have shown that to encourage individual participation in costly corrective group behaviour – such as purchasing electric cars or investing in renewables – both the scale of the negative consequences of failing to engage in that behaviour, and the likelihood of those consequences materialising, have to be exaggerated. I don’t doubt that CRSD also informed many of the projections set out by Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Chris Whitty at the Downing Street press briefings in 2020 and 2021.
But we shouldn’t forget that the projections those catastrophising about the risk that climate change poses are relying on are, in fact, ‘reasonable worst case’ scenarios produced by climate models – projections, not predictions. The climate scientists themselves – the more rational ones, anyway – acknowledge that the probability of their models’ most catastrophic projections materialising is less than 50 per cent and might even be as low as one per cent, or lower. These scenarios are plausible, not probable. Nevertheless, they think humankind has a moral duty to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the risk of the worst scenarios coming to pass – and, indeed, should be forced to do so by national governments, as well as the EU and the UN.
Clearly, this interference in our liberty is informed by the same Pascallian logic – the same aversion to low-probability/high-consequence risks – that underpinned the lockdown policy. Indeed, the debt that climate activist policymakers owe to Pascal was spelt out explicitly by Warren Buffett: “Pascal, it may be recalled, argued that if there were only a tiny probability that God truly existed, it made sense to behave as if He did because… the lack of belief risked eternal misery. Likewise, if there is only a one per cent chance the planet is heading toward a truly major disaster and delay means passing a point of no return, inaction now is foolhardy.”
Climate contrarians like me often point out that the predictions that climate alarmists have made in the past haven’t come true.
For instance, Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), told the New York Times in 1969: “We must realise that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”
In 2004, Observer readers were told that Britain would have a “Siberian” climate in 16 years’ time. Temperatures did drop to minus five in December, but we don’t yet have an Icelandic climate, let alone a Siberian one.
Climate scientist Peter Wadhams, interviewed in the Guardian in 2013, predicted Arctic ice would disappear by 2015 if we didn’t mend our ways – in fact, Arctic summer sea ice is increasing.
In 2009, Prince Charles said we had eight years left to save the planet, while Gordon Brown announced in that same year we had just 50 days to save the Earth.
But, for the more serious-minded advocates of policies like net-Zero, the fact that these scenarios haven’t materialised is no more relevant than the fact that the ‘worst case’ projections of the pandemic modellers didn’t materialise at the end of 2021 or that no-lockdown Sweden suffered a comparatively low number of excess deaths in 2020.
These scenarios, they now claim, were only ever ‘reasonable worst case’, not predictions of things the modellers, or the advocates of reducing carbon emissions, thought were likely to happen. And if they exaggerated these risks at the time, that was merely a white lie because a bit of scaremongering is necessary to get people to adjust their behaviour. CRSD.
Free speech
Before talking about what arguments we might use to challenge ‘Pascalllian logic’ I want to mention one more area of public policy informed by this reasoning, namely, curbs on free speech.
For instance, it’s the rationale employed by large social media platforms like Facebook for suppressing the speech of those who question the efficacy and safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Those platforms, or those pressurising them to remove vaccine sceptical content, such as the U.K. Government’s counter-disinformation units, believe it’s responsible to remove that content because they take it for granted that the mRNA vaccines and boosters alleviate more sickness than they cause and it’s possible that not removing this content will increase vaccine hesitancy.
They don’t know it will. Indeed, they may accept that the likelihood of it doing so is quite low. But nevertheless, if there’s a risk the content will cause just one person not to get vaccinated, they believe they’re justified in removing it.
The same rationale is used to license the removal of content questioning the claim that we’re in the midst of a climate emergency – that extreme weather events are caused by climate change, for instance. If it’s possible that such content might discourage people from reducing their carbon footprint – not probable, but possible – they feel justified in removing it.
Finally, ‘Pascallian logic‘ is used to justify passing laws prohibiting ‘hate speech’ or censoring the purveyors of ‘hate speech’, like Andrew Tate. The argument isn’t that such speech will cause violence to be inflicted on those it’s targeted against, such as women and girls, or even that such violence is likely. Rather, the argument is that it’s possible ‘hate speech’ will cause violence. That alone is reason enough to ban it.
In defence of liberty
So, now that we’ve identified that ‘Pascallian logic’ informs the curtailment of our liberty in these three separate but important areas – the three greatest threats to liberty in the contemporary world, I think – what arguments can we make to challenge this type of reasoning? What can we say in defence of liberty?
One place to look is the standard objection to Pascal’s Wager.
One rejoinder is that belief in a supernatural being is irrational (although Isaac Newton and many eminent scientists believed in God), so it can never be rational to modify your behaviour just in case that being exists.
Setting aside whether this is a good argument or not, it doesn’t apply to ‘reasonable worst case scenarios’ since they’re produced by computer models created by epidemiologists and climate scientists. They bear the imprimatur – the authority – of science.
Another line of attack is to point out that the selection by policymakers of what low-probability/high-consequence risks to safeguard against is somewhat arbitrary.
For instance, why aren’t we building expensive defences against the possibility of an asteroid strike or colonising other planets as refuges just in case the Earth is invaded by aliens?
More prosaically, instead of just banning the sale of new diesel or petrol cars in the U.K. from 2030, why don’t we just ban cars altogether? After all, every time you get in your car it’s possible you’ll kill someone, even if it’s improbable.
What’s the rational basis for curtailing our liberty to reduce the likelihood of some low-probability/high-consequence risks materialising, but not others?
The advocates of large-scale policy interventions like lockdowns and net-Zero have an answer to this, which is that the reason for prioritising some risks above others is because if they materialise they will disproportionately effect vulnerable, disadvantaged, historically marginalised groups.
This is the rationale for imposing permanent mask restrictions by an American group calling itself the ‘People’s CDC’, which was the subject of a recent article in the New Yorker by Emma Green. It’s a collection of academics and doctors who are part of a broader coalition of left-wing public health activists advocating for more persistent mitigations.
These activists believe the reason the state has a duty to continue mitigating the risk of COVID-19 is because the virus’s infection fatality rate is higher for disabled people, elderly people and fat people – as well as black and minority ethnic people because, on average, they have less access to healthcare. One of the policies recommended on the People’s CDC website is that all social events should take place outside with universal, high-grade masking. Opposing this policy, the activists argue, is ableist, fatphobic and racist. Lucky Tran, who organises the People’s CDC’s media team, says: “A lot of anti-mask sentiment is deeply embedded in white supremacy.”
Moralistic scientism
You may not take activists like this and their demands for permanent Covid restrictions seriously, but I believe this combination of extreme safetyism and left-wing identity politics is a potent cocktail. Emma Green described it as “a kind of moralistic scientism – a belief that science infallibly validates lefty moral sensibilities”.
This ‘moralistic scientism’ undoubtedly informed the zero-Covid policy in New Zealand, as well as the draconian lockdowns in some Canadian and Australian states, and the pressure to lockdown in Christmas 2021 exerted by Independent SAGE, the British equivalent of the People’s CDC.
One of the organisations that funds the People’s CDC is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the CEO of which, Richard E. Besser, is a former acting director of the CDC.
Professor Susan Michie, one of the members of Independent Sage, is also a member of SAGE.
According to Emma Green, this coalition of public health activists is “influential in the press”, and that’s certainly true of the Guardian, which published the People’s CDC manifesto last year.
Much of the campaigning for net-Zero and other policies designed to reduce carbon emissions is also rooted in ‘moralistic scientism’. Our duty to mitigate the risk of climate change, these activists argue, isn’t just because climate scientists have ‘proved’ that the consequences of not doing so could be catastrophic, but because the negative effects of climate change disproportionately impact the Global South – or the ‘Global Majority’, as it’s now called.
So what can we say in response to this ‘moralistic scientism’?
One argument is that the policies imposed in an attempt to avert these low-probability/high-consequence risks disproportionately harm precisely the same disadvantaged groups they’re designed to protect.
For instance, when schools were closed in the U.K. during the lockdowns, children from low-income families were much more likely to suffer learning loss than those from middle- and high-income families. They’ve also proved less likely to return to schools since they’ve been reopened. The Centre for Social Justice published a report last year pointing out that 100,000 children are now ‘missing’ from the British education system. The report found that children who were eligible for free school means were over three times more likely to be severely absent than their peers.
Similarly, deindustrialisation policies designed to avert the risk of a climate catastrophe are more likely to harm people in low-income countries than they are people in middle- or high-income countries. Indeed, that was one of the arguments put forward at Cop27 for why the fully industrialised West should pay ‘reparations’ to African and Middle Eastern nations.
Oddly, however, these arguments never seem to land with advocates of large-scale, top down policy interventions to mitigate low-probability/high-consequence risks. The notional harm caused to ‘at risk’ groups if we ‘do nothing’ engages their moral passions far more powerfully than the actual harm caused to those groups by the measures designed to protect them.
Another line of attack is to appeal to the ‘scientism’ of the advocates of these top-down policy interventions, pointing out that there’s no such thing as ‘the Science’ in the sense that very few, if any, scientific hypotheses are ever completely settled, including the claim that global warming is caused by anthropogenic climate change. And even if they were settled, to argue that they ‘prove’ we should implement certain policies would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy – to infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
Indeed, the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries wouldn’t have been possible if descriptive propositions about the natural world hadn’t been disentangled from the cosmology of the Old Testament and Christian morality more widely.
One variant of this argument is that the reason we shouldn’t allow high-level policy decisions to be based on the projections of supposedly ‘scientific’ models is because those projections are, by definition, untestable. Yes, we can point to predictions that haven’t come true – at Davos three years ago, Greta Thunberg said we had eight years left to save the planet, so the clock is ticking on that one. But the more cautious climate activists will acknowledge that the ‘reasonable worst case scenarios’ they’re warning us about are projections not predictions and when they fail to materialise if we don’t follow their policy recommendations, they can say we just got lucky. In this way, the projections of the models – which are only saying what’s possible, not what’s probable – can never be falsified. As Karl Popper pointed out, if a hypothesis cannot be falsified, it doesn’t deserve to be called scientific.
But, as climate contrarians like me know, those argument also fail to land. Anyone expressing scepticism about net-Zero and similar policies is automatically branded a ‘denier’ – or a purveyor of ‘climate misinformation’ – in the pay of Big Oil.
There’s one final argument I can think of, which will be familiar to the opponents of Big Government, which is to acknowledge that humankind does have a moral responsibility to do what it can to mitigate low-probability/high-consequence risks, particularly those that will disproportionally affect historically marginalised people, but point out that policymakers simply lack the competence and expertise to mitigate these risks.
Ignorance, as well as the law of unintended consequences, means that even if we’re concerned about these risks, we simply cannot be confident that the costly measures policymakers are proposing will make them less likely to materialise.
For instance, the lockdowns and other Covid restrictions didn’t merely fail to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in those countries where they were imposed, they left populations more vulnerable to seasonal respiratory viruses, such as the winter flu strain that’s currently putting the NHS under pressure.
Encouraging people to scrap their existing cars and buy new electric ones may not result in any net reduction in carbon emissions since the carbon emissions resulting from the production of a new car are so much greater than those produced by continuing to drive a ‘wet’ car, at least within a 10-year period.
For a discussion of the incompetence of policymakers see ‘The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance’ by Scott Scheall, who also has a Substack newsletter and podcast.
But will that argument land? Won’t we be accused of making the same old, tired libertarian arguments, probably in the pay of rapacious corporations who want to avoid state regulation?
Greatest threat to our liberty
I think this new hybrid of extreme safetyism and left-wing identity politics – ‘moralistic scientism’, in the words of Emma Green – will be the greatest threat to our liberty in the coming decades and resisting it will be hard. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that trying to persuade its adherents to be a bit less alarmist and a bit more reasonable by appealing to evidence and logic is misguided. They may claim to be ‘following the Science’, but they don’t set much store by the scientific method.
The reason these arguments don’t land, I suspect, is because ‘moralistic scientism’ is a synthesis of what might be described as the two fastest-growing religions in the West – the woke social justice movement and the green, climate activist movement. It now has child saints (Greta Thunberg), missionaries (George Monbiot), high priests (Sir David Attenborough), annual evangelical meetings (Cop26, Cop 27, etc.), catechisms (‘There is no planet B’), a Holy See (the IPPC), and so on. For the votaries of this new cult, it provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose – it fills the God-shaped hole left by the ebbing away of the Christian tide.
Therefore, to successfully resist it, we need something more than rational scepticism. We need a new ideology – something like a religious movement of our own. One that’s more optimistic about the future of humanity, that places a little more faith in the ability of people to do their own risk assessments and voluntarily adjust their behaviour if necessary. One that keeps faith with the principles of democracy and national sovereignty and opposes the transfer of power from national parliaments to unelected international bodies who are convinced they know what’s in our best interests. An ideology that recognises the limits of science when it comes to informing public policy – particularly computer models. That restores public trust in science by disentangling it from ‘moralistic scientism’ and depoliticising it more generally, making it clear that science can no more be invoked to support left-wing policies than it can right-wing ones. Above all, a movement that places free speech and the unfettered pursuit of knowledge at is core. A second Scientific Revolution. A New Enlightenment.
Creating that, I believe, is the greatest challenge facing those of us who want to resist the creep of this new authoritarianism.
Stop Press: Steven Pinker has published a speech he made in November at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference that is partly about how to deal with the problem of science becoming politicised and the resulting decline in public trust in science. He comes at the problem from a different political direction to me, but some of his conclusions are remarkably similar.
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1600 years of British history said the government had no right to impose ‘lockdown’.
300 years of the Enlightenment said that we should have been wise to their shenanigans and lies.
Toby writes: We need a new ideology – something like a religious movement of our own.
Indeed. But until 2020 I thought we had what the necessary ideology. Somehow though we forgot, and now have to relearn it.
Rona fascism happened thanks to the Enlightenment. Where do you think the cult of scientism comes from?
Fascism and communism both happened thanks to the enlightenment only in the same way as the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition happened thanks to Jesus Christ.
The intellectual response to covid was the antithesis of the Enlightenment, and instead was a throwback to Medievalism, or at least the worst parts of Medievalism.
An awful lot of people on the woke left do of course think they are enlightened, although in truth they are anything but.
PS.: Wiki page on the Enlightenment. First para.:
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
A little further on we read:
The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church.
A pretty good antithesis of everything we’ve seen regarding the covid response.
Maybe the conservative movement needs its own modellers to produce their own scary “scenarios”.
For example:
The fact that these statements are likely or not is irrelevant, right? They could be true. And we should act to avoid the worst case scenario, right?
It would quite easy to produce a simulation model that produces those results. Time to start funding some conservative modellers and fight fire with fire.
“Maybe the conservative movement needs its own modellers to produce their own scary “scenarios”.
For example:
The online safety bill could destroy up to 500,000 jobs.Net zero will drive 50% of Britons into poverty.Wearing masks for just 30 minutes a day can reduce life expectancy by 5 years.etc…”
Stewart, all of the above are known in government. These three examples are just some of the impoverishments being used against the peoples of this and other Western countries. We also have rampant inflation, alleged fuel shortages necessitating massive domestic price increases – entirely mythical – manufactured strikes, allegedly polluted cities (yeah right), allegedly ‘safe and effective…’
Where depopulation is the end game anything which assists is deemed usable.
Politics in this country is a farce. It is finished, redundant. The whole bunch of them are leeches on the citizenry. As I keep repeating:
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
“Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.”
True, if by that we mean the masses habitually playing musical chair establishment political party voting.
The people of Britain have used the ballot box successfully to reject establishment parties in European elections, but for some reason, they can’t grasp the importance of applying this practice to national elections.
Centre Right political parties are there waiting for our support.
So many issues from this speech.
A major problem I have is that even if the modelling is necessary to outline a worst case scenario, all Covid and climate scenarios ignore both adaptation of humans to deal with problems, and alternative treatments and solutions (HCQ, ivermectin, etc).
This makes modelling the most simplistic approach to dealing with problems confronting humanity, though perhaps that’s all our politicians, media, and bureaucrats are capable of comprehending.
In terms of ‘modelling’ all Ferguson did, in its essentials, was to model a gigantic nationwide chain letter, and assume that 0.9% of recipients died.
I’m not sure about how apposite Pascal’s wager is here. Essentially, his approach was that there is little to lose (from present experience) from belief in the gospel, but a lot to lose from unbelief (in the uncertain hereafter). And to Pascal, even the hereafter was not a mere guess, on the understanding that the rest of the gospel were true.
But in the case of COVID modelling, “plausible” risks in the immediate future were weighed against no less plausible costs both now AND in the immediate future. Pascal’s wager is by no means watertight, but it has a lot more going for it than Chicken Licken’s precautionary principle.
It isn’t apposite. It is stupid.
Pascal was discussing the immaterial, the spiritual a faith.
Implementing a medical Nazism is 100% atheist, totalitarian based on the religious-dogma of ‘the science’ or scientism.
Models are junk. I work in IT. I analysed some of Fergutard’s code made by a first year computing student 13 years ago. It is embarrassing it is so bad. Show me the data sources, the data schemas and the application logic….a one day audit would reveal a fraud.
The Imperial College code is Fortran written in a C subset of C++.
Totally agree. The analogy doesn’t hold water.
Also – Diamond Princess.
Great article. I agree that, sadly, most people do seem to need something to believe, ‘to fill the god shaped hole’, despite a few hundred years of advancement of the scientific method. Presumably, because of the omnipotence of science and technology over our lives nowadays, this new pseudo religion needs to be couched as being ‘Science’.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the oligarchs and corporate elites have cottoned on to this in the last decade or so, and are channeling this progressive virtuosity for their own purposes.
Pascal has nothing to do with fascism.
Surely, by the same logic, it is legitimate to ban vaccinations against Covid due to the possible risk from the vaccination.
You’ve hit the nail on the head ! I think Toby has created a great discussion here, but he talks about the ideology as though it exists independent of other factors. The reason they will never evaluate vaccine risks is – profit, as we all know. Profit and the philanthro-capitalists which drive it’s accumulation – are the major factors which nudge the groupthink in a particular direction.
This talk by David Starkey called “the Woke Reformations: Historical Parallels is worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HMbEiZAPME
That’s put a definite dampener to the start of my day, mentioning Prof Neil Ferguson aka Prof Never F’inright and including a picture of Witless. Please, no one ruin my day further and mention Blair or I might forget I’m doing dryJanuary…
I prefer The Maths to The Science, it shows that epidemics never grow exponentially.
Pascal’s wager is just stupid: Assuming God exists, he’ll know those who only pay lip services to him because they think he’s so unimportant that that’s really all which is called for.
As to democracy, Aristotle claimed it would be an undesirable form of government because the demos would sooner or later always fall for a demagogue. That’s what happened at a large scale in 2020. One also has to realize what the demos in all these so-called democracies really is. By definition, it’s the set of people allowed to attend the popular assembly in order to vote on policy proposals and to hold public offices. Hence, the demos of our so-called democracies are the members of the respective parliaments. They have an outer ring of somewhat-demos around them, all the people who could conceivably become members of a parliament. This is usually a very small subset of the electorate (1.45% in Germany, 1.4% if members of parties standing no realistic chance of governing at the time being [AfD] are excluded). Everybody else is just Stimmvieh (vote-oxen).
A further argument against moralistic scientism is that ‘scientism’ depends upon the distinction between science and models. The projections produced by models are not scientific – they merely use mathematics to produce numbers, based on assumptions that for example do not reflect the true epidemiology of Covid or climate variations since the industrial revolution.
Scientism is in fact anti-scientific but wraps itself in the cloak of science to promote the quasi-religions of climate change and social justice.
Attacking the anti-scientific basis of moralistic scientism highlights the fact that it is built on foundations of sand.
We don’t need a new ideology.
Small government capitalist democracy works fine.
We have to stop paying for all the Pantsdowns and Gumby Brothers through the grotesquely bloated state sector.
Pay MPs a lot more but make them a great deal more accountable to their constituents. That would reduce the power of the party machines and government payroll.
Only with more independence for MPs of a higher calibre can we get back to small and effective government that truly represents the majority wishes of the electorate
How can politicians know the wishes of the majority and why should the majority have the right to impose their wishes on the minority. It is time for the government to stop imposing its wishes on us and for us to take responsibility for our own lives.
Pascal’s Wager is easily refuted. If you are behaving yourself out of fear of potential retribution to be exacted by an omnipotent entity after your opportunity for reform has passed then He will not be fooled for a moment. If you’re hedging your bets He will know.
The extension of the reasoning behind Pascal’s Wager into zero risk policy is equally futile. If some researcher comes up with an unlikely but extreme risk it needs to be tested precisely to see if it is plausible. If it passes these first tests we can go on to argue about cost/benefit analysis of various possible mitigations.
Report 9 predicted 510,000 deaths with a peak of about 14,340 deaths per day. The authors used the word ‘predict’ or some variant of the word repeatedly in their ‘Results’ section – we must not let them get away with retrospectively claiming they meant this was ‘only a possibility’.
By predicting the height of the peak and the total toll the authors have defined the important parameters of an epidemic curve. If their predictions did not result in an epidemic curve then their report failed the plausibility test immediately.
Report 9 was published on March 16 2020, eleven days after the first day with multiple deaths in GB (2 deaths on March 5 2020). An epidemic deaths curve which matches the predicted parameters should reach about 1,000 deaths per day by day eleven after the first day with more than one death. On March 16 2020 there were 50 deaths. Report 9 failed the plausibility test on the day that it was published.
The lockdown was announced on March 23 2020 but was widely anticipated. The empirical evidence available up to March 23 pointed to a peak in early April and a death toll of about 36,250 by the end of August. The peak did occur on April 8 2020, and the overall toll was about 30% higher; but much closer to reality than the implausible Report 9.
Even considering mitigating extreme risks only makes sense if the scenarios pass plausibility tests.
A splendid essay.
Some here eloquently question the suitability of the analogy or of the wager itself.
I subscribe to it, but in connection to its original question and application only.
Its misguided attribution to all these other areas, which Toby delves into brilliantly here, is in my view due to not just bad maths and bad faith, but also and primarily to the God complex so many ‘enlightened’ scientists, politicians, journos and decision-makers nowadays suffer from.
Which is where and why they have (erroneously) come full circle again with regard to the original wager.
“The job of the modellers is to sketch out a range of ‘plausible’ scenarios in the event of the government doing nothing, or not doing enough, so policymakers are aware of the risks. That’s why the modellers are so insistent that the output of their models are ‘projections not predictions’.”
So, what is the purpose of these models if they are consistently off-target. Almost anything could be deemed “plausible” even though in relaity it never happens. It is “plausible” we will be struck by a large asteroid tomorrow but would that justify everybody living underground from now on. It also begs the question why are the models not correct at least some of the time? Are they just so badly designed they are never correct or are they just devices to create alarm by deliberately exaggerating the threat? Accurate modelling requires a thorough understanding of what is being modelled. It is used successfully in disciplines like engineering where the parameters of the model are better understood and more predictable. Natural phenomena are more complex, less well understood, and therefore harder to model. They are also increasingly subject to political influence and the trend towards manufactured “truth”. It really begs the question should we take any notice of them at all?
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-boy-who-trapped-death-in-a-nut/
A fitting read in conjunction with it.
Thanks for the link.
My parents are both 83 (and will hopefully both become 84 this year) and Corona’s witnesses have stopped me from meeting them (they’re living in Germany) for two years. This time is irretrievably lost and hence, they’ve done a damage to me I cannot ever get compensation for. Their theory is that I’m selfish bordering on the antisocial because I didn’t want to suffer this damage and that they’re altruistic for inflicting it on me nevertheless, despite this was for their own benefit. They claim that I benefitted from it, too, but I don’t believe this and didn’t ask for it.
Toby, this is one of your best articles to date. You’ve articulated everything I’ve been thinking these last couple of years. We need a new paradigm of the relationship between the people and those who are supposed to represent our interests but don’t. As you say a new enlightenment written by the people, for the people and of the people. The moral vacuum that exists in society from the top to the bottom is the result of two hundred years of Scientism that has no interest in understanding or importance of the transcendent value of life. Without a connection to the spiritual side of our nature we become lost, unanchored and susceptible to false ideologies and prophets.
Under what banner can the people who are awake gather under to create this new Enlightenment?
Great piece. I’ve been researching in this area (starting with Ian Hacking’s excellent “The Emergence of Probability”), and was thinking of writing something about the revival of Pascal’s Wager. (“Act Like You’ve Got It”…)
But the Wager is based on something even more intriguing and currently relevant, which you don’t mention.
Several commenters have made the counter-argument that the Wager is stupid: God would know that you’re only pretending to believe, that you’re just applying decision theory (in Pascal’s case, before Bayes was even around). God – if He exists – is omniscient and can see into your heart’s secrets. When you finally reach Heavenly Boarding, St Peter the flight attendant would shout “Fake!”, and direct you to the right, to eternal Ryanair, rather than left to eternal Singapore Airlines First Class.
This counter-argument misses out a key part of Pascal’s thinking. According to him, the way to belief – for those who lack the unmistakable zeal of true faith – is to act as if you believe. Acting out belief – following the rituals – will eventually produce true belief: perhaps not in the form of a Saul/Paul flash of light, but incrementally. And this effort is acceptable to God. And in the case of the other possibility – that God doesn’t exist – this acting will make you a Good Person anyway.
I can’t think of any better way to understand the current religion. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wondered, when witnessing yet another instance of COVID-insanity: “Do these people actually believe this dreck?”. It seems impossible that so many people actually experience true COVID-zeal, so the behaviour of the vast majority who don’t demands explanation.
There are a lot of candidate explanations around: conformity, social pressure, legal sanction, mass formation. The hidden argument of Pascal’s wager recasts this question, by collapsing the distinction between sincere, zealous belief and “mere” acting-as-if-you-believe. The latter is perfectly sufficient on its own – sufficient for approving judgment by God and by man. Asking whether it is, or represents, “true” belief is pointless.
I’m not theologian enough to know what other theologians, or churches, have thought of this in the context of Christian faith. But you can see how beautifully it fits the present-day COVID religion. Personal opinion, empirical knowledge, comfort, desire for a normal, sane life, are all placed to one side (in the Christian context, on the side of “Doubts”): the most important thing is to act-as-if-you-believe, as a kind of asymptotic project towards salvation. The result is universal bad faith.
And this curiously affects even the contemporary “preachers”. They don’t have to try to bludgeon you into real belief; that would be beyond the ability of anyone without the resources 1984’s O’Brien enjoys. All they need to do is make you act-as-if, and make you recast your reluctance as Doubt. The split between “Doubt” and as-if-belief affects them themselves too, and they can admit it, to some extent. In their own circles, in their ‘sciencific’ ‘studies’, they can openly worry about the bad effect of certain beliefs or opinions, without concerning themselves in the slightest about their truth or falsity. Because the threat posed by an ‘undesirable’ belief, thought, speech, writing is a threat not to truth, but to the maintenance of the as-if which is central to the COVID-cult.
I think that recognising this as-if is crucial to the struggle against that vile word “misinformation”. Insisting against this slur that a particular piece of so-called “misinformation” is true, enjoys an enormous evidential base, is important, in a way misses the target. The other side are not playing by the same rules: truth, for them, is not the criterion – or if it is, it’s deferred to a future determination: to a God’s eventual judgment, but without honestly invoking an actual God they actually believe in. This is not surprising: God, as arbiter of truth, can never be actual, under this scheme; as the final arbiter, He remains eternally suspended as a future possibility.
Good thinking. Regardless of Pasacal himself, though, I remember learning in Social Psychology of research that showed that if you act against convictions for long enough, your beliefs change. This explained how conscripted guards in death camps could become progressively more comfortable committing genocide.
And that’s why the point of propaganda is not to change belief, but to change behaviour, ideally by bypassing rather than opposing rational belief. Get people compliant and belief, to a degree, will follow.
And that is true of behavioural nudging as well. Teaching people to evaluate research is slow and hard, and may not end in their agreeing with you (especially if you’re a politician or psychologist who hasn’t evaluated the science). But showing pictures of nurses wearing masks and getting jabs, and bemoaning the shortage of test kits bypasses asking if any of it works, and changes behaviour willingly or by social pressure. Belief follows – until the lies become obvious to all.
I think you are spot on here – as-if-believers want to show that they are good people and so they go along with the narrative (to question it would show that they are less than good/bad even, truculent, awkward squad, trouble makers…, spoiling for an argument and they don’t want to show that publicly even if privately they have doubts.).
This counter-argument misses out a key part of Pascal’s thinking. According to him, the way to belief – for those who lack the unmistakable zeal of true faith – is to act as if you believe. Acting out belief – following the rituals – will eventually produce true belief: perhaps not in the form of a Saul/Paul flash of light, but incrementally. And this effort is acceptable to God. And in the case of the other possibility – that God doesn’t exist – this acting will make you a Good Person anyway.
That’s the Catholic theory: Salvation is awarded (exclusively) to those who outwardly conform with the demands of the (Catholic) Church and this very church has spent centuries with persecuting everyone proclaiming alternate theories with a genocidal zeal, ie, kill everyone in sight, often brutally, and lay waste to all anybody ever possesed. As it naturally befits a organization dedicated to universal love and forgiveness. But nevertheless, some people who are not Catholics survived here and there and still proclaim alternate theories, usually something along the lines of Because man is inherently sinful, he can never justify himself through his works alone but must ultimatively rely on God’s mercy with repentant sinners who actually believe in His mercy.
Pascal’s wager is as relevant in the 21st Century as is the belief that a centralised health service created over 70 years ago is still relevant today
Disagree. It is irrelevant if, as I conclude, it doesn’t quite cover the case. But the age of an idea does not in any way diminish its truth. If it did, we’d all embrace intersectionality as Progress, as we are expected to by self-styled progressives.
‘CRSD’ a.k.a. lying to benefit the liars
It’s ridiculous and an insult to God to compare climate change policy to Pascal’s wager in regards to God. “it is rational to adjust your behaviour even if you think the probability of him (God) existing is very low.” Toby writes.
You would only come to the conclusion that the probability of God exisiting is low if you ignore all the evidence for God and chose to believe the unscientific unprovable theory of molecules to man evolution – that something came from nothing.
People don’t believe in God not because of lack of evidence but because they don’t want to believe there is a God. When you talk to athiests and agnostics you discover they have a deep hatred for God.
For once I don’t agree with Toby. Pacal’s cost re God was negligible compared to the prospect of eternal damnation in hell. The cost of lockdowns are and will
continue to be for many years to come incredibly high, and compared to Ferguson’s 500k deaths fantasy are not even close to being worth it.