Lab leak and the say-so of serious people
Dr. Anthony Fauci joined Kara Swisher of the New York Times on her “Sway” podcast recently for a wide-ranging conversation about, among other things, his recently published emails, including his correspondence with Mark Zuckerberg, the long-evolving federal guidance on face masks, and the lab leak hypothesis positing that the novel coronavirus may have escaped from a lab. You can read the whole transcript here.
As everyone should know by now, Dr. Fauci is an eminent immunologist and clearly a dutiful public servant. Having spent the past year and a half helping to guide the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, he has been at the center of the public’s attention and surely unfairly maligned in certain corners of the political ecosphere. This blog has no current view on the U.S. government’s policy response to the pandemic, or on Dr. Fauci’s job performance during the pandemic more generally. I note that he seems like a nice guy.
The conversation with Kara Swisher was revealing, however, of just how commonplace and accepted a certain fallacious form of reasoning is in the public discourse more broadly. It goes by many names: “argument from authority,” “appealing to authority,” ipse dixit (“say-so”), etc. Because it is fallacious reasoning, it can lead you to conclusions that are not likely true; or, equally, direct you away from conclusions that are likely true. Investors, participating as we are in an activity that essentially amounts to competing to identify truths that other people get wrong, ought to care a lot about this.
Here’s a good example of the logical form I’m talking about, from the website Logically Fallacious:
According to person 1, who is an expert on the issue of Y, Y is true.
Therefore, Y is true.
In this case, Y may indeed be true. But it also may not be true. The problem is that the reasoning used to support the proposition that Y is true actually provides no basis to conclude that Y is, in fact, true. To put a finer point on it, the validity of the proposition that Y is true does not depend on who says it. This is shocking to a lot of people because we (society, the media) simply mess this up all the time. Consider, for example, how often you hear arguments like “95% of scientists agree on Y” advanced in serious fora by serious people as a valid basis to conclude that Y is true.
The problem is more obvious and intuitive when you replace Y in the example above with a simple, self-evidently false proposition about which few would disagree. For example, you can formally prove that the reasoning above is wrong by replacing Y with the proposition that 1+1=3:
According to person 1, who is an endowed professor of mathematics, 1+1=3.
Therefore, 1+1=3.
Absurd! 1+1 does not equal 3! But if the say-so of supposed experts was a valid basis for identifying true statements, we would be compelled to conclude that 1+1 does in fact equal 3. Alas, the validity of the similar true claim that 1+1 equals 2 does not depend on who says it or their credentials. It is not the person saying it that makes the statement true, but rather the principals of addition—accessible to any reasoning person—which render it true by definition.
Back to the Swisher-Fauci interview. In the interview, Dr. Fauci appealed to authority numerous times on the topic of the lab leak hypothesis and the all-over-the-map guidance on face masks during the pandemic (emphasis added in the quotations below):
“I feel, as do the overwhelming majority of scientists who have knowledge of virology and knowledge of evolutionary biology, that the most likely explanation for this is a natural leap from an animal reservoir to a human”
“…we all want to find out, really, what the origins were. But again, I get back to saying if you talk to the scientists with knowledge about viruses…”
“…again, I’m not an evolutionary virologist, but those who are look at the virus, and they say it’s absolutely totally compatible with something that evolved from bat viruses because of the closeness to"…”
“At the time that I said to Sylvia that you don’t necessarily need to wear a mask and where I even said publicly you don’t need to wear a mask, you know who agreed with me? The entire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the C.D.C, and the Surgeon General of the United States.”
Importantly, this isn’t to say that, on the lab leak specifically, the opposite conclusion (that it came from a lab), must be true. It’s just to say that the claim that ‘a bunch of experts think it jumped zoonotically’ isn’t good enough or dispositive enough as a purely logical matter to rule out the alternative in the way that supposedly credible authorities suggested over the past year and a half. This really shouldn’t be controversial even if all experts were saying the same thing, because expert consensus can, and often is, wrong (e.g., North Vietnamese resolve, Iraq WMDs, the electability of Donald Trump, the list goes on ad infinitum).
But it especially should not be controversial in light of the fact that other credible experts were, in fact, saying it could have come from a lab the whole time. Quite obviously, a lack of authoritative consensus obviates any argument premised on, well, consensus among authorities.
Kara Swisher pressed Dr. Fauci on this point, noting that other reputable scientists and epidemiologists like Dr. Ralph Baric and Dr. Marc Lipsitch “seem to think it’s possible it originated in a lab, or at least, they think the theory is worth checking out[.]” This was an epistemologically productive moment in the interview because it elicited from Dr. Fauci an actual argument—rather than ipse dixit—about why arguments supporting the lab leak hypothesis are less reliable than some think. To wit:
I mean, even when they’re [the Chinese government] not hiding anything, they act that way. I mean, if you look at the first SARS in 2002, they were not particularly forthcoming in what was going on. And what it was, was proven of being a natural occurrence. Yet if you look the way they acted early on, that’s the nature of the way the Chinese, when they have something that goes on in their own country, they just act in a very put-offish way. They’re not forthcoming with information. Does that mean that they’re really lying and hiding something? I don’t know.
So there you have it. Setting aside the say-so of experts, one reason we should discount the lab leak theory, per Dr. Fauci, is because one of the major arguments supporting the theory—the “what are they hiding” argument—isn’t very compelling when you consider that the Chinese government censors information in the ordinary course of affairs.
That seems like a good point and it may be true. Most importantly for this discussion, though, the validity of the point does not depend in any way on the credentials of its purveyor. It is just a plain argument, premised on basic reasoning and logic skills that all humans possess. Swisher’s Q&A revealed that what was initially proffered as a point of view well-supported by technical, definitive, expertise and specialized analysis really might not be that.
It seems plausible then, that what we’re left with here at the end of the day is a sleight-of-hand that is used regularly in public policy debates: a perfectly debatable contention, accessible to any thinking person to assess and evaluate, disguised under a veil of credentials and authority having the effect of inoculating the argument from inspection. Investors, take notice.
A bit of an aside here, but one wonders if the scientific/medical establishment could be particularly vulnerable to this type of errant reasoning. It’s a bit counterintuitive, because one would expect esteemed practitioners of science to be the most rigorous and skeptical people when it comes to popular consensus about uncertain questions. Scientific inquiry is, after all, just applied epistemology, the act of asking over and over again: “do we really know what we think we know and, if so, how?”
But it’s also possible the institutional factors that govern who is allowed into the “guild” could have the opposite effect. There are high licensing barriers, and years (decades?) of study must be done before one is permitted entry. The credentials that accompany those efforts must confer special authority (and cover from critique) to justify the efforts in the first place, separating the “in” from the “out”. Similar dynamics exist in many other places to be sure (rising publications standards for tenure at universities, rising revenue standards for becoming law firm and consulting firm partners, prohibitive zoning rules put in place by home owners on zoning boards to make new building activity in the area prohibitively expensive) — once people are in the club, they tend to make the walls higher and the moats wider for others behind them.
That’s not to say those efforts are pointless — surely they are not! Surely, people who have spent years or decades studying particularly topics are better positioned to advance strong, sound arguments on matters in their domain of expertise than are other people. But they still have to make the argument and it needs to be logically coherent. No argument is immune from examination. The smartest people in the world have always known this: if it’s too complicated for the expert to explain, there’s a chance the proverbial emperor has no clothes.
Lay folks interested in truth (or investors betting on it), should keep it in mind.
