Up first we have the very first video Distributist made, "Dismantling the Cult of Confidence." It's a voice recording of a speech given at the Socratic Forum for Thought in Seattle, Washington on September 5th, 2015. The video itself was uploaded four days later, on September 9th, 2015.
The video's description reads as follows:
A lecture given on communicating uncertainty in the contemporary world. I point to how our modern obsession with certainty has harmed our public discourse generally and propose some possible lessons that can be learned from statistics when communicating constructive doubt.
One thing you'll learn about Distributist is that he knows exactly what underlying assumptions to question in a given period of time. The topic of many of his videos is not what political policy is the best or even what political ideology is the correct one. Rather, he is interested in how political discussions are structured, what assumptions underlie those discussions, and how to dismantle those assumptions to create a political framework better equipped to deal with the problems of modernity.
While he's by no means a modern Thomas Aquinas, the Distributist's knowledge of the fields of epistemology and statistics far surpasses most people's, and this first video demonstrates his knowledge by applying what he knows to modern political discourse. The thesis of his talk is deceptively simple: even though we know more about science than ever before, we are unable to say anything with certainty because we automatically distrust any claim that we judge to be "uncertain." This "cult of certainty" has had catastrophic consequences on our culture, increasing perplexity, philosophical skepticism, and cynicism while decreasing trust in institutions like the media and elected officials.
The example from his personal life he provides is revealing. A friend of his who was sick went to a doctor to get tested for a rare disease. The test itself had a 99% success rate and came back positive. The doctor then said to her "I'm 99% sure you have this disease." Said sick friend was devastated. But then a statistician came to her and said "get another opinion." So she went to another doctor, took the same test, and it turned out she didn't have the rare disease. As the statistician explained, only one in a million people actually have the disease, and the test's chances of success are ninety-nine out of a hundred. The odds of getting a false positive are much more likely than actually having the disease. The sick friend felt betrayed by the doctors and never trusted them again. The moral of the story is this: the desire to appear confident motivates people to be dishonest!
He then points out how so many of the questions of our day and age cannot be answered with certainty. Not just questions of abstract metaphysics or ethics, but even empirical questions like whether anthropocentric climate change is real. Because authority figures are afraid to give uncertain answers to tough questions, they instead give a certain answer to a different question and pretend to have solved the problem. But this is an inherently dishonest answer, and when people inevitably find out, they get mad. Public discourse becomes riddled with lies, damned lies, and statistics, perplexity increases, and people stop trusting the authority figures. The authority figures react to a skeptical public by doubling down on their confident but dishonest assertions. Thus, a vicious cycle is born and epistemological chaos ensues.
So what's the cause of this "cult of confidence"? Why can't we talk honestly about uncertainty? Well, in a word: scientism. People look at modern science, with all its wonders and precise knowledge, and become enraptured by it. It becomes tempting to think that we could have that level of precision in all areas of human knowledge, that we could solve all the world's problems if we just ask the right scientific question. This fascination with modern science created a new epistemology that simply rejected all answers that weren't backed up with a sufficiently high enough amount of evidence. However, very few positive beliefs could be backed up this way. Science is only certain because it narrows its field of inquiry. Start widening the field, and you lose the certainty. When the scientism-believer is confronted with a non-scientific question, he either turns into a con artist or a total skeptic.
And what's the way out of this mind trap? First, we have to be honest about the uncertainty in our answers to life's important questions. We need to have the courage to say that we aren't sure about what we know while speaking with confidence. Second, we have to be able to communicate about what we believe systematically so that we can have rational, honest discourse. To this effect, the Distributist suggests applying the
Bayesian interpretation of probability to our understanding of how belief systems develop and evolve over time. Third, we have to be watchful of chicanery and equivocation in public discourse. It's better to have an approximate answer to the right question than to have an exact answer to the wrong question. Fourth, we have to be comfortable making decisions in spite of the uncertainty of our answers. Otherwise, we risk getting led astray by charlatans or getting paralyzed by indecision. Lastly, we have to realize that our models of the world aren't reality itself, and if a particular model of the world ceases to be useful, we must discard it. Models are great tools for understanding, but no model is capable of grasping the full complexity and nuance of reality.
Overall, it's a great speech that gives a taste of the Distributist's overall philosophy: rational caution, epistemic humility, and systematic, logical thinking based on modeling. This is the epistemological foundation for his worldview, and through this way of thinking, he is able to come up with clever answers to tough questions.
I highly recommend watching the video. The breadth and depth of topic is vast, and his analysis is very interesting.
