beautifully done. the structure of the essay matches the intellectual journey very well.
the "post-rational nihilism" I've tended to call "meta-scientific dread" as a practicing social scientist. the best answer I've found is to use American Pragmatism as a basis...which I'd summarize as equivalent to "“in general” is a myth we tell schoolchildren", there's no fixed point on which to sit and divvy up ends and means
One nice addition to the Semmelweis story is the way it got used over the next century and a half. The other doctors were sure the bad stuff was in the air, so Semmelweis washing his hands was irrelevant. But from 1920-2020, the medical establishment was so sure that the bad stuff was on the hands and not in the air, that it took several months of covid for them to realize we should wear a mask rather than wash our hands to death. They rationalized the concern for dirty hands with the germ theory, but it turns out that germs can live in aerosols, and they had largely ignored that for a few decades.
This is all probably just another example of the fractal ratchet!
This makes me think of the overfitting problem in statistics, where making an equation more accurately resemble data with noise in it makes the equation worse. Less is more when more is too much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting
beautifully done. the structure of the essay matches the intellectual journey very well.
the "post-rational nihilism" I've tended to call "meta-scientific dread" as a practicing social scientist. the best answer I've found is to use American Pragmatism as a basis...which I'd summarize as equivalent to "“in general” is a myth we tell schoolchildren", there's no fixed point on which to sit and divvy up ends and means
One nice addition to the Semmelweis story is the way it got used over the next century and a half. The other doctors were sure the bad stuff was in the air, so Semmelweis washing his hands was irrelevant. But from 1920-2020, the medical establishment was so sure that the bad stuff was on the hands and not in the air, that it took several months of covid for them to realize we should wear a mask rather than wash our hands to death. They rationalized the concern for dirty hands with the germ theory, but it turns out that germs can live in aerosols, and they had largely ignored that for a few decades.
This is all probably just another example of the fractal ratchet!
This makes me think of the overfitting problem in statistics, where making an equation more accurately resemble data with noise in it makes the equation worse. Less is more when more is too much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting