What can artificial intelligence not do? It cannot live your life. It cannot know or inhabit your personal stories. It cannot duplicate your intuitions. You can poke around on AI all day, and it will never come up with precise memories and experiences that are yours alone, those that inform your understanding of the world around you.
Your own stories have become much more meaningful because they are yours alone. They belong to you, and no machine can duplicate them. This is the real mote that separates human life from machine life. That’s why we need to start placing a premium on such stories, both in public and private life. We need to rally around them and trust them more than any content generated by AI.
Artificial intelligence is in many ways the latest chapter in the era of over-valorized science. It does systems better than any single person. We have already seen all the ways in which this is true. Still, I’m not a believer. There is no case for replacing your gut instincts. They are more likely to steer you to better answers in the long run.
In my position as editor at Brownstone and as a daily writer for The Epoch Times, I receive vast amounts of correspondence, much both positive and negative. When it comes to matters of science, I often receive notes of outrage about something I’ve written. The first riposte is often about some study I’ve supposedly overlooked.
I’ve begun to treat such moments as sport. I will go to the study and figure out a weakness with it. It could be a model. It could be skewed because of subject bias or data mining. It might have a start and end date problem. It’s always something. Some are easier to dismiss than others, but oftentimes, the problem with the paper will jump out at me, especially when they are dealing with large and sketchy data sets.
When I have time, I’ve taken to pointing these kinds of problems out, only because I’ve become rather skilled at this. Here’s what happens. The expert or scientist will write back and push back once or twice. But even he or she will concede that yes, that study is indeed weak.
But what happens then will interest you. It is extremely predictable. Because the conversation is by now civil and veering toward the personal, the expert who previously rallied around some published science or large model or data set will shift in tone. They will explain a touching story about their daughter, mother, grandfather, or friend.
At this point, the argument becomes real and meaningful. I will express sympathy. Usually, the conversation will end with a mutual pledge to stay at it and find the real answer. What’s striking is the change in tone and method. In the course of a few back-and-forth emails, we move from grandiose claims wrapped in the science and settle on personal stories that have a profound emotional impact.
What I’ve learned is that most experts and even decorated scientists believe what they believe not because of large data sets or randomized controlled trials. They believe what they believe because of something that has happened in their lives, something that is personal.
Let me give an example. If you were mugged last week, had your bike stolen last month, and fear walking down the streets tonight, what are you going to believe when the news media proclaims that crime is down? More than likely, you are going to dismiss this claim. It’s because you know otherwise from your life and experience.
In any case, you are not going to make your judgments on staying safe based on large data sets, even if you trust them, which you probably do not. Your own personal experience with crime has gone up. It is out of control. Unless you are an insane person, you are going to trust what you know personally more than what any expert says.
In truth—and I say this as a person swimming now in the sociology and culture of science—the scientists themselves don’t trust the science. They trust what they know based on their families, friend circles, and communities. Moreover, what they claim to be their epistemology—facts only, please!—in public is very different from that on which they ultimately fall back personally. Everyone in this game is basing their view on personal experience, regardless.
My argument is that this is a good thing. Statistics are too easily manipulated. The facts are too selective. The models tell you nothing: garbage in and garbage out.
This principle applies throughout life. Do you draw your view of human nature from reading theological treatises or from the good and bad experiences you have had in your own life? Most likely, it is the latter. A person who has been betrayed by a lover or spouse is not likely going to trust as much in the future, and this is true regardless of what the science says.
A few months back, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention trotted out its usual parade of statistics to a committee charged with examining immunization practices. The yes vote seemed like a fait accompli. But one member of the advisory committee spoke up and said that something seemed not quite right about the numbers. There were too many deaths in the footnotes for a shot designed to protect against a disease that is not fatal. If he had a newborn, he said, he would not give that shot to him.
The comment was shocking in that setting. That’s because in “the science” and the environments in which it is discussed, to tell a personal story and to report on one’s instincts is considered bad form. And yet, as the weeks progressed, it turned out that he was precisely correct. The study that was being trotted out in defense of the shots was indeed corrupt. He had a very bad feeling, and he was correct.
I spoke to this scientist yesterday. He is top of his field, the best there is at one of America’s most prestigious universities.
He put it very plainly to me: “If something doesn’t feel quite right, don’t approve of it. Well-formed instincts are more reliable than any study that has not been duplicated and not examined very closely. Sometimes you have to go with your gut sense of things.”
I maintain that we have all this in our lives. Further, this is a good thing. After thinking about an issue for a long time and gathering as much information as you can, it is very likely the case that you have formed a good and reliable opinion about it. That doesn’t mean that all your intuitions are correct; it just means that you should not dismiss your personal sense of things just because all “the science” is saying otherwise.
In any case, genuine scientists do not operate based on abstract facts that contradict all knowledge gained from real life. If you have had a bad experience with medical doctors in the past, you are less likely to trust them in the future, no matter what the American Medical Association claims. If you feel a shot harmed your child, you are going to believe that the shots are potentially harmful, even if the mainstream media is shaming you for saying it.
We have all lived through the most astonishing betrayal of the people by public-health officials on record. This reality is not going away, no matter how much elites tell us to forget what we saw, heard, and experienced. This real-life record has been burned into the memory of millions and billions. It is now rocking politics at home and abroad precisely because it is more real than all the shaming dished out by the mainstream media.
This is why, during the pandemic, I came to trust the knowledge and sense of medical practitioners on the ground far more than data, charts, and officious spokespeople for government agencies. This is as it should be. Despite all the dismissals of anecdote and clinical experience, it has proven far more prophetic than any academic study.
“The senses deceive from time to time,” Rene Descartes said, “and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.”
He is correct, but the data has deceived us in countless ways over the past several years. It is also prudent never to trust wholly any expert who is yelling claims that don’t fit with what we know from our own senses too.
Data, statistics, studies, and empirical science have made marvelous contributions in the past. Their over-valorization at the expense of good sense, however, has led to distortions and corruptions. Especially in the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence—which steers us in the wrong direction very often—we can rely on our own stories precisely because they are our own. It is the course of life that forms the shape of the heart. In the end, this is likely our best guide.
