Knowledge is awesome

Aeon essays are at least reliably provocative. In this case, I think the author could have saved themselves a lot of bother if they'd at least tried to distinguish "knowledge" from "facts". Of course, defining knowledge is an immensely difficult philosophical problem, but they way it's described here just makes things overly-complicated.

Imagine that 100 prisoners are exercising in the prison yard, and suddenly 99 of them attack the guard, carrying out a plan that the 100th prisoner is no part of. Now one of these prisoners is in the dock. No further evidence is available. Guilt is 99 per cent likely, innocence 1 per cent. Should the court convict? Everyone’s first reaction is – certainly not. The court has no information that rules out the defendant being the one innocent prisoner. You can’t convict someone solely on statistical evidence.

Hypothetical examples are fine, but it's a good idea to make them as watertight as possible (for all its problems, the Trolley Problem does that very well). In this case, why is that particular prisoner in the dock as opposed to the 99 others ? Why is there no other evidence available - can't we at least ask the guards or the other prisoners if they remember what this particular prisoner did ? Why in the world did the others leave out this one guy from their plans ? Wouldn't this prisoner have taken measures to alert the guards or at least make their innocence clear during the attack ?

Anyway, my first reaction is neither, "lock them up !" nor, "set them free !" so much as it is, "hmmm". 1 out of 100 is not quite convincing. Had it been 1 out of 1,000, I'd err towards presuming guilt rather than innocence. If you know that there are so many prisoners involved and you know the chance is much greater that this one is guilty, you should seek to establish innocence, not assume it. Statistical knowledge is a kind of knowledge, a type of fact, it's just not about individuals. Hence labelling it as not being knowledge is confusing and simply wrong.

It might be intuitive, but this legal ban on statistical evidence is puzzling. Think of a man who is convicted because an eyewitness says she saw him steal a necklace. Nowadays, thankfully, the courts know eyewitness evidence can go wrong, and so they check carefully to make sure it’s reliable. Even so, the courts don’t demand 100 per cent certainty, only that the eyewitness makes doubt unreasonable – which seems to mean something like 95 per cent assurance, whenever the judges can be persuaded to put a number to it.

Does an anecdote count as evidence if it's an anecdote about statistics ? Dunno, but I'll offer one anyway. During my PhD, I decided to try a process known as stacking. This is a simple procedure where you take a series of observations and add them together to see if you detect anything. In this case, we had a set of galaxies which were visible at optical wavelengths but not in the radio band (which is sensitive to the presence of atomic hydrogen gas), so by stacking the radio data we could improve sensitivity. As it happened, this still resulted in a non-detection. Booo.

When you stack data, you can measure how the noise level varies, i.e. how the sensitivity improves. It's exactly equivalent to doing longer exposures, except you can do it after the fact. I found that the sensitivity was increased as expected, by a factor of about 10. So it was a bit disappointing that nothing was detected in my sample of some tens of galaxies. But, having not been taught exactly how it worked, it took me a very long time to realise what this meant - in fact, it was probably the most difficult part of my PhD*. It did not mean that every single individual galaxy in my sample didn't have gas down to the sensitivity limit calculated. Rather, it meant that the whole sample, on average, didn't have that much gas. It was quite possible that a few individual galaxies had a bit more gas than that, as long as some others had significantly less.

* I could have just asked someone, but I found it more rewarding to work things out for myself. Also I managed to confuse myself quite severely, which wasn't a lot of fun.

That's what statistical information is. It is most definitely knowledge, but it's knowledge of the population, not the individual.

Maybe we intuitively feel that good eyewitnesses allow us to know about guilt, whereas statistical evidence never delivers genuine knowledge. But, even so, why is it a good idea to let this difference weigh in court? After all, a true belief derived from statistical evidence is just as true as one derived from an eyewitness – not to mention that the statistics deliver truths much more reliably than the eyewitnesses... Nearly all the experts assume that there must be some logic here, if only we can figure it out. But despite huge amounts of effort, none of them has managed to find any. I say that’s because there isn’t any logic to be found. 

Well, I say there's no mystery here at all. Eye-witness testimony is preferred because it's the reverse of statistical information : it concerns the individual, not the population. Information about the population is circumstantial; information about the individual is direct. Of course both are subject to error, but, assuming an equal failure rate, I'd prefer direct information whenever possible. That doesn't mean we have to throw out statistics any more than it would mean throwing out all eye-witness reports, both of which would be stupid things to do. Instead we have to proceed with whatever we've got, preferably using all sources of information in concert and not in isolation.

Deliberately taking this quote out of context :

Of course, the false believers won’t actually find bananas. It’s only the true believers who generally gain what they seek.

That's surely the founding principle of a religion designed for monkeys... but anyway :

Once the notion of belief is to hand, the old notion of knowledge becomes redundant. We modern thinkers can distinguish between three kinds of agents: those whose beliefs are in line with the facts; those whose beliefs misrepresent the facts; and those who have no opinion.

Err, hang on, what exactly are these "facts" of which you speak if they're not knowledge ? Eh ? No, we shouldn't abandon knowledge - that is ridiculous. We need to encourage more truth-seeking, and that demands a respect for the facts. The implied definition of knowledge running through this piece is incredibly unhelpful.

Take lottery tickets again. Many of us buy them at highly unfavourable prices. We don’t know we won’t win, we tell ourselves, even though the statistics emphatically say otherwise. Yet we are very quick to change our minds once we have more direct evidence, such as reading in the paper that we had only four of the six numbers right. Oh well, we tell ourselves, now we know we’ve lost, and we bin the ticket. Yet the chance of having the winning ticket could well have risen significantly if the newspaper is unreliable and capable of misreporting the two bad numbers. Our penchant for direct evidence obscures this. I wonder what proportion of unclaimed winning tickets are discarded for this kind of reason.

Whut ? How unreliable do you think newspaper reports of lottery numbers are ? That's a terrible example.

Bertrand Russell once said that the concept of causation, ‘like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’. Russell was probably wrong about causation. But his strictures apply perfectly to the concept of knowledge. This is indeed a relic of a bygone age, and moreover one that does appreciable harm. We should get rid of it.

No, no. We should try and define it, if not perfectly, then at least usefully. Divorcing knowledge from facts in the way that's done here is not useful at all. Factual knowledge is awesome and we should bloody well keep it.

Knowledge is a stone-age concept, we're better off without it - David Papineau | Aeon Essays

I'm against knowledge. Don't get me wrong: I'm as keen on the facts as the next person. I'm no friend of fake news. I want truth rather than falsity. It is specifically knowledge I'm against, not true belief. Knowledge asks more of us than true belief, and it isn't worth it.