Your epistemology might be broken. Here is one test to find out. And if that’s what you find, you need to repair that broken epistemology; and I have some tips here on how to do that. But the broader skills you need to master for a reliable epistemology I have already covered in Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning, A Vital Primer on Media Literacy, and How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World). The latter aims at general principles only using “the historicity of Jesus” as a test case, like a working example, in the same way as I will use certain claims about Anthony Fauci here: the objective is not really those specific claims (in the process, yes, we will get some clarity as to what is actually true about those claims—and what not), but actually the general principles you must absorb—because you need to be applying those general principles to every single belief you have about anything whatever in the entirety of your life, before you exhibit any confidence in it.

Beliefs you are not confident are true you can let slide, for lack of time or resources to vet them, because your lack of confidence is already compensating for the risk of your being wrong about them. You are “taking into account” that you might be wrong, and behaving and making choices accordingly. Which in turn means you should apportion time and resources to vetting your beliefs in direct proportion to the cost of your being wrong about them: a high cost to being wrong, entails a high priority to ensure you are right; and a low cost, a low priority. But even when you haven’t vetted a belief, this should cause you to be less confident in that belief—precisely because you haven’t vetted it yet. So if you want to be more confident in that belief, you still have to engage that effort to vet it. You can’t use “the low cost of being wrong” as grounds to be confident you are right. That is a fallacy. And only broken epistemologies operate on fallacies. Just like claiming someone is wrong about a thing when you haven’t even read their argument for it; or worse, simply because you don’t like them or their tone or what lower class dialect they speak in, or because they did some unrelated thing you don’t like. If this is how you are operating, your epistemology is broken. Fix it.

Vegetarians: Your Epistemology Might Be Broken

I just recently encountered another example of this, which I’ll go through before getting to the Fauci test case, to illustrate by disparate examples a simple point: we need to always be focusing on the epistemology grounding a bad argument, rather than simply focusing on fixing or catching the bad arguments. Yes, we also need to do the latter. But we even more need to do the former. Because there is rarely a good reason for us to have even attempted these bad arguments. There sometimes can be—even people using reliable epistemologies can overlook things or make mistakes. But very often that is not what is happening; but rather, the fact that you made a particular mistake, a really obvious one you should not have made, indicates a much broader problem that you should be addressing: the broken epistemology that motivated you to use, and indeed even fall for, those bad arguments in the first place. Because if your epistemology let you do that in that one case, it must be letting you do that in every other case. In other words, catching yourself trusting a bad argument means you have no reason to trust that any of your beliefs, about anything, are well-founded. Since you haven’t been deploying a reliable epistemology, every belief it has generated for you is unreliable. And that means you need a complete revamp, a whole new system check, a repair regimen on your entire epistemology. Stat.

This is the central point in my article What’s the Harm?, about why even liberal religions and worldviews present epistemic dangers we could be doing better to avoid. And I’ve encountered the same issues in secular worldviews as in religious ones, from the fiasco of Jordan Peterson (a total travesty of a broken epistemology) to the often suspect rhetoric of vegans and vegetarians (see Dumb Vegan Propaganda and Meat Not Bad). For years, the “rebuttals” to those I have gotten to date have always exhibited broken epistemology; which leads me to suspect only a broken epistemology leads to evangelical vegan or vegetarian thinking (as opposed to merely selecting such diets for aesthetic or legitimate medical reasons, which never correlates with trying to argue everyone should adopt them). And just now I encountered another example, in a comment thread with CP 9 (which you can labor through here, here, and here; though they may be only acting as Devil’s Advocate in this case), which proceeded essentially as follows (I am only parsing and paraphrasing here):

• CP 9: I’m disappointed you mentioned Eat This Book, because it’s unreliable, as evinced by the fact that it argues the whackadoo unscientific premise that plants are sentient. Citing that book therefore makes meat eaters look bad.
• RC: Please take more care in reading what I write. I specifically did not endorse anything in that book. I merely mentioned someone else said it concurred with my position, a fact I explicitly said I had not verified. That you didn’t read what I wrote carefully leads me to doubt you read that book carefully. It is also suspicious that you seem to be picking a single argument (the one you found the weakest) and ignoring the rest of that book as though you had thereby refuted it. This is a huge red flag for a common cognitive bias. That you misread even a single sentence I wrote does not bode well for you having correctly read and absorbed a whole book. So at this point, I am not confident you have correctly apprehended what that book actually says about plants. [Note that I set aside their use of emotional-targeting language in the framing of their arguments, like talking about being “disappointed” and this making me “look bad.” But it is worth noting that as well: this is a broken epistemology at work, replacing facts and logic with emotional shaming and browbeating, and pretending the opposite has just happened.]
• CP 9: I just found it odd that you would mention it. As for the stuff about plants, you can read it yourself to check. I don’t know what else to say except that if someone is getting basic facts like that wrong, then it’s pretty hard to take them seriously from then on.
• RC: It’s really your job to present the evidence for your position. So you should be the one quoting the book. But I skimmed it just now and found nothing corresponding to what you said. You seem to be mistaking the actual argument made in it about plants. But even if you didn’t, taking the dismissal of a single bad argument as a refutation of an entire book is simply not sound reasoning. You should never have attempted it. That you did, suggests a problem with your epistemology that you need to fix. “Making up excuses to ignore an argument” would be at the top of my diagnostic list.
• CP 9: I don’t think I made the argument that the book is refuted based on that one argument. It’s clear you’re not going to read the book. I’m sorry for wasting your time.
• RC: Yes, you did make the argument that the book is refuted based on that one argument. That was literally the entire point of your first comment: that I should not have even mentioned that book (and the only reason you gave was that single argument); and your subsequent comment: that its containing such an argument indicates none of what’s in the book can be trusted. So you have now completely abandoned your original argument and started pretending you never made it, and instead make an emotional excuse to bow out of this exchange, with the passive-aggressive statement about it being “clear” I won’t read the book and saying you are “sorry” for wasting my time—all rather than presenting any evidence or sound argument in defense of any point you are trying to make. This is all a bad sign. It suggests you are working with a broken epistemology. And you need to do something about that.
• CP 9: If I made a mistake, shouldn’t I be allowed to correct it? You’re not being fair. I used flawed logic, you corrected me, I eventually accepted the correction and I appreciate it. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with that. It’s not backtracking, it’s called being reasonable.
• RC: The problem is not whether you can correct a mistake. The problem is that you made the mistake: that indicates a systemic problem with your epistemology. It is a symptom of a much bigger problem you need to recognize and fix. You should never have engaged in such reasoning to begin with. And until you address that, you will continue to make these mistakes in every area of your worldview and belief system. Here are your failure modes: you started by denouncing an entire book because of just one argument in it. I caught you out on that. Now you have retreated to just saying it has one bad argument people should be aware of, which is no longer a denunciation of the book; and not the argument you started with. And that one bad argument does not appear to even actually be in the book; you’ve failed to adduce any quotations attesting it, despite several attempts at making your point here. [Plus again notice more emotion-targeting language, e.g. saying I’m “not being fair,” implying I’m not “being reasonable,” and other efforts to trigger and shame; I continued to let that slide.]
• CP 9: As far as the plant argument, I didn’t quote the book because I didn’t think you wanted me too. But here goes: the title of a subsection is “Plants, Too, Are Sentient Beings” and in that it says “the ethical vegetarian sincerely believes that the plants he consumes in such good conscience do not suffer and have no interests of their own, but his conviction is neither as rational nor as empirically grounded as he supposes” because the scientific evidence entails “like all other living beings, plants have interests and actively pursue them” [and also that they react to damaging stimuli, etc.]. These are deepities: to the extent that they’re true, they’re trivial; to the extent that they’re profound, they’re false.
• RC: Those are not deepities: the author is making a correct point about the circumstantial equivalence of having needs and pursuing goals without consciousness. They are not claiming plants are cognitively sentient. You keep making this mistake. Why? You are confusing two different things, and thereby misrepresenting an argument in that book. If moral value attaches to having needs and pursuing goals, then it attaches to plants. Q.E.D. Ergo a vegetarian cannot appeal to those properties as a reason not to eat animals. They may have other reasons for their conclusions, but that’s the point I made before about how you cannot rebut a whole book by cherry-picking a single argument: that book does not assume that’s the “only” argument it has to address, so you were acting irrationally when you acted like it did. They are merely there addressing one particular argument, not “the entire case.” You acted like it was the latter; and then completely misrepresented what that one argument even was, and even got wrong its salience. These are fundamental epistemological failures. Which returns me to my first point: you should not be making any of these mistakes. So you seriously need to examine yourself to answer why you are making these mistakes, and what you can do to change your epistemology so you stop making them—not just in this case, but in every subject of belief in the entirety of your life.

CP 9 then promised to listen and think about all that, which if true is not how these things usually go. Kudos to them. But even with that in mind, here in one short exchange we see many of the common features of a broken epistemology: use of emotional appeals (from shaming to passive aggressivism), rather than facts and logic; not actually reading or listening to what their opponents say; misrepresenting what their opponents say—indeed, constructing them as having said a completely different thing, one that is conveniently easier to refute; dismissing an entire book or case because of a single argument in it (and that usually—and conveniently—the weakest one); when caught doing any of this, denying that what one has been arguing is what in fact they’ve been arguing (motte and bailey) or proposing to run away rather than fixing anything (avoidance, distraction, escape); and then defensively avoiding any appeal to their need of abandoning all these procedures in their method of forming beliefs—in short, getting angry and insulted, and using that emotional response as an excuse to ignore everything just told them, rather than listening, hearing, and updating their epistemology.

Broken epistemologies are often catastrophically arranged to avoid ever admitting they are broken; they come with built-in excuses (often emotional, always illogical) to avoid ever updating them. They are thus a cognitive trap: once someone has fallen into one, it’s almost impossible to get out again. All I can do is keep offering them a rope ladder; eventually, maybe, someone trapped this way will use it and climb out. I can’t help them if they won’t. But be warned: religion simply is not the only false belief system a broken epistemology can trap you in.

The Anthony Fauci Test

So now to the main example of exactly this point. If you have said anything to the effect of “his emails prove Anthony Fauci was a fraud all along,” even if only to yourself, your epistemology is broken.

For what I’m talking about here, see the summary at The Washington Post (and for more detail, see FactCheck). There are really only three emails people are using to construct this false belief:

• One concerning a single communication he had with Facebook;
• One concerning a single communication he had regarding the “laboratory origin” theory of the Coronavirus pandemic (not counting another in which he just responded politely to someone thanking him for his public denunciations of counter-productive conspiracy thinking);
• And one concerning his scientific opinion regarding the use of masks.

Let’s do these one at a time.

The Facebook Communique

The first of those is an obvious nothingburger, in which Fauci probably just expresses his interest in Facebook considering doing something to combat misinformation about the pandemic that threatens public health and safety. He does not there endorse anything Facebook eventually actually did; just that he thought doing something was a good idea. Which is entirely correct: Facebook should have done something to prevent its platform being used as a public health threat. One can certainly criticize whether what Facebook did actually succeeded or was crap; but Fauci had no control over that, and no email regarding his opinion of that has been found; so no opinion you have of Fauci can be based on that. So if you made that false equation, your epistemology is broken. Fix it. A reliable epistemology will take care to get correct what the evidence actually is (e.g. Fauci did not command or even comment on any specific Facebook policy or activity; all he did, so far as we can tell, was endorse their concern to benefit public health and safety) and reason without fallacy from that evidence (e.g. nothing negative can be inferred about Fauci’s honesty or competence from this email; it simply evinces him correctly doing his job).

The Wuhan Lab-Leak Theories

The second instance leads to a classic example of conflation error, a common mistake in a broken epistemology: when people talk about the Wuhan lab-leak theory, they tend to be confusing several different theories; and then choose the one they want something to refer to, when it suits some position they want to maintain. Originally the Wuhan lab-leak theory was solely about the Wuhan lab wholly creating and releasing the coronavirus as a deliberate bioweapon, a theory that remains whackadoo and contrary to all evidence (there is no biowarfare program at that lab; actual bioweapons are vastly deadlier than Covid-19, so it is inherently improbable it would be one; and genetic assays have confirmed there are no human-engineered structures in the virus). Only subsequently was it proposed that it was a naturally-collected virus that that lab was studying and released accidentally (due to poor containment procedures, a known and real problem), which has never been ruled out (more on that point shortly). Then these two theories became conflated into a third theory: that Covid-19 was a naturally-collected virus subject to a “gain-of-function” study at the Wuhan lab (a method of experimentally making a virus more virulent for medical—not military—research), and then it got out accidentally. This is far more plausible than the original “Wuhan lab-leak” theory, but it has more or less been ruled out. That kind of work leaves unmistakable evidence in the structure of a virus, yet genetic assays of the virus confirm its unique features are too inefficient to likely be of human design, and are entirely in line with known and probable natural viral evolution; indeed it’s evolved more since its release into the world population, than what originally made it virulent in humans.

That still leaves one plausible theory: that the virus originated in nature, was collected and studied at the Wuhan lab, and released by accident. This theory has actually never been discounted. People who claim they were “right all along” when trumpeting the lab-leak theory when “everyone” was making fun of them as a conspiracy nut, probably are operating on an edited or selective memory, conveniently forgetting that what was being made fun of was the original lab-leak theory, that the virus was an engineered bioweapon (and/or released deliberately). The “accidental release of a natural virus” theory was never so condemned. As early as March 17, 2020 (that’s right: the same month that the first state emergencies were declared and before even any U.S. lockdowns had begun), the science journal Nature Medicine concluded “although the evidence shows that” the virus “is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here,” among which included “an inadvertent laboratory release” (in contrast to an “engineered” virus “lab release” theory, which they found implausible; a result further evidence has only confirmed). Selectively misremembering recent history (who said what, when, and about what exactly), and not checking to make sure what the actual sequence was, is indicative of a broken epistemology. You will be able to purge and avoid a huge load of false beliefs if you take the trouble to go back and check what the actual sequence of events was, and who actually said what and when, and take care to disentangle conflation fallacies (like mistaking a statement about the “bioengineered virus” theory as being about the “accidental release of a natural virus” theory, or vice versa), so you can be sure to avoid these cognitive errors. A broken epistemology is one that doesn’t do that.

Which brings us to the Fauci email. Per The Washington Post, “In a Feb. 1, 2020 email,” which as they importantly note was very early “in the virus’s life in the United States,” the “immunologist Kristian G. Andersen wrote to Fauci stating that the virus had limited ‘unusual features’ that might suggest manipulation in a lab,” and offered to research whether that was the case. Fauci made no objection. Andersen subsequently found the evidence didn’t pan out that way; it turned out to be highly unlikely that the features she was looking at were engineered—the result was that Nature Medicine article I just mentioned. Until that study came out, publicly Fauci always framed the matter as “there being no real evidence” the virus was engineered, rather than there being evidence showing it wasn’t engineered—which was then true. Subsequently it was also true the evidence did indeed show the virus wasn’t engineered, and Fauci then correctly said so. But he never said the evidence ruled out the accidental lab-release of a natural virus; that’s a conflation fallacy. Fauci has made clear he thinks the accidental leak theory is less probable than not, but that it still warrants investigation.

Confusing these things is a common failure mode indicative of a broken epistemology: someone will hear “there is no evidence of x” and conclude that it has just been said that x has been disproved or discounted. But that is their error. Not the error of the one who originally spoke. Fauci was always scientifically precise in his framing. Anyone who mistook him as saying something more than that is the one who is making the mistake, not Fauci. Similarly, when someone reports to you an untested hypothesis (like, say, Andersen did to Fauci), and offers to research it, if you mistake that as someone presenting evidence that hypothesis is true, you are the one in error. Fauci was scientifically correct to report there was as yet “no evidence” of engineering in the virus (and at that early date, that was the only lab-leak theory being asked about; hence the importance I just noted of avoiding the conflation fallacy here). Because it would be scientifically irresponsible of him to predict the results of a scientific study that hadn’t even been conducted yet. No scientific study, means no scientific evidence. That’s how science works. If you think it works differently than that, you have a broken epistemology. Fix it.

It remains the case that there is no evidence even of an accidental leak of a stored virus. There also is no evidence against an accidental leak of a stored virus. And Fauci has always said this—when actually asked about that specific theory. If you thought otherwise, you have a broken epistemology. You need to diagnose how you came to the false belief that Fauci said anything other than this, so you can prevent that error happening again in any other matter of important belief. Likewise, Fauci has also said he thinks an accidental lab-leak of an illegal gain-of-function project is much more unlikely but still possible enough (unlike the deliberate bioengineering theory) to warrant continued investigation. But people only found that out when that is what they specifically asked him. For example, when he was asked about his specific confidence in a purely natural viral origin (when he conceded he was not wholly confident yet), it was in the context of his recent spat with Rand Paul over the possible role of gain-of-function research; if you disregard that context, you can easily get wrong what he said or meant. The media is thus partly responsible for the conflation fallacy that may have misled you, as they appear often to have conflated all three theories, and not been clear in their questions in this respect, and thus misreporting what question Fauci actually thought he was answering. But a reliable epistemology would have inoculated you against this source of error. That’s why you need a reliable epistemology. It’s the only thing that can anchor you to reality.

The Mask Communique

Which brings us to the last case: what Fauci wrote to a colleague about the then-known science of medical masks, which he wrote before the virus was an epidemic in the United States, and well before subsequent scientific studies of mask efficacy and function. As The Washington Post summarizes:

Fauci even acknowledged publicly a year ago that part of the reason for his initial guidance against masking involved the possibility that because people would buy up masks and deprive the medical professionals who truly needed them of enough masks.

Indeed I myself remember him saying that back then. So if you forgot he said that, check your epistemology. But more importantly, Fauci was at that time correctly reporting the state of the science when he said masks only reliably help the sick not infect the well. Thus, “In a Feb. 5, 2020, email,” by which point hardly any cases were even reported in the U.S., “Fauci told former Obama administration Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell that she needn’t mask up,” writing:

Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material … [so] I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location.”

This “doesn’t really show Fauci saying anything privately that he wasn’t saying publicly.” Hence “it would probably be more concerning if he had been telling health officials like Burwell something different from what he told the general public. But he didn’t.” Indeed, pay attention to the contextual details: “particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location” means Fauci is not giving Burwell general advice that would apply in a pandemic zone (he’d thus have advised she wear a mask if she went to a high-risk location; which not long after became the entire United States), “drug store” masks weren’t known then to be effective against particulate virus (which was at that time true), and wearing a mask is for “infected people to prevent them from spreading infection” (ditto). Later, scientific studies and case study evidence proved that that accepted science was wrong, or not as applicable to the peculiar nature of Covid-19, finding instead even ordinary masks not only reduce infection in the uninfected but even reduce the severity of infections (thus resulting in fewer hospitalizations and deaths among those who are infected). At the same time, it was soon discovered that Covid-19 had unusually long periods of asymptomatic infection, and unusually large numbers of asymptomatic infected. These facts changed everything.

All this new evidence meant Fauci’s original advice that “the infected” wear masks actually entailed that everyone should wear them because we will not know when we are infected or infectious. Hence we are accepting an unnecessarily high risk of community contagion if we “wait” until only symptoms are showing before donning a mask. And this remains the logic behind mask policies to this day. When a store asks you to don a mask, they are not saying, “We don’t want you to get infected here,” they are saying, “We don’t want you to infect anyone here,” and because millions will be infected and not know it, they can’t trust anyone who is unmasked won’t be a threat. Nor should you ever “assume” you are not a threat. Because as a matter of empirical fact, there is no logical reason you should assume you are not infected merely because you have no symptoms. We knew by then that was not a reliable assumption, and thus no one should be basing decisions on such an assumption—not even yourself. And this remains the case—until infection risk drops considerably or herd immunity is reached (which we can only get to swiftly and safely through mass vaccination). It just also happens to be known now that masks also partially protect even the uninfected (reducing your chances of infection and the severity of symptoms should you get infected), by reducing viral exposure (the amount of virus that gets into you; your body can kick the ass of any invading virus most of the time, until its resources become overwhelmed by quantity—thus, controlling how much virus gets into you has become a crucial factor).

That we learned all of this after Fauci wrote that email in February 5 and then delivered much the same general advice on masks in March (which was more nuanced than broken epistemologists tend to remember), which he then started changing in April, means we cannot scold him for anything he wrote in that email or advised the public shortly after. At that time he was relaying the best available scientific knowledge. When scientific evidence then accumulated showing he was wrong and should instead advise wider mask adherence (and as the pandemic spread through the entire population, necessitating it), he revised his position. A scientist revised their position in light of new evidence. That is actually praiseworthy. It’s an indication that Fauci is a reliable source of scientific information. If, instead, you concluded that this about-face was evidence that Fauci is unreliable (indeed, “a fraud”), you have a broken epistemology. Because that means you expect scientists to never change their position no matter what evidence emerges; you thus think a dogmatism that is immune to evidence is “reliable,” instead of the other way around. And if that’s how you go about evaluating sources of information, you’re screwed. Don’t be screwed. Fix your epistemology.

Conclusion

Anyone who thinks Anthony Fauci is “a fraud” has a broken epistemology. You have selected to respect dogmatism and disrespect the scientific method; you have failed to fact-check your own assumptions about timelines and the content of actual statements made; you have selectively ignored things that actually were or weren’t said; you’ve conflated different things as the same one thing, and conveniently in just such a way as supports rather than tests your presuppositions; and you have preferred your own emotionally satisfying narrative to anything resembling a reality-based belief-system (the signature of all tinfoil hat). I have seen this pattern in many other people and groups, who think (even boast!) that they are reasoning rationally but are actually reasoning illogically, often in wilful ignorance of the actual facts (exhibiting even a persistent disinterest in actually fact-checking anything they feel should be true), and all quite in slavery to their emotions, letting their desires and preferences and assumptions dictate their perceptions and inferences, and letting their anger or embarrassment or pride steer them away from ever fixing their epistemology or ever paying attention to the actual evidence and arguments presented for any position they dislike. Please stop. Get on the rope ladder. Climb out of that trap. Your whole life and the whole world will be better for it.