Is it Rational To Be "Outraged By Things That Are Outrageous"?

I was reading an old article in New Scientist this week, and I was struck by an article's subject's claim that "It's rational to be outraged by things that are outrageous". Whilst I agree with the author of that article about many things, surely anyone looking at today's world can see that we could do with a lot less outrage (and the pleasant feeling of self-righteousness it engenders) all round.

The quote illustrates one aspect of how we got into this mess. There's actually nothing rational about outrage, (it's an emotional state) and there's nothing intrinsically rational about what we think outrageous, so the idea that there might be such a thing as rational outrage is nonsense. That the article referred to is about countering misinformation about scientific issues brings in a second issue, related to the first in a complex way.

Allow me to personalise it. One of the reasons I became an academic for a while was that I got cancer, specifically metastatic malignant melanoma. Back then, there was no effective treatment other than surgery. (I thought academia would be a rest. Boy, was I wrong, but that's another discussion). Anyway, many of the other newly diagnosed people I came to know died within months. People with cancer without effective treatment are prime targets for quacks. It wasn't however just commercially interested parties who promoted "alternative medicine" on cancer patients' forums. There were also an assortment of partners of patients in active denial, people who had had the line between beauty treatments and medicine blurred for them on spa breaks and so on.

I used to be pretty harsh in dismissing the false claims of advocates of the Gerson diet etc. looking to exploit my fellow cancer patients. I was a bit more patient with the "unicorns and rainbows" brigade who didn't like the idea of there being anything as sharp-edged as facts in medicine, or indeed anywhere else. But not that patient. At the point where they started trotting out the "there's no such thing as facts" postmodern nonsense, or judging my posts on their level of serenity rather than accuracy, I might take the gloves off. Lives were at stake. Some of my fellow cancer patients didn't have the one effective treatment (surgery) because they had put their faith in magic fruit juice. They all died.

So, I used to be 100% clear about what a fact was. Two things spoiled this for me. One was doing a PhD, and the other was that as I got further into scepticism, I started to notice that my fellow sceptics didn't just think that medicine and science were or should be fact based. Most of them were (like me) left of centre, and I started to notice that consensus views in "social sciences" were being treated by these people in the same way as consensus views in the more rigorous disciplines of the harder sciences and medicine. The problem with this is that significant proportions of the population think that these conclusions are wrong, and they'd be right in thinking that the strength of objective evidence for them is far weaker than that for those in real sciences and medicine.

Both sides in the discussion about cancer treatment were outraged. The rationalists like me were outraged by people offering false hope (at great expense) to desperate cancer patients. The "fairies and footrubs" crew (who had a big crossover with the antivaxxers back then) were in turn outraged by the denial of "validation" of their views, which they felt was their right. The idea of "validation" is key here. It means that if you feel something is true, it is true. No evidence is necessary. It's an idea borrowed inappropriately from therapy. If you feel something is true, it's a fact that you feel it to be true. It doesn't however say a thing about whether it actually is true.

Establishing whether a claim is true is far trickier than that, and being outraged at the mere suggestion that you cannot simply intuit the truth isn't helpful. This is true even if all of your friends agree with you (which of course they do-you can't be friends with anyone who doesn't agree with you nowadays). If it seems that I am being too hard on the space cadets, please bear in mind that I was emotionally involved in who was right here. It was a life or death matter, which is where I learned to draw the line. If it isn't a matter of life or death, I tend to let people be as wrong as they want nowadays (especially on the internet), unless I'm being paid to find out the truth.

However I do get paid for this quite a lot, which helps me to understand another problem. I do a lot of expert witness work nowadays. Truth to a court is different to truth in science. I've written about this before, so I won't discuss the issue of the tests applied by a court again. Instead I'll discuss how you demonstrate the truth. Something can meet the far higher standard of proof of science, but that is of zero value in court unless you can make clever (but usually scientifically illiterate) lawyers understand it. If the proof depends on statistics, you are probably in trouble. If it depends on modelling, forget it.

But so many key scientific truths depend on these things. If you don't have a rudimentary grasp of statistics, you'll never understand why the Gerson diet is quackery, or why the evidence-based treatments they developed for melanoma were breakthroughs. On the other hand, if you don't understand mathematical modelling, you'll never understand its limitations, and why there are many chemical engineers who do not accept anthropogenic climate change. I am not one of them, but I do not think that censorship has a place in science.

I might think that it is outrageous to deny man-made climate change, just as I might think that it is or is not outrageous to deny or affirm the theory of evolution. But this would be my emotional reaction, and there are many whose emotional reactions differ from mine. Insisting that there is such a thing as rational outrage is actually the contemporary illness of worldwide society. People are outraged by smaller and smaller perceived provocations or denials of their versions of the facts. This is the life and death matter which must be addressed. The details of your version of the truth are unimportant. The key thing that needs to be addressed is the one thing which you agree with your opponents about. You think that your version of the truth is not just the one you like best. It is the only and eternal truth, and anyone who says different is stupid, evil or both.

Perhaps however those who differ from you differ also in politics, religion, or degree of education, and perhaps you are not quite as educated as you think. Aristotle is quoted as saying "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." If he was right, educated minds are in short supply nowadays.