Listening to the Scientists

A Deadly Trap for Strategists

A reader, who has read my pieces (e.g. here, here and here) on Aristotle and the dangerous overreach of science against which he warned, sent me a video (screenshot above). I suspect that he knew my likely reaction. Indeed, the video inspired me to write an original Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece on Listening to the Scientists: A Deadly Trap for Strategists. You can find the whole PTW/PI series here.

The Video

The video mainly features three types of spokespeople: scientists (or at least individuals purporting to be), politicians (current and former), and television news personalities (current and fired). Additionally, one pharma CEO, Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, makes an important appearance.

It shows these spokespeople uncompromisingly arguing three central propositions:

1) Science is Truth

You know, science is truth – Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, Scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci

We won’t be free of this pandemic until we listen to the acknowledged truth – Former Politician Al Gore

By not hearing the truth…they are prolonging how bad the economy will be – Politician Chuck Schumer

Science is truth – CNN’s Don Lemon (later fired)

It is not surprising to see politicians spewing nonsense and, of course, cable news personalities aren’t hired for either their intelligence or knowledge, but Dr. Fauci is a scientist. And any even mildly knowledgeable scientist knows that science is both incapable of and not designed to declare what is true – Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman is a good one to listen to on that. At its best, science can tell us what is untrue – thus eliminating those potential beliefs from further consideration.

This is an important point made over a century ago by English philosopher Bertrand Russell with his famous chicken story – though converting its star to a turkey makes for a great American Thanksgiving story. From the first day of its life, the turkey experiences the farmer coming to feed it every morning. After several months, the turkey has enough statistically significant data to scientifically induce that the friendly and supportive farmer will feed it every morning going forward. That is the turkey’s scientific truth. But on Thanksgiving morning, instead of feeding it, the farmer wrings his neck to make it the central feature of Thanksgiving dinner.

Thus, we can see the limitations of science. The father of science, Aristotle, explained long ago that in only the narrow set of circumstances in which there is an inviolable rule that the future must be identical to the past can scientific induction declare a proposition to be reasonably called true. That is, if all turkey farmers had to swear on pain of death that they would feed all turkeys under their care every day of each turkey’s life and never harm a turkey in any way, the turkey’s scientific induction would be valid.

Hence, all the scientist, politician and media statements above are flat out wrong – and shamelessly so in the case of Fauci. The others probably don’t know any better. But Fauci knew he was lying through his teeth. And most of the purported ‘truths’ have already been demonstrated to be utterly false.

The science checks out…The scientists were right all along – MSNBC’s Antonia Hylton

Sorry, they were consistently wrong. The vaccine was anything but safe. (In fact, my prediction is when the public health authorities are finally forced to divulge the necessary population-level statistics, the COVID vaccine will be shown to have caused more deaths than COVID.) COVID vaccination for children had zero justification. Six feet of separation was a completely made-up number. And COVID came from US funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not a ‘wet market.’

You can give each other hugs as long as everyone is fully vaccinated – CNN’s Jake Tapper

Sorry, vaccination had zero beneficial impact on transmission prevention. Zero.

2) Listen to the Scientists

Science, science, science. Only listen to the scientists – Politician Nancy Pelosi

Every scientist, every expert. Listen to the experts – Politician Kamala Harris

Let’s listen to the scientists – CNN’s Chris Cuomo (later fired)

We are seeing how important it is to follow the science – CNN’s Anderson Cooper

Seek out the scientists and follow their advice – MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace

The message here was that there is a class of human beings called scientists to whom you should listen, because they perform something called science which they delusionally believe to be truth. It is not some scientists. It is all scientists that opine on the subject of COVID, whether the scientists are lying through their teeth to hide their complicity and/or stand to make a huge windfall if listened to.

All these commentators are preaching a form of bigotry. The only thing you need to know about a person is whether that person is or is not a scientist to know what the appropriate action is. Scientist: listen. Non-scientist: don’t listen. How about Dr. Josef Mengele? He became a research scientist after completing his PhD. Should he have been listened to because he was a scientist? I don’t think so.

I am against bigotry, regardless of the form it takes. And I have met enough scientists to know that many of them should never be listened to under any circumstance.

3) Don’t Think

Now is the time to do what you are told – Scientist Fauci

Trust that vaccine – DHS Scientist Dr. Rick Wright

We are going to trust the science. We are going to trust the experts – Politician Justin Trudeau

“Do your own research.” It sounds so innocent, but it can have serious consequences – CNN’s Brian Stelzer

Trust science – Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla

The message is don’t think about it, simply trust the scientific experts and do what you are told. Thinking could have “serious consequences.” Roll that around in your head: don’t think because it could be dangerous!

One can readily understand why Pfizer CEO Bourla wanted all of us to trust the experts. In the ten years from 2016 to 2025 (the most recent completed fiscal year), excepting the COVID vaccine years of 2021 and 2022, Pfizer earned an average of $9.4 billion. Then, in just the two years of 2021 and 2022, Pfizer earned $53.4 billion – i.e. about $35 billion more than it would have with decade-average years. Pfizer and Bourla were rewarded with $35 billion in extra profit only because people listened to the politicians, scientists and pundits telling them to trust and not think.

The combination of believing that science is truth, listening to scientists, and not thinking was a recipe for disaster for everyone except for public health authorities who achieved power in ways they never had before or will again and pharmaceutical and health service companies that got rich enforcing that formula.

20-20 Hindsight?

Many readers may now be muttering, “Gee, Roger isn’t this just 20-20 hindsight on your part. In 2020 that wasn’t at all obvious.” Wrong and wrong.

On September 20, 2020, I published the piece, Should We ‘Follow the Science/Scientists?’ It was my seventh Medium piece. I started publishing on Medium on July 23, 2020, and published ten pieces across a variety of subjects before initiating the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insight series with my eleventh piece on October 5, 2020.

My September 2020 piece made virtually the same argument as I make above and did so mere months into the COVID crisis. Its conclusion was:

With respect to following the scientists, it is dangerous and counterproductive to adhere to that as a rule. We need to be particularly careful of taking heed of scientists who use the argument that a course of action doesn’t follow the science as their tool for attacking things they don’t like. Unfortunately, too many scientists want only scientists to be allowed to be unscientific.

The piece has garnered a pathetically low 618 views, 298 reads, 44 claps and 0 comments – the second worst performance across now almost three hundred Medium/Substack pieces. Why? It was a message that people were already primed to reject – as illustrated by the video that inspired this piece. They already believed that it was unconscionable not to listen to the scientists – even though history has shown me to have been utterly prescient.

That having been said, I realize that in some ways I was lucky that both the piece was totally overlooked and my timing was fortuitous. Had I published it after January 20, 2021, I would have, at a minimum, been censored and probably entirely cancelled as a human being. For years, it was utterly unacceptable to say the things I said in that piece.

I was saved from destruction by being too soon and not relevant enough! How about that?

Practitioner Insights

The simple and clear practitioner insight is don’t ‘listen to the scientists.’ Full stop. Never.

Respect everyone – scientist or not – for their expertise. There are no renaissance people any longer because there is too much specialized knowledge for any one individual to master. So, experts are useful if not essential.

But that does not imply that you should ‘listen to them’ and ‘do what you are told.’

Rather, your job is to interrogate experts. If they are real experts, they will be able to explain to non-expert you in what way their expertise is useful to you. If they can’t make the point of their expertise clear to a non-expert, or refuse to do so, you should assume they are faux experts – of which there are many, many, many – including 100% of the world’s macroeconomists.

For example, if ‘experts’ say that COVID originated in a wet market in Wuhan that happened to be right next door to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an institute doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses – figuring out how to make them bind to human receptors by altering viral spike proteins – and scientists working there are dying of a mysterious new virus and anybody there who talks about that mystery is disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party, you might want to ask them some questions, that are totally within your non-specialist abilities to ask, like why the hell they are so sure COVID came from the wet market? When they tell you it is because they are experts and they think so, reject them out of hand because they are using their expertise to pursue their own goals – as with Anthony Fauci and Pfizer CEO Bourla.

And when they tell you the vaccine is safe, ask them to describe the studies that demonstrated the safety. If they wave their arms and say they are experts, assume they are simply lying to you because someone told them their primary job wasn’t patient health; it was defeating ‘vaccine hesitancy.’ This is no small task. I was lied to repeatedly from start to end of COVID, often convincingly.

In the modern world generally, you are going to need to get practiced at interrogating experts.

And the same applies to the specific domain of strategy. The only way you are going to become a great strategist is to become skilled at interrogating experts. Strategy is by its inherent nature an integrative exercise performed within an organizational form – the company – that is based on and organized around siloed expertise. Across your life as a strategy, there will be experts everywhere – sales experts, marketing experts, e-commerce experts, financial experts, AI experts – no end of experts. They will consistently do two things – overestimate the determinacy of their expertise and succumb to using their expertise to pursue their narrow self-interests.

If you want to create great strategy, you must get beyond that. It is your job to integrate across knowledge domains – expert knowledge domains. You accomplish that by being good at interrogating (nicely!) the domain experts. Your rule should be: if you try hard but still can’t understand in your terms what an expert is saying, assume it is not valid and reject that expert’s advice.

A great example of this is TD Bank CEO Ed Clark during the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) crisis in Canada in 2007 in which the government had to intervene because the market collapsed devastating investors who were told ABCP was a safe investment when it wasn’t (foreshadowing the US mortgage crisis soon after). Of the five banks that dominate Canadian banking, four were heavily involved in ABCP while one – TD Bank – had zero involvement. Why? CEO Clark lived by the rule that I suggest above and when his people came to him to explain this new product and get his permission to start selling and trading ABCP, he couldn’t understand how it worked, so he banned it at TD Bank. He was right while the other four bank CEOs listened to the experts. And no, Clark is not an anti-intellectual curmudgeon. He is an Economics PhD – from Harvard University.

Be like Clark, refuse to listen to the experts – scientists or otherwise – or do what you are told.