Before you read this essay, there is a YouTube video that sets it up and makes it personal for you:
Watch this AFTER the video above to get the story behind it:
This experiment and this essay may help explain, but not excuse, some of the blindness during The Great COVID Disaster.
I thought I knew something about Louis Agassiz. He was a famous Swiss naturalist who came to Boston in the 1800’s and made numerous contributions to natural history and taxonomy and was one of the originators of the theory of a past Ice Age. Glacial Lake Agassiz is named for him. However, it is what I read about him yesterday that convinced me of his critical role in the present day and the Future of Inquiry.
Samuel H. Scudder (himself an eminent paleontologist and student of Agassiz at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School), recounted his experiences as a student: In the Laboratory With Agassiz. Agassiz taught Scudder to hone his powers of observation by examining (for three days!) a single preserved fish, using only his eyes and a pencil. This was followed by comparing that fish with a second preserved fish of the similar species, and then another, and another for 8 months:
The fourth day, a second fish of the same group was placed beside the first, and I was bidden to point out the resemblances and differences between the two; another and another followed, until the entire family lay before me, and a whole legion of jars covered the table and surrounding shelves; the odor had become a pleasant perfume; and even now, the sight of an old, six-inch, worm-eaten cork brings fragrant memories.
The whole group of haemulons was thus brought in review; and, whether engaged upon the dissection of the internal organs, the preparation and examination of the bony framework, or the description of the various parts, Agassiz’s training in the method of observing facts and their orderly arrangement was ever accompanied by the urgent exhortation not to be content with them.
“Facts are stupid things,” he would say, “until brought into connection with some general law.”
At the end of eight months, it was almost with reluctance that I left these friends and turned to insects; but what I had gained by this outside experience has been of greater value than years of later investigation in my favorite groups.
The link to this incredibly important story is from the website of Bill Stifler, a retired Associate Professor of English at Chattanooga State Community College. He used this story as a prelude to the classes he taught on the study of myth in Western Civilization. Stifter’s explanations are too critical not to be reproduced, at least partially:
Most people are not good observers. Yet many fields of study require that people in those fields develop skill in observation. One reason behind this lack of skill in the classroom is that many students assume that teachers will provide them with the answers and that the students’ only responsibility is in writing those answers down and repeating them on exams. Behind this is the belief that teachers have all of the answers. But the purpose of education is to teach students how to figure out answers for themselves. That means that often students may feel “stupid” or inadequate to the task. In his article “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research,” Martin A. Schwartz explains that oftentimes no one has the answer to a question. That is why it is the subject of research. For him,
The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can. (Schwartz)
Of course, he is not referring to those students who do not read the materials or study. Instead, he suggests people should be “ ignorant by choice,” which “allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.” He argues that “The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries” (Schwartz).
A student once apologized, saying “I am really struggling with this class. I’m trying to read the book and really understand it, but it’s . . . so much harder for me.” This course covers complex ideas. Students should be struggling with them. That is the reason for the discussions--not that students answer every question correctly, but that students struggle with the ideas, making missteps, but sometimes reaching insights, and, in the process, interact with everyone else struggling with these ideas. This is what learning really is.
We will begin the semester examining the various ways in which Western Civilization has viewed myth over time. Some of these approaches to myth will become the tools for our examination of myth, the “telescopes” and “microscopes” which we will use to examine myths more closely. As we begin to look at myths from around the world, students will have to look closely and carefully at what they are reading, and think about the implications and patterns emerging from the myths. This will require focused attention.
This skill in observation is the foundation for close reading in literature classes, the scientific method, diagnostic skills for those in fields as diverse as mechanics and nursing. This semester you will be looking at “fish,” comparing one myth to another, always with the purpose of understanding as much as we can about how the myth reveals the culture of the people of the myth as well as seeing the patterns within each myth that connect it to all other myths. Here are things to keep in mind as you work through the semester:
1. Do not do research. This is a class that focuses on seeing information and ideas rather than finding those that someone else has seen. This skill of seeing is crucial for so many fields of study and is often marginalized in our education system today.
2. Expect at times to be frustrated. Like Sam Scudder staring at his fish, there will be times that you will feel frustrated, without a sense of what to do next. Try taking notes, drawing what you see in the myths, picturing the stories in your imagination. Read the insights other students have had. Believe that answers are there if you are willing to look for them. Look for patterns, repetitions, things that seem significant even if you do not know why they are significant, things that are odd or strange. Keep asking why these things are there, and believe that they are there for a purpose.
3. Expect me to poke and prod you. Do not take it personally. As your instructor, I will, like Louis Agassiz, prompt you to look more closely, more deeply into each myth; to think about what is actually happening in each myth, and to discover the patterns that re-appear in myth after myth. Like Agassiz, I may sometimes say that you have overlooked “the most conspicuous features . . . [which are] plainly before your eyes.” A statement like that can feel threatening, but it is not meant to be, and I am no more saying that you are “stupid” than Agassiz was saying that to Scudder. Learning to truly see takes time.
4. Don’t expect to figure everything out. As all of the members of the class work together diligently and steadily, meaning will be revealed. That is why it is important to engage with the materials early and steadily. Brilliant intuitions posted at the last minute are not as useful because no one has had the time to digest and think about them, and carry them on farther.
5. Read carefully my final comments on the discussions and my feedback on the written assignments. Often, what we learn in one myth helps us as we look at the next myth.
I freely admit that the thoughts in this essay are not original to me, but perhaps I can add an application that brings them into focus for the arena of Health Care, our past failures (particularly regarding COVID and Big Pharma), and the importance of learning from these failures to prevent even more catastrophic failures in the future.
Twenty-five years ago, one of my tasks as Professor of Ophthalmology was teaching first and second year medical students. What was viewed as a chore by most of my colleagues was my own passion. I loved seeing the students at a formative stage in their journey in medical education and strove to make a difference in their lives. I had 3 hours to teach them “Ophthalmology”—a ridiculous task. Instead, I tried to teach them how to think. Inadvertently, I was emulating the approach of Agassiz, Stifler and Schwartz. I would show them photographs of pathology (congenital malformations, tumors, trauma, etc.) and ask them to describe what they saw.
I was not interested in the diagnosis, but their ability to recognize the significant elements: the color, margins, blood supply, anatomic levels of the external tumors; the things that “seemed out of place” in the trauma, the deviation from normal anatomy in the congenital malformations, etc.. Try as I might to discourage a “diagnosis”, the more compulsive students would blurt it out. Sometimes it was right; most of the time it was wrong.
It was clear that our educational system had prioritized the right answer over the right question! Stifter was so correct when he remarked:
1. This is a class that focuses on seeing information and ideas rather than finding those that someone else has seen. This skill of seeing is crucial for so many fields of study and is often marginalized in our education system today.
I had hoped that my announcement to the medical students that I was not looking for the right answer, but the right questions, would be liberating. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite was the case! Only a few of the students saw it that way. Many were frustrated and even complained to the administration that I did not “follow the book” in my lecture! As if 3 hours of ophthalmology would teach than anything remotely useful…
The focus of the students on the answer, even if it was to the wrong question, has been drilled into our educational system for a long time. I recall reading Classics Illustrated comic books in grade school, thinking that I somehow absorbed the gist of the real thing. Perhaps this is too harsh—at least they exposed me to the plot and piqued my interest in the underlying work of literature. However, that was followed in High School and College by a reliance on CliffsNotes when I didn’t have time to do the actual reading. I “learned” enough to pass the tests, but I am sure I did not extract all the value I could have.
That realization hit me when, as a student at the University of Vienna my 3rd year of undergrad as a history major, I read Der Prozeß (The Trial) by Franz Kafka in the original German. In his novels, set in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Kafka often uses the abbreviation “K und K” (kaiserlich and königlich— “imperial and royal”) when describing official governmental agencies. In German it is read as “kaka”, which has the same connotation as in English. That never came through in the translation.
I thought back to high school where I read Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey in their original Latin and Greek. While the story can be conveyed in translation, the art of the original dactylic hexameter is largely lost, as are the aural magnificence of such words as rhododaktylos eos (“rosy-fingered dawn”).
Consider the difference between reading this:
Nessun dorma
Nessun dorma
Tu pure, o Principessa
Nella tua fredda stanza
Guardi le stelle
Che tremano d’amore
E di speranza
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me
Il nome mio nessun saprà, no, no
Sulla tua bocca lo dirò
Quando la luce splenderà
Ed il mio bacio scioglierà
Il silenzio che ti fa mia
Dilegua, o notte
Tramontate, stelle
Tramontate, stelle
All’alba vincerò
Vincerò
Vincerò
And hearing this!
The exhortations of past professors on the importance of original sources came back to me as a peer-reviewer of scientific papers. I was surprised and dismayed at how many manuscripts were submitted with references clearly copied from the reference list in other cited works. Sometimes these contained errors, either with conclusions directly opposite of what was claimed, other times with errors in author’s names or credentials which led to some authors who never in fact existed being placed in the literature. This is by no means rare, as confirmed by other reports such as this and this.
Indeed, the evidence of fake citations in the biomedical literature is reaching alarming significance and has climbed significantly since 2023. An article in The Lancet suggests that increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence may play a role.
The danger of forgetting the tool of observation was driven home in the disastrous response of medicine and public health to the COVID episode. Instead of “looking at the fish” as Agassiz insisted, we instead paid attention to the Cliffs Notes version of some people’s ideas of what the fish “probably” looked like, or more likely, what they thought the fish “should” look like. Instead of listening to those people who KNEW what the fish looked like, such as Zev Zellenko and those using his protocol, Mary Talley Bowden, Brian Tyson and George Fareed and Pierre Kory who all used personal observation in treating real patients, we relied on political apparatchiks in our federal agencies (who themselves never treated a COVID patient) for leadership.
Formerly prestigious medical journals and medical leaders mounted an all-out attack on early treatment and fast-tracked publications that ignored the need to use cheap, available medications during the early viral replication phase and in the proper combination and dosage.
We were warned by Peter and Ginger Breggin as early as 2021 of the nature of this societal catastrophe but failed to appreciate its truth. Now, the “forensic autopsy” of those times clearly indicates that our response was at best wrong, and at worst sinister.
Instead of studying the fish, we read commentaries on the study of fish or looked the other way when the people in charge substituted a squirrel and called it a fish!
We should have listened to Agassiz, at least on the importance of observation. However, for all of his brilliance in prioritizing observation, Agassiz was not without faults. He became a prominent member of the Scientific Lazzaroni:
The Lazzaroni wanted to mimic the autocratic academic structures of European universities.[2] The members of the Lazzaroni wanted only university-educated scientists, at one point, so as to create a “pure science” for America. Therefore, the scientists who did not match the code and “oath” of the initial members would be forced, if possible, out of their vocation and not allowed to advance unless they met the qualifications of the Lazzaroni, who often kept scientists out of any professional scientific position. They used their influence together, a group of top scientists against any one individual.
This sounds eerily like the concerted effort directed against those brave individuals who dared to buck the party line during COVID and paid a bitter personal and professional price. Ironically, those who followed the dictates of Agassiz on the importance of observation could have run afoul of him on this other ground! It is the ideas of Agassiz we should celebrate, not necessarily his personality.
I wish I could say the bleak academic and professional period in our national history during COVID has ended, but I look at such recent actions as the dissolution of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) by a federal judge with no apparent expertise on the subject and the firing of individuals like Tracy Beth Høeg with profound pessimism. Mankind seems to have a strange aversion to learning from mistakes, with an even stranger desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in order to keep the status quo.
In closing, I offer the final paragraph from the 2008 essay by Martin Schwartz of Productive Stupidity:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
Let’s return to the “productive stupidity” that recognizes the importance of unbiased observation and of asking the right questions instead of trying to fit the answers into politically or economically acceptable forms.
Let’s understand the pros and the cons of Artificial Intelligence, using it as a tool instead of outsourcing our thinking and decision making to a Large Language Model. We outsourced our decision making under COVID to agencies and individuals with no understanding of context. This action levied a heavy toll both in the loss of lives and the integrity of, and trust in, institutions, science and particularly, medicine. It will take concerted efforts and years, if not decades, to regain this trust.
If COVID taught us anything, it is this: We must remember that there is a difference between knowledge and understanding. We must not be so blinded by the wonders of Artificial Intelligence that we forget the value of Human Intelligence. The success of the Future of Inquiry demands it.