Re:One of Darwin's evolution theories finally proved by Camb...
by jfengel on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @11:50AM
(#22617959)
It's generally harmless for philosophers to believe stuff, since they don't drive buses, and they generally get their vaccinations regardless of the epistemological status of their effectiveness. For that matter, they continue to eat food, despite the uncertainty whether they're really holding a peanut butter sandwich and not, say, the average temperature of the asteroid Ceres.
They get to be anarchic, as long as you can't prove otherwise -- and "prove" in the mathematical sense, not the scientific one. All it costs you is paper, pencils, and the price of a trash can. (Which they never use.) If you shut down the line of reasoning just because other people are incredibly, dangerously stupid, you're going to have to shut down pretty much everything.
It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about all the drugs and therapies which are helpful, do much more good than harm, and which are "proven" to work for all practical intents and purposes. Being unwilling to attack stuff like anti-vaccine nonsense head-on because of some abstract epistemological nonsense kills people. There's no upside to that.
Saying "Nothing is absolutely certain, therefore it is absolutely certain that we know nothing" is bad enough. Actually believing it is dangerous in direct proportion to how much of a hand you have in shaping policy. The bus driver might believe in utter epistemological nihilism, but they'd better not veer into oncoming traffic just the same.