Empiric Project

In order to seek the truth of a matter the Empiric Project looks to empiricism, data, research and analysis, rather than at the empty face of morality, belief, corporate media headlines, and straw man fallacies. The Empiric Project does not claim to know the truth but it earnestly seeks it.

The Empiric Project exposes often simple metrics that generate widespread repetition and amplification, informing a zeitgeist used to rationalize belief systems and political action.

Opinion based on an extremely limited understanding of a thing is to disregard civic discourse  in favor of something closer to religious discourse, i.e. devil v. god, evil v. good, my religion v. your religion, my morality v. your morality, black v. white, democrat v. republican, what makes me feel bad v. what makes me feel good. Oftentimes your moral opinion - ill informed as it is - is not the same as a rigorous assessment of reality, and is therefore best kept to yourself.

The Fairness Doctrine was introduced by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949 requiring that broadcasters (1) devote a portion of airtime to discussing matters of “public interest” that included “controversial” issues, and (2) air both sides “equally” regarding those matters. Papers of record had been held to a similar standard. When the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, our heretofore considered “neutral” reporting skewed to biased, resulting in polarized one-sided reporting where “opposing” viewpoints are not presented as analysis, rather more commonly as straw man fallacies. Doing little to shed light on almost any subject, straw man fallacies alongside ad hominem attacks are designed to stifle, not expand, truth in discourse:

Query and research the efficacy and safety of certain vaccines, you are: An anti-vaxxer and are complicit in the deaths of people who die of Covid.

Question how and whether critical race theory is applied to elementary school students, you are: A white supremacist and in denial of the history of the treatment of black people in America.

Wonder whether a child suffering from anxiety and believing they may be the opposite gender should receive a psychological evaluation before being allowed to enter into treatment by puberty blockers or hormone therapy, you are: A transphobic who is causing transgender people to become suicidal.

Do you have the capacity to judge the veracity of information you seek? There are many studies that speak to the safety of tobacco, nuclear energy, pesticides, forever chemicals, hormone injections, vaccines, and processed food. Can you judge the difference between a study funded by the pharmaceutical industry or the nuclear energy industry, or a U.S. government health institute partnered with one of those industries, rather than studies that are - in fact - verifiably independent? Do you trust your own observations, rather than those filtered by voices telling you what is moral belief and what is immoral belief? It seems that the inability to judge and receive real information about what is really going on is like groping in the dark, and the only light we are allowed to see ignites our morality, or virtue signaling, or divisions and polarization, but not the truth.

In the parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant we are told a group of blind men were apprised of an animal strange to them that had arrived in their village. They gathered round to touch the animal in order to understand what it was. The first person held the thick trunk and reported, “This being is like a thick snake.” The next held its ear, reporting “like a fan, this being is.” The third, encircling its leg with his hands announced that is was “a pillar,” and the fourth, placing his hands along the side, said, “a wall.”  

When only one part of the elephant is amplified, and is then the basis of a moral response, and then often a legislative or executive government response, we are as lost as the groping blind men.

The Empric Project seeks to uncover the information that can help us to begin to understand the magnitude of emergent, and too often catastrophic, problems we face. Frequently those problems are not what is reported, and certainly not amplified, in a media that is corporate, capitalist, and partisan. They are also problems of magnitude that are not even remotely met with concomitant solutions matching scale and urgency, and they are often connected by common and discernible themes.

An example that may be explored in a future column, is as follows. The CDC has indicated that humans have 212 toxic chemicals in our bodies. The Environmental Working Group puts that number at 493. In a sample test of the umbilical cords of ten newborn infants, EWG reported finding 232 chemicals including developmental toxins and neurotoxins like lead, mercury, and PCBs (formerly understood to have been banned by the U.S. government in 1976), cancer-causing toxins including dioxins (Agent Orange, among other uses), and Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), what we now call part of a class of “forever” chemicals that do not break down in our bodies, soil, water, and the environment. In the age of the Anthropocene, has humanity reached the pinnacle of reproducing infant humans as toxic waste?

After falling weeping to the ground, the Empiric Project may then ask: How did we get here? Why did we get here? And, where can we go from here? Stay tuned…