Trust Fall 2: Deformed Consent

It's not our fault you don't know what the influence of trypsin on the anti-adhesive effect of CA 125 is.

Not Pictured here: informed consent. (Model: Thistle, a boar that cannot actually read)

A response to Consensual Penetration by Riggery Pokery

Apologies for the long hiatus.

This topic was next in the clip for the past week or two, but even thought it was already in my head, a lot of salient stuff has come out from excellent Substack authors:

• Kyrie Irving and decline in trust of public health by Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts

• the goldilocks zone of societal participation lies in knowing what you don't know by some fucking cat or another

…and many more. As I’ve said in the past, one of the main things that has always stopped me from writing more, professionally or otherwise, is being averse to saying things other people have already said better, or offering nothing new to a discussion and simply contributing to the white noise of the internet for a dopamine hit or a few bucks.

But I was already going to write this, in specific response to the aforementioned article, “Consensual Penetration,” on Rudolph Rigger’s stack.

Worrying way too much about being indecorate by titling his article with a sexual innuendo, Rigger opens with the following provocative questions in making a broad comparison between vaccine mandates and sexual consent (“If you are going to stick something into someone else’s body you must first obtain consent”):

- What does consent even mean?
- If consent is based on incorrect information, is it still consent?
- If consent is given after some element of coercion, is it still consent?
- Who is deemed able to give consent?
- Who can override that consent (or non consent) and in what circumstances?

These are all reasonable, important questions, and Rigger addresses them very well in his article- this response isn’t intended as a specific criticism. These are indeed major philosophical issues in the area of consent.

There’s something else interesting about Rigger’s article, though: it doesn’t have the word “informed” in it anywhere, preceding the word “consent” or otherwise. “Information,” yes, but not “informed.”

I checked, twice, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re reporting on other people’s ideas, which now makes me a more qualified journalist than actual journalists, except for my aversion to the taste of fresh asshole.

Pictured here: A baccalaureate journalism final exam typical of United States universities.

I got the phrase for the subtitle of this article by searching the research article on ovarian cancer that I was reading for the most incomprehensible phrase I could find. (Don’t worry, fellow Gutterscum, I don’t have ovarian cancer, nor does Mothermouth or any other female I know personally. I just like reading shit.) I did that on purpose.

I did this because the majority of people reading it wouldn’t even begin to know what it, or any of its constituent words in context, mean. I remember a particularly nasty trend on Twitter earlier in the pandemic of generally younger (typically new grads or grad students, it seemed) and obviously progressive (pronouns in bio, masks on avatar) people in science or medicine “owning” skeptics in debates simply by asking a bunch of questions of them using big words from medicine or biology or statistics and stating, essentially, that if you didn’t possess the same mastery of what that vocabulary meant, you were simply INCAPABLE of mounting a meaningful argument against their Covidian position and should surrender, immediately change your ignorant position, and bow out. In addition to masks, their avatar photos would typically feature them in lab coats or goggles or other sciencey accoutrement.

It was Appeal To Authority By Way Of Big Words.

In a past life, I worked in public health for about a decade, all told, in various roles mostly around mental health, with some casework/advocacy type nonsense in there too. I used the words “informed consent” a lot. I gave, and received, lots of pieces of paper with those words on them.

The super-brief distillation of the meaning of the phrase “informed consent” that I’m using for this article- and which I used in those various jobs, and which most healthcare providers and other people mean when they say it, is roughly as follows:

You have to understand what is being done to you before you can give “real” consent to allow it to be done.

I briefly worked with a severely developmentally disabled adult who had been sexually assaulted in the group home she lived in. She wasn’t able to give informed consent about just about anything except maybe simple concepts like “do you want to eat this” or “do you want to do this activity instead of that one or not at all?” The notion that the effects, side effects, or health risks of, for example, psychiatric medication could be explained to her in any meaningful way so as to create the conditions for “informed consent” was laughable, and it didn’t happen anyway- due to her mental incapacity, she had a legal guardian (I honestly don’t remember if this specific client had caregiver parents in the picture or was a ward of the state) who gave “informed consent” on her behalf based on her perceived best interests.

After reading Rigger’s article and noting the lack of mention of informed consent, I re-read his immediately preceding article Do your own research? in which he discusses an article from about two years back by physicist Ethan Siegel that the Covidians absolutely ate up and smugly linked in response to any dissent whatsoever about COVID policy. The article ended with this lovely paragraph:

But that requires a kind of transformation within yourself. It means that you need to be humble, and admit that you, yourself, lack the necessary expertise to evaluate the science before you. It means that you need to be brave enough to turn to the consensus of scientific experts and ask, legitimately, what we know at the present stage. And it means you need to be open-minded enough to understand that your preconceptions are quite likely to be wrong in some, many, or possibly even all ways. If we listen to the science, we can attempt to take the best path possible forward through the greatest challenges facing modern society. We can choose to ignore it, but if we do, the consequences will only increase in severity.

Pictured here: A man who is smarter, wiser, and just plain better than you to whom you should submit your decision making and critical thought.

Don’t worry your pretty head, sugarplum, the odds are, the “consensus of scientific experts” is always going be a more reliable indicator of truth than anything your smooth brain is going to come up with, and “if we listen to the science” it will all be okay. Now have another cigarette, the consensus of scientific experts is that it’s good for your health. After all, the words “consensus” and “rigorously-tested theory free of bias or corruption” are basically synonymous. Hey, remember drapetomania?

The physicist that enjoys cosplaying strangely-colored flightless birds that enjoy cosplaying pirates is distorting a seed of truth in that article, the same seed that Rigger puts in a bit of effort to defend in the aforementioned ‘Stack. It’s the truth that I was left thinking the rest of the day after I had read “Consensual Penetration” and felt compelled to draft a response:

It is impossible for one person to know all salient details relevant to all such circumstances that morally demand “informed consent.”

Around the same time, NY Times Propagandist Charlie Warzel put out the equally blood-boiling Critical Thinking Isn't Helping In The Fight Against Misinformation, another reminder that regular proles like us simply aren’t capable of amassing the right information and comprehending it properly to come to the correct conclusion and the only solution for us poor mentally-handicapped peasants is to defer to a particular source of information that we are told is the right one by the same people telling us not to look at other ones because it will hurt our silly monkey brains.

Back to that “seed of truth” I mentioned a moment ago. There’s a problem with humanity that supports the argument put forth by such philosofascists. Most people are pretty dumb. Seriously, have you looked around you? Look at what’s on TV. Look at what people are wearing in public. Look at their lifestyle choices. Stand in line at the post office or the bank, for god’s sake.

Half of us are of “below average” intelligence, and “average” intelligence seems barely enough to get most people through the day without doing things that harm themselves.

Pictured here: Still not informed consent.

But really, this isn’t strictly about “intelligence”- it’s about the shining star of “expert status,” which we typically (and fucking WRONGLY) correlate with intelligence. Ethan “Don’t try to do science or you’ll hurt yourself ” Siegel is a physicist, and I’m sure he’s intelligent, probably somewhere “above average,” because getting a PhD in physics involves mastering complex, difficult concepts, committing a lot of things to memory, and being able to string together a lot of big words fairly correctly to publish papers. Siegel isn’t, notably, an epidemiologist, virologist, public health statistician, or any of the other things that, by virtue of his humanitarian entreaty to “please leave this to the Experts,” should invalidate any authority he has to tell us what to do about COVID-19. But he and those like him aren’t just the “-ists” or “-icians” that their diplomas say, they’re ALSO “Experts”- a status distinct from simply holding a degree or license. When an Expert tells you to “trust the experts,” even if it isn’t THEIR area of expertise, it’s just a guildsman protecting the turf of another guild so that they’ll later return the favor when I try to pretend I understand physics and suggest that Siegel shouldn’t be the boss of whether or not I build a particle accelerator in my barn. (Full disclosure: I will not build it for research. I will build it to try to blow shit up. If DARPA or the DoD shows up at my door, I will happily start calling it ‘research,” but I want to be perfectly honest, my motivation is about as scientific as Mythbusters.)

So, we’ve got experts that want to maintain a monopoly on final arbitration of what society should or should not do, but also what, by extension, we will and will not be allowed to do as individuals, like build energy weapons in our barns or not take poorly-crafted vaccines. And that motivation- hoarding authority at the cost of our autonomy and agency- that’s easy enough to understand.

But the previous truths- that individual humans, at large, are poor decision-makers, that many aren’t very smart, and that even if we are smart, it’s impossible for us to reach expert-level understanding of every topic and discipline pertinent to every decision that morally demands informed consent- those are also true.

How the fucking fuck do we square this circle?

First, we (and by “we,” I mean those of you spending your afternoon in The Gutter reading this, and other dangerous sympathizers, and not “we” as in “everyone”) have to decide if we still agree that that informed consent is a moral obligation and why we still think that. That parenthetical qualification was made because I don’t truly believe that every part of society- particularly the “don’t try to think about this” shitheads discussed above, and their devotee cultists including but absolutely not limited to the Branch Covidians- believes this anymore. After all, why are we so scared of the theory that the WEF or something like them want to create a global totalitarian state where virtually every single life choice is made for us by algorithms and Experts and enforced by perfectly seamless top-down governance?

Lots of people truly hate making their own decisions, or coming to their own conclusions, and would leap at the chance to outsource every significant act of thinking, especially if they were convinced that the answers would be handed down by the very, very best scientists and the very, very best AI-powering algorithms.

So. Since those of you in this room are here because you haven’t already decided that your life is too exhausting and difficult to keep your own hands on the wheel, does it naturally follow that we believe that when we must give Someone Else permission to do something to us, that Someone Else has the moral and ethical responsibility to tell us all the salient details that would impact our decisions, particularly the risks and likely-unforeseen impacts of those decisions?

Between us chickens, I think the answer is an easy “yes.” I’m deeply concerned that the wider world is quickly coming to the conclusion that philosophical positions like these are quaint and outdated and that people need to be governed like stupid children. But I think there are still vast numbers of us that want to maintain our own agency to the maximum degree possible, and out of a sense of empathy or honor or spiritual belief want to extend those same rights to other humans.

But it’s also true that to be truly “informed” on the issues that demand consent, like vaccines, how the government spends the money it steals from us, or whether or not to go ahead with this or that medical procedure, is often impossible in the truest sense of the word “informed.” To truly arrive at the best possible decision about whether or not to, say, take the current COVID vaccines, we would need to be a competent virologist to understand COVID itself, a chemist and pharmacologist to understand the vaccine’s constituents, a doctor of several specialties to understand the likely impact of those constituents on the human body, and I haven’t even gotten into the expertise required to draw truly masterful conclusions about the data that would need to be collected to address the aforementioned issues at a population level.

Don’t worry, I know you’re getting tired and probably have to pee by now. I never said you couldn’t.

Here’s how we square the circle. And, simultaneously, here’s how we repudiate the Experts like the aforementioned that regard us as misguided dolts that should just do what we’re fucking told, and that what we’re told will be based on the majority opinion of a select group of guildsmen who happen to be sitting in the same room.

We do listen to Experts. We find informed voices specialized in the areas that govern an informed choice we need to make, consider what they have to say, and make the choices.

What we throw out is the synonymity (fuck you, Substack, it’s a real word) of “consensus” with “rightness,” and the non-results-oriented processes- there are thousands of them infesting our institutions- by which someone is crowned Expert. Why isn’t El Gato Malo an Expert, for example? Why are people who were Experts a moment ago, like Malone, not Experts anymore? They both know a hell of a lot more about statistics and medicine than I do, clearly no less than other people I’m told are legitimate Experts that I should listen to.

Because of consensus, again.

We reject the notion that Expert is a status that only existing Experts can bestow, and instead consider people Experts when they deliver robust results- which puts people like Neil Ferguson out of a fucking job and directly out of the Experts Circle. We reject monopolistic guilds that claim crowning authority of Expert.

The only monopoly that should exist in this whole circle jerk is that claiming you’re right requires you to actually be right and show testable, replicable proof that you’re right.

Second, if we live in free societies and want to continue to do so, we have to demand the right to make poor choices, because we are all going to, and you cannot simultaneously have a free society and an Expert cult that is ready to pounce and say “ah-HA, you fucked up there, no more decisions for you ever again” with the force of an Expert-powered state ready to take those decisions from you and kill you when you resist.

Those choices are YOURS, by the way. You can’t be an Expert- you can’t retain your status as a guide for others’ decisions- if you’re consistently wrong in ways that lead people who come to you for guidance. (And that accusation of “wrong” has to be equally robustly demonstrated and provable, by the way- you can’t just censor them and take away their credentials.)

You can be wrong for yourself. That’s it.

“Aha, you dangerous far-right cunt, you don’t have the right to infect ME with your dangerous virus, ergo I command you to wear a mask, get a shot, lose your business, and be locked in your home.”

Nope. I don’t have the right to KNOWINGLY and INTENTIONALLY do that, and good luck reliably demonstrating that in all but the weirdest, rarest of outliers, and you know what? If someone actually goes to the deliberate trouble to a) catch a genuinely deadly disease and b) specifically attempt to pass it to me knowing for certain they have it, yeah, punish them. Find that incredibly rare edge case.

There’s more to say about this- a lot more- but the reason this is filed under Trust Fall is because we ultimately MUST outsource our expertise to give anything like genuinely “informed consent”- but we need not submit to a abridged list of who we may outsource to that is curated by the same people that would like to be the only choices of whom we may outsource to. In the end, we do have to find people beyond ourselves that we can trust. In the previous Trust Fall, I make the point that because of the same complexities and difficulties that make trust difficult in the modern era, we must exercise a kind of “qualified trust” backed by accountability and serious consequences for betraying trust, and that’s still true.

The addendum is that we must demand the right to choose who to trust and that our choices are not conditional upon us making choices that Experts agree with.

Because the Experts are going to continue to fuck up, too.

A lot. And often.

The last word: jugs. You just don’t hear it much anymore, and it’s a dandy.

A nice pair, I think. No one’s are the same exact shape and size anyway.

Until next time.