Proxy “Evidence” and the Manipulation of Human Perceptions

One of the key drivers of modernity is the belief that human beings are at their core empirically-minded creatures who, if left to develop this innate disposition to its fullest, will uncover and explain all of the world's many mysteries. It is a very compelling idea, one that has no doubt greatly contributed to energizing what is sometimes referred to as the social and material "march of progress."

As an epistemic system, however, it is also plagued by a grave foundational problem: the supposition that an acculturated human being can and will assess the reality around him with virgin or unbiased eyes.

• Human perceptions in a given moment are always mediated by previous and often quite personal cognitive, vital and sensorial experiences, and as a result, can never begin to approach the levels of neutrality or breadth of focus that we humans are presumed to be capable of having as participants in the empiricist paradigm of modernity.
  1. Well, you simply develop proxy measurements, such as the rise in antibody levels in injected trial subjects—results that may or may not have a proven causal relation with the above-mentioned real measurements of effectiveness—and present them as being flawless indicators of success in disease minimization and eradication.
  2. Like large revenue-producing college athletic programs, Big Pharma is deeply aware of how little thought most citizens, and sadly it seems, most medical professionals give to how “facts” and notions of “reality” enter into their field of consciousness.
  3. Since the dawn of western medicine, medical diagnostics has been driven by symptomatology; that is, by having a physician cast his experienced eyes upon the physical manifestations of sickness in the patient.
  4. The line of sight must fixate upon a small group of objects and deviate from the rest, effectively neglecting those other things.
  5. “In any landscape, in any precinct where we open our eyes, the number of visible things is practically infinite, but in any given moment we can only see a very small number of them.
  6. To see it is not enough that there exist, on one side, our organs of sight, and the other, the visible object situated, as always, between other equally visible things.
  7. When watching the commercial enterprise colloquially known as college sports on TV we are frequently told of the wonderfully high graduation rates achieved by certain coaches at certain universities.

https://brownstone.org/articles/proxy-evidence-and-the-manipulation-of-human-perceptions/