alierak

Many years ago, I was sitting on the steps of the MIT Student Center, eating my Tosci's ice cream after SCA dance practice, when a young philosophy major I was mentoring ran up to me and exclaimed, "I just realized! You're not a platonist! You're an empiricist!" I cracked up. To this day I have no idea what ever might have lead him to think I was a platonist in the first place.

I think about that from time to time, moving in the worlds of smart sciency people. One of the things I often feel sets me apart from most of my conspecifics in my cognitive approach to the world is that I am an empiricist. I've been described as "Rationalist-adjacent", which is fair enough, but I am not a small-r rationalist. I love reason – but I love data more. Reason can be great stuff, but without valid data to reason from, it's just a way of going wrong with confidence.

This came round on the guitar again lately with regard to the US cyclosporiasis outbreak. At least one reasonable medical professional whose judgment I generally respect has announced they feel it's safe to go back to eating lettuce, because usually the cyclospora season ends at the end of August. That would be some of that them there reasoning I am dubious about,

I can't help but notice that usually we don't have a cyclosporiasis outbreak like this at all, so reasoning from what usually happens seems to maybe not be so warranted. Sure, maybe all the new cyclosporiasis cases will fall off dramatically in the immediate future because of some seasonal effect. But we don't know why this outbreak happened in the first place, so we don't know what will stop it. Like one of the possibilities here is something climate change related, that, thanks to climate change, will not be dropping below whatever threshold until later in the year than usual.

Personally, I'm going to wait for the data to come in showing that lots of people aren't getting new cyclosporiasis cases.

Now, because of the enormous lag between infection and symptoms, and symptoms and testing, and testing to reporting to health authorities collecting the information, and then publishing it somewhere I can see it, chances are that by the time the new infections numbers go down, lettuce – and the other suspect produce I've been avoiding – will have been safe for weeks.

That's fine. I'm not hurting none. I've had lettuce almost every day this summer, and blueberries too, because we've been patronizing our local farmers market here in Massachusetts, far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Blueberries are out of season now, so I'm on to peaches which to my surprise are apparently in season here to the end of September. When we get takeout, we get thoroughly cooked food. If this goes on, I might get a countertop hydroponic lettuce kit. I don't see a huge need to rush back to eating grocery-store lettuce. I don't think it's some sort of tragedy if I avoid bagged lettuce that retroactively turned out to have been safe for a month or two.

I'll agree that grocery store lettuce is safe to eat again when I see data that indicates that.