What any responsible scientist knows is that we live in an imperfect world where we have imperfect data sets and imperfect models. Indeed, Plato’s cave, where we are looking at a wall with imperfect reflections on the wall from the real world just beyond our perception, is a reasonable metaphor. The main difference between the news media and scientists is that the press actually believes that the pale reflections on the wall are reality.
Since any highly competent professor with careful research and numerous publications can convince a malleable student that the Earth is flat, how can we actually arrive at truth? The answer is a dialectic and a robust peer review process and debate.
So it was that the framers of the Constitution, especially James Madison, who was apparently obsessed as a child of the Enlightenment with the almost planetary checks and balances necessary in a constitutional system (which are to some degree missing in a parliamentary system), gave us our great jewel.
Because of this, the election of Donald Trump was a good thing, not a disaster, because the checks and balances of our constitutional system could handle his necessary adjustment to the republic’s orbit. With regard to the new Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, it is also clear that if the Republicans don’t retain control of the Senate to balance the Democrats and prevent catastrophic orbital changes, the republic is in dire straits. The Georgia runoff election is therefore one of the most important elections of the new century.
— William Hibler
Fairbanks
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