These six short stories point to the increased importance of the quantitative during the pandemic. While much of the pre-pandemic world was dominated by digital data, often describing individual behaviours online, the pandemic and post-pandemic world has forced numbers about society onto the mainstage. Before the pandemic, people would be familiar with GDP or unemployment rates. But the scale, scope and familiarity with this type of data marks a distinct juncture.

This makes understanding the cause, nature and effect of the quantitative a pressing task in the ‘post-pandemic’ world. To do so, this book argues that we need to engage with data bounds: how data becomes a meaningful way to experience, think about, discuss, react to, engage with and change certain phenomena. These data bounds are complex, made up of an ensemble of technical processes (collecting data, cleaning it, analysing it), contexts (political, economic, cultural, and so on) and media and communication.

But this complexity should not inhibit understanding. Each chapter in this book offers a distinct perspective of data bounds: they are reinforced by policy (Chapter 2), quantitative realism underpins them (Chapter 3), quantitative realism is mathematical and abstract (Chapter 4), desire for them underpins quantitative realism (Chapter 5), they are emotive (Chapter 6) and their boundaries are drawn within historical norms (Chapter 7).

These perspectives allow for data bounds to be broken down into six characteristics. In doing so, it can be used to think through non-pandemic phenomena that are highly quantified. These include – but are not limited to – health and fitness, inflation and cost of living, crime and justice and finance. It is hard to discuss, engage, experience or think about these contexts and for data not to be meaningful. To speak of the cost of living is to speak of wages, prices and profits. It is not to say that the qualitative plays no role, but to argue that the quantitative dominates.

Just as there are highly quantified phenomena, there are also contexts that have not felt the data creep so acutely. We can think of poetry and literature as existing outside data bounds.

Technology plays a significant role in our lives. Dominant narratives for technology might centre on the benefits, but for queer people the opportunities afforded by technology are counterbalanced by the consequences.

As a younger queer person, access to the information and social networks available through the Internet played a key role in my self-discovery. I vividly remember searching the web using different queer identities as keywords (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer) while completing online web surveys which promised to concretely label my identity and hesitating over the selection of ‘who I was interested in’ while adding to my Facebook profile. Through the family computer and ADSL, I possessed an avenue for finding out what it meant to be queer while existing in a largely heteronormative world. This combination of technology and networks meant access to social groups, ways to find other people like me. Today it still serves that purpose by helping me communicate with and join people who are organizing social movements for LGBTIQA+ communities. Yet, my public ‘out’ presence also poses risks that I am mindful of, particularly when it comes to global travel (Equaldex, 2022; ILGA, 2020).

The pervasive and powerful presence of different technologies can be both a boon and a problem. This means science communicators who work with and through technologies need to be critically awake to the implications of their use. Here, I explore the impact technologies have on queer people and voices. I consider how queer voices might be added into the technology and innovation creation and use discourse. The underlying motivation of this work parallels Emily Dawson's (2019) eloquent articulation as to why science communication should learn to value differences instead of minimizing and erasing them. In her book on ‘race’ and informal science learning, Dawson says that as people who feel included in science and technology worlds, science communicators and associated professionals ‘have a responsibility to centre social justice in our work. If we do not, we have to ask serious questions about whether we are happy to reproduce advantages for dominant groups at the expense of the minoritised’ (Dawson, 2019, p 159). Here, I apply this lesson to technology and innovation discourse and consider what communication looks like when equity, diversity, and inclusion are centred, rather than given lip service (Yep, 2003).

Over two centuries ago, Thomas Paine confirmed that “religion” need not be associated with deistic beliefs and rituals: “The word religion is a word of forced application when used with respect to the worship of God. The root of the word is the Latin verb ligo, to tie or bind. From ligo, comes religo, to tie or bind over again, to make more fast.” In an effort to clarify a notion of “religion” as being analogous to any set of beliefs, values, and commitments that govern one’s life—what I am calling a “worldview” or “ideology”—it helps to revisit and consider the culture wars in Holland during the Protestant Reformation (16th–17th centuries) and continuing through the 19th century. There is a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that reminds us of the two different worlds that Christian believers—Protestant and Catholic, respectively—occupied in 17th-century Holland. Golden Age art historians have noticed, both in that painting and in others, the Calvinist perspective on religion as a worldview affecting all of one’s life, rather than having to do primarily with worship, ritual, or prayer. In the 19th century, neo-Calvinist politicians used that unique conception of religion to argue that Enlightenment rationalism, as well as the ideology behind the French Revolution, were both religious in nature, involving beliefs that paralleled (and opposed) the Calvinists’ religious beliefs.

Revisiting a Dutch Golden Age painting

Wholly apart from complex doctrinal disagreements and the hidden prayers of believers, the religious fervor of the Reformation had a visual aspect:

My initial focus in this chapter is on the representation of two important features of Dutch Calvinism in the painting “Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft,” a detailed study by Emanuel de Witte (1616–92) of an 11th-century, formerly Catholic church, with whitewashed walls and no images of Christ, nor of Mary or any other saint.

Within the so-called “culture wars” dividing many nations politically, there is a persistent controversy, intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, over the trustworthiness of consensus science—the so-called “crisis of expertise.” When the science concerning climate change, mask wearing, or vaccinations becomes politicized, it loses its mooring in scientific evidence and reduces the effectiveness of both regulatory laws and the voices of scientists. Perhaps counterintuitively, however, the solution is likely not to wear “Because Science” T-shirts, while insisting on “cold, hard facts” and diagnosing as stupid those who believe the scientific theories of marginalized, minority-view scientists. Indeed, a certain level of modesty—regarding the uncertainties and tentativeness of even the best science—is necessary for the type of understanding and communication that might convince someone to change their scientific beliefs. Unfortunately, the reaction of some scholars to the crisis of expertise is unwittingly to idealize consensus science by identifying an anti-science ideology in certain segments of the citizenry, while easily ignoring the ideological, almost religious, belief structures on both sides in the crisis of expertise. Indeed, the arrogance of those who believe in consensus scientists (a group to which I belong) probably increases distrust of experts. How do we reduce that conflict over consensus science? In Wittgenstein’s formulation: “Conflict is dissipated in much the same way as the tension of a spring when you melt the mechanism (or dissolve it in nitric acid). This dissolution eliminates all tensions.” But what is the mechanism dividing us in scientific matters, and what can dissolve it?

The purpose of this book is to analyze the crisis of expertise in terms of ideology, by which I mean an inevitable worldview (and not the Marxian-inspired notion of a false consciousness, perhaps empowering a ruling class). I readily acknowledge the difficulty of useful discourse between groups who seem to live in different realities, and I draw on the recent work of sociologists who recommend modesty concerning probabilistic scientific models and data that can rarely be characterized as unchanging “cold, hard facts.”

Tribalism in politics

We tend to think of political divisions primarily as “secular”—for example, in the US, even when one major political party becomes associated with evangelical Christianity, some supporters of that party will not share those beliefs and members of the opposition party may reject religion altogether (identifying as nonbelievers) or claim that religion should not influence politics. However, that limited understanding of religion is misleading: “Whereas the foundational metaphor for tribalism is kinship, the foundational metaphor for political sectarianism is religion, which evokes analogies focusing less on genetic relatedness than on strong faith in the moral correctness and superiority of one’s sect.” A recent Science article on political partisanship by social psychologist Eli Finkel (Northwestern University) and others analyzes our cultural divide in terms of opposing sectarian faiths. Mirroring the Protestant Reformation in Holland discussed in Chapter 2, the core ingredients of political sectarianism identified by the authors are: (1) “othering,” in the sense of exaggerating differences; (2) strong aversions to, even contempt for, those in the other group; and (3) moralization, as the other side is characterized as disgraceful or iniquitous due to belief in the moral superiority of one’s community. Despite “plentiful” common ground, the growing, mutual distrust nowadays in the US between Republicans and Democrats leads to a striking polarization. In a manner reflected in religious sectarianism, “Americans today are much more opposed to dating or marrying an opposing partisan; they are also wary of living near or working for one.” We can discern “radically different sectarian narratives about American society and politics.”

Like other analyses of the culture wars, the authors note that “as Americans have grown more receptive to consuming information slanted through a partisan lens, the media ecosystem has inflamed political sectarianism.” Like the analyses of the crisis of expertise by sociologists, the authors also recommend instilling into political debates:

Throughout this book, I have maintained both that ideology is inevitable and, consequently, that we cannot criticize others from a position of neutrality: “For Latour the critic pretends to an enlightened knowledge that allows him to demystify the fetishistic belief of naϊve others. … [T]he fatal mistake of the critic is not to turn this anti-fetishistic gaze on his own belief … a mistake that renders him the most naive of all.” Well before the crisis of expertise was intensified, due, in part, to the Trump administration’s response to global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic, Latour explained where such naivete leads: “This is why you can be at once and without even sensing any contradiction … an antifetishist for everything you don’t believe in … and … a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish.”

The situation with respect to consensus science therefore seems dire, as citizens living in different worlds cannot believe how blind their opponents are. Collins and Evans, however, in their analysis of communication between experts, rely on a Wittgensteinian view of lived worlds, wherein communication, in the sense of understanding the other side, is possible even between opposing worldviews. There may be limitations in the culture wars, insofar as a journalist who tries to embed within a far-right militia group in order to understand its beliefs might find that assignment difficult. However, in the field of scientific expertise, it is not difficult to imagine taking seriously (and respectfully criticizing) some of the scientific claims and data of minority-view scientists, all the while acknowledging the uncertainties and limitations of consensus science. With respect to controversial scientific issues, it is rarely a matter of claiming the unadorned “Truth” and identifying the stupid people who will not acknowledge it. We need, that is, to recognize the tension “between the need to preserve the right of the individual to make novel claims, setting him-or herself outside of the consensus, and the need to accept a degree of regulation of scientific thinking and acting if science is to move forward. … [S]cience is always balancing these two needs.”

Not many people know that before he became an academic, Dave Caudill would sometimes sit at the end of a runway in Germany in an F-4 Phantom jet with an armed nuclear weapon, waiting for the alarm that would send him to release it on the forces of the Soviet Union. That was his earlier method of promoting peace. Now, the pen has taken the place of the sword. Like many of us, he sees the world getting ever nearer to mutually assured destruction as a result of the erosion of truth. A group of apprehensive people, including Caudill, think that a proper understanding and respect for science might help to stop the death of truth, followed by the death of all of us. However, this is not the kind of understanding of science that causes people to go around wearing “Trust the Science” T-shirts because we know science, most evidently science in formation, is too provisional and embedded in ordinary social life for that. Typically, the kind of science that confronts potential dictators and could limit their power to exercise “the will of the people” in any way they interpret it is the provisional sort of science that still could be wrong. We have to find a way to bring this kind of science to bear on public opinion without going back to slogans reminiscent of the 1950s. This is what some of us think of as the ambition of the Third Wave of science studies.

Too many social scientists take the easy way out, abandoning the old model so completely that science folds into public opinion; in this book, Caudill confronts the dilemmas. You cannot have checks and balances without elites. Caudill’s treatment of this is original in a number of ways and unique in bringing his immediate post-military profession of lawyer into the debate. He knows how the paradoxes of expert witnesses confronting lay juries work out, and if nothing else, this aspect of the book will make it indispensable.

The complexity of the crisis of expertise

In the culture wars generally, there is a tendency to oversimplify; for example, some critics often talk of those who live in an “alternate reality” as if they— the critics— live in the “real” world. As to some issues, this may be justified. Stories of those who believe their parents have been brainwashed by Facebook posts claiming election fraud (or a grand left-wing conspiracy), or who cannot believe their friends supported an “authoritarian” president who divided the country, are common. However, many of the differences between the two sides in the culture wars reflect different values and visions for the nation. As sociologist Nissim Mizrachi explains, with respect to the working-class voters in Israel who supported Netanyahu (the parallels with Trump voters “are impossible to miss”): “The problem [is not that they were] confused about what was best for them. They weren’t suffering from … ‘false consciousness’. … [They] were consciously spurning liberalism for a reason: what they see as the endgame of the liberal worldview is not a world they wish to inhabit.”

One need only think of the abortion rights controversy, immigration policies, or the supposed attacks by the Left on religious freedom or gun rights to recognize that the division in the culture wars is not simply about misinformation from unreliable Internet sources; it is about values, identities, and foundational commitments to a way of life. Moreover, those on the Right do not have a monopoly on foundational commitments—both the Left and the Right have a moralized anchor “around which to understand the world”:

One can certainly argue that there is no moral equivalency between the opposing ideologies in the culture wars and that the views of one side will lead to superior outcomes in terms of fairness in opportunities for success, racial and gender equality, or helping those in need.

Wittgenstein’s hope

Even as we seem to speak the same language as our fellow citizens, often we do not: “[W]hile we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do.” However, one of the insights from Third Wave studies of expertise and experience is that we do not have to become believing members of another community to learn its language: “[I]t is possible, given the right circumstances, for a competent human from any human group to understand the culture of any other human group without engaging in their practices.” Moreover, there is in Wittgenstein an optimism that it is possible for those who occupy a form of life to communicate with, and even persuade, those in a different form of life. The philosophical problem of relativism, however, arises in Wittgenstein’s account of forms of life—both cultural relativism due to differences between groups “with regards to social, moral and religious values and practices,” and cognitive relativism due to differences between groups as to their “different ways of ‘seeing the world’—that is, that there seems to be a plurality of different sets of categories under which experience is organized and the world understood.” If others live in a different world to me, or see the world differently than I do, how can I even talk about what is wrong and right about current events, appropriate values, or scientific knowledge? For Wittgenstein, however, we can “imagine situations and practices that are quite different from our own. … Outsiders can, as it were, achieve something of an insider’s perspective. … [D]ifferent ways of ‘seeing’ the world are not cognitively inaccessible to one another.” For example, Wittgenstein suggests that we should try to persuade a person who believed the earth to be only 50 years old: “We should be trying to give him our picture of the world.” It is never, however, merely “a matter of presenting cold facts about [his] false beliefs.” In Philip Toner’s formulation, “[d]ialogue, persuasion, self-awareness and humility are the order of the day for Wittgenstein.”

Anthropology is famous for its effort to understand a culture other than the anthropologist’s own—its ethnographic methodology in particular aims to see things as others do: “What they call life is a ghost ship. On the ship are many rooms. … An uncountable number. There is always another. This is how they escape the prison of the self. To see the world through the windows of someone else’s room.” Impliedly, we all have a perspective, or a viewpoint from which we see the world; the challenge in the crisis of expertise is to understand why others might disagree about something as seemingly universal and uncontroversial as scientific facts.

The anthropology of religion

Anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann (Stanford University) recently published a study of religious practices—not simply religious beliefs—entitled How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. Luhrmann emphasizes the “real-making” efforts, including prayer, ritual, and worship, of religious believers. Her ethnographic observations, for example, of charismatic Protestants “suggested that it took these staunch evangelicals [a lot of] effort to keep God present and salient in their lives.” Luhrmann recalls public debates between atheists and Christians, the former convinced that the way Christians “think is simply wrong-headed,” and the latter explaining that “Christianity is not about propositions at all, but rather about truths that are more transcendent, symbolic, and nonliteral”: “ ‘The result,’ [anthropologist Jonathan] Mair comments, ‘is a loud conversation at cross purposes.’ That’s because, he argues, they think about realness differently. The two sides don’t hear each other properly because they live in different ‘cultures of belief.’” Even the atheist, that is, lives in a culture of belief. Both have a sustained, intentional, deliberative commitment: for the Christian, it is a faith in “the idea that there are invisible beings who are involved in human lives in helpful ways”; while for the atheist, it is a firm belief that there are no such beings. And both have a set of values to which they are committed.

In faith communities, Luhrmann also identifies how religious people occupy a “special world defined by special rules. … [T]hey signal their participation by special actions [called] rituals … [and] find their inner lives socialized by others as they accept the rules of the game and remake them as their own.”

We hear the questions so often nowadays from colleagues, friends, and family, whether in discussions of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the safety of vaccines: “How can those people ignore the obvious facts?”; “How can they be so lost in their bubble?”; and “Who are their so-called experts?” Of course, I do not mean to imply that it is only one side in the culture wars asking those questions; rather, both sides view the other as living inside a bubble or an echo chamber. Fox News and CNN are “said [to] report as if from alternate universes.” These divisions have legal and policy consequences, as we have seen in the suggestion the Trump administration reflected an anti-scientific bias in appointments to head science-related government agencies, as well as in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while scholars agree that 21st-century technological growth and the digital age has exacerbated the “tribal” divisions in the US and internationally, the phenomenon of citizens living in “two different worlds,” or in “alternative realities,” is hardly new. A relatively random historical parallel—but one to which I will return as exemplary of our contemporary situation—is the sharp division between Catholics and Calvinists during the Protestant Reformation. Each side was convinced of both the righteousness of their cause—not only of their beliefs, but also of their acts of violence—and the dangerous blasphemy of the other.

More recently, about 30 years ago, Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson, focusing on risk assessment in policy contexts, highlighted the role of cultural cognition in ongoing clashes of contradictory certainties and plural rationalities. Drawing on the myths of nature represented by some ecologists (nature as capricious, benign, perverse/tolerant, and ephemeral) and mapping them onto some anthropologists’ representation of two dimensions of sociality (individual versus group and no external restrictions on choice versus external restrictions on choice) and four types of “rationalities” (fatalist, individualist, hierarchist, and egalitarian), Schwarz and Thompson identified four different orientations in technology assessment. Thus, for example, the contradictory certainties held, respectively, by the producer of a genetically modified (GM) food product (that the product is safe) and an anti-GM activist (that the product is unsafe) can be explained by reference to differing perceptions of nature as, respectively, robust and vulnerable.