The Asymmetry of Truth: What Really Happened on Epstein Island?
Nearly everyone knows about Jeffrey Epstein. But what people disagree about are the exact details of what was regularly happening on Little Saint James in the Caribbean.
Certain facts are undisputed, but much is left to speculation. To fill in this information vacuum, people have constructed various scenarios. Some say that almost any high-class visitor who flew on Epstein’s plane must have known about, and even participated in, sex orgies with minors. This oftentimes includes public figures such as Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton, and even the late Stephen Hawking. Others build upon the apparent Epstein-Israel connection, with this version of Epstein being a Mossad spy who blackmailed powerful figures. Many go beyond regular accusations, imagining that ghastly crimes such as zoophilia, cannibalism, even child sacrifice, were common on Little Saint James. And there are those, such as a colleague of mine, who, with fervor in their eyes and disgust in their voice, insist that the “Epstein class” engaged in literal demonic rituals and worshipped the Devil.
It’s possible that these scenarios are correct, but the catch is that all of them are most likely wrong.
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Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has divided truth into two zones. The first is the reality zone, which focuses on the truth we can know directly and experientially, mostly through our own senses. With it, there is no negotiating. We can pretend all we like that our car runs on diesel, but if we pump diesel into a gas-powered vehicle, we’ll be leaving the gas station in a tow truck. We can lie to our parents about getting an A instead of an F, but once mom pops in to check with the teacher, we’ll be saying goodbye to our phone for a week. And if we fail to turn off the stove before heading off to work, we’re welcome to insist that truth is a relative social construct but the burned ruin waiting on our return will attest otherwise. In this zone, deviation from truth carries a price.
Since we generally pay no price for false beliefs in the mythology zone, our brains let imagination run wild here.
The second is the mythology zone, which focuses on the remote truth largely inaccessible to our direct experience: the ancient past and the distant future; private conversations between world leaders and closed-door meetings of powerful corporate figures; deep space, the afterlife, and parallel worlds; the depths of Loch Ness and haunted houses; Area 51, 9/11, Bohemian Grove, Rosicrucian and Masonic gatherings, the fate of Malaysian flight MH370; or … the regular activities that Epstein organized on Little Saint James.
Since we generally pay no price for false beliefs in the mythology zone, our brains let imagination run wild here. But here lies the problem: there are countless falsehoods, yet only one truth.
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Before returning to Epstein, a different question: What exactly is the geometric shape of the Earth? It may be easy to know the answer today, but imagine being an average person in Sumer 7,000 years ago. You have almost no reliable sources of information, and you are unaware of the scientific method by which you might uncover the truth. So, you rely exclusively on reasoning.
The Earth might be flat. It might be a cuboid, a cylinder, a pyramid, a cone, a torus, a Möbius strip, or a doughnut-like object. Many people assumed additional specifics. Hindus believed it to be a disc resting on the backs of elephants, which stood on the giant tortoise Akupara; Israelites thought it was flat, set within a dome beneath a heavenly vault and the waters above it; Scandinavians believed it was part of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil.
The Earth, in fact, is not a cuboid, cylinder, or torus. It is an oblate spheroid—flattened at the poles and bulged at the equator—and it is only that. This asymmetry places objective truth in a tragically unfavorable position—painfully difficult to reach. By contrast, the mythology zone exacts no toll for false beliefs, and thus there can be any number of possible “truths” dreamed up by fantasy. This asymmetry leads us to the drastic realization that when people speak about topics they cannot know through direct experience, they are almost certainly stating one of many falsehoods, rather than the truth.
In a desire to appear intelligent and educated, we will not naturally embrace intellectual humility and admit that we “don’t know” something or that we “haven’t studied the topic enough,” except perhaps in complex and remote fields such as aeronautics, quantum physics, or programming. We become victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect: we know very little, i.e., we don’t know what we don’t know, and therefore think we know almost everything.
We know that all politicians are corrupt and elections are rigged; that the CIA assassinated JFK and tried to do the same to Donald Trump; that some kind of metaphysics “absolutely must exist”; that public schools were manipulatively established during the Industrial Revolution to churn out obedient workers; that the world is not actually governed by chaotic nation-states but by shadowy billionaires no one has ever heard of. And, to my point, we think we know exactly what was happening on Little Saint James.
The more elaborate a theory, the less likely it is to be true, as each additional detail raises the chances that we have grasped one of the many possible falsehoods.
Paradoxically, theories with more detail sound more convincing to us, even though the opposite is likely the case. The more elaborate a theory, the less likely it is to be true, as each additional detail raises the chances that we have grasped one of the many possible falsehoods.
For instance, true crime enthusiasts regularly construct elaborate theories about perpetrators. Their arguments tend to resemble fiction writing more than neutral evaluation of evidence: they are willing to make up elements to link certain pieces of evidence into a coherent whole, declare their suspect the killer, and solve the mystery. But in so doing, they are almost certainly choosing one of many available falsehoods.
Logicians have rightly pointed to the conjunction fallacy, whereby hypotheses with fewer elements are more probable (A, not A ∧ B). This is illustrated by the famous “Linda Problem” developed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman: Imagine that you are looking to hire someone for your company and you are considering for employment the following candidate:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more likely? 1. Linda is a bank teller. 2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. When this scenario was presented to subjects, 85 percent chose the second option of Linda as both a bank teller and a feminist. Mathematically speaking, this is the wrong choice, because the probability of two independent events occurring together (in “conjunction”) will always be less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone. Here, it is far more likely that Linda is a bank teller than that she is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.
Consider the Epstein case again. By adding various unproven details—the blackmailing, the Mossad connection, the cannibalism, the Devil worshiping, or that Chomsky and Clinton and Hawking and others raped minors—you might be satisfying your own need to fill in the information vacuum, but you are almost certainly wrong. As the great Christopher Hitchens said, what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. And evidence for a few of the aforementioned claims is thin and circumstantial at best; for others, non-existent.
We become victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect: we know very little, i.e., we don’t know what we don’t know, and therefore think we know almost everything.
The asymmetry phenomenon is also related to an internet adage known as Brandolini’s Law: the amount of energy needed to refute a falsehood is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. It is easy to blurt out on internet forums or podcasts that a car can run on water enriched with hydrogen peroxide. Repeat it often enough, and thanks to the illusory truth and bandwagon effects, people will even believe you. Once a critical mass gathers behind a piece of nonsense, it spreads even more easily.
The latter has been demonstrated by the Asch conformity experiments, which repeatedly proved that a person will repeat what others are saying even if they are contradicted by their own eyes. Social conformism encompasses not only fashion and popular culture, but also intellectual opinions concerning objective truth. Since people naturally resist updating their beliefs—especially those in the mythology zone, where reality doesn’t punch them in the face—presenting contrary evidence after the fact can feel like a Sisyphean task. And so, while you waste your time explaining why there isn’t enough evidence to claim that Epstein was a Mossad spy who blackmailed powerful figures and practiced cannibalism, it is too late: a large number of people are convinced of some of countless falsehoods.
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Aside from the Epstein scenarios, the same epistemological asymmetry bears the blame for the vast number of false beliefs that have followed humanity since time immemorial. In their desire to explain the world, people have latched onto some of the infinitely many untruths: flat Earth, Atlantis, animism, Zoroastrianism, essentialism, dualism, ancient aliens, Antarctic civilization, Feng Shui, Lamarckian inheritance, Lysenkoism, phrenology, the witch-finding instructions in Malleus Maleficarum, reincarnation, the idea that “everything happens for a reason,” or contemporary conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the globalist cabal.
But the truth is that the universe unfolds according to the laws of physics, and miracles do not happen; we live on a round planet, third from the Sun, at a random point in the Milky Way; we are a product of evolution, just another species in the animal kingdom, with apish ancestors and an anatomy inherited from fish; we are built from trillions of cells composed of organelles like mitochondria, cytoplasm, the nucleus, and ribosomes; our DNA is a sequence of nucleotides with instructions for synthesizing specific proteins; we came out of Africa, and there was no human civilization in Antarctica; a person is not born a tabula rasa but with genetic predispositions. And so on.
Relying solely on reasoning to reach conclusions about how the world works—the school of thought known as rationalism—will almost certainly lead us astray.
Facts like these were uncovered through the tremendous effort of many individuals who, in their search, wrestled with a vast ocean of incorrect alternative hypotheses. Yet each of these individuals consulted nature directly and gathered firsthand data from it. Once a matter had been re-examined again and again, looked at from numerous perspectives, it was accepted as true—or, in the spirit of intellectual humility, as very likely true.
The asymmetry also reminds us why evidence is essential in our pursuit of truth. Relying solely on reasoning to reach conclusions about how the world works—the school of thought known as rationalism—will almost certainly lead us astray. Instead, such conclusions must be drawn from the world itself, which is known as empiricism.
Whether we are discussing the Epstein case, the shape of the Earth, claims about the CIA behind assassinations, the resurrection of Jesus, the assertion that men are on average more risk-prone than women, Freud’s conception of the ego, evolution, a potential Jack the Ripper suspect, the prehistoric fish Tiktaalik, entropy, or anything else concerning objective truth, we should have one question in mind: “How do we know this is true?”
The answer cannot be an abstract logical syllogism alone; it must also be reliable, critically verified, and based in empirical evidence.
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Luckily, there is a heuristic by which the asymmetry can be circumvented in favor of truth. It is called relying on credible institutions, which are represented by credible experts. The latter have spent far more time than most studying a specific field. Of course, they are far from infallible, and so is the scientific consensus. But if you had to bet on one of countless possible hypotheses, your chances of getting the right answer are greatest with them.
By “credible experts,” I refer to scientists held in esteem within their field, those who have earned numerous awards and recognitions, who enjoy a good reputation, whose work is widely acknowledged, and who consistently rely on the scientific method and empirical data. They are recognizable by the way they express themselves. They do not have an answer to every question and are willing to say “I don’t know”; they refer to other quality experts; they do not offer simple explanations but embrace the complexity of the world; their vocabulary is permeated with terms such as “evidence,” “hypothesis,” “experiment,” “probability,” “statistics,” “empirical,” and “scientific.” They don’t have much time for popular podcasts because they are busy working in laboratories or lecturing at universities. They are not lone Galileos motivated to prove everyone else wrong, but overwhelmingly accept the widely confirmed facts found in textbooks. Oftentimes they are Nobel laureates, authors of praised works, and professors at prestigious universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, or Yale.
If you wish to get closer to the truth and reduce the number of falsehoods you believe, you should rely on credible experts.
Where does this leave the Epstein case? Unless there is direct evidence to prove any one particular scenario, the wisest thing one can do is reject the dramatic, accept the mundane, and remain agnostic.