Stochastic Tinkering, Techne vs. Episteme, and the COVID-19 Vaccine: How Science Really Works?

There has been much speculation regarding progress towards the creation of a COVID-19 vaccine, which some believe may be the only lasting solution to the pandemic. Without mass immunization it is likely that lockdowns will persist across the world as cases continue to rise. How soon can we expect the vaccine, how long does scientific research usually take, and how are scientific breakthroughs such as the discovery of a vaccine usually accomplished?

Here is the current status: in February 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said it did not expect a vaccine to become available in less than 18 months, but as of July 2020, 205 vaccine candidates are in development, with 19 in human testing. The foremost organisations in vaccine development such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) have organised over $2 billion in a worldwide fund for rapid investment and development of vaccine candidates, while the WHO has received over $8 billion in pledges from various countries for the development of vaccines, with scientists in laboratories across the world working around the clock on this problem. With more than 13 million confirmed cases and 600 thousand deaths worldwide, it’s a race against time to see how fast a vaccine can be developed, tested and effectively deployed.

Stochastic Tinkering

However, although tempting to take these facts at face value, these predictions must be taken with a grain of salt, and the truth is we may be much closer or further away from the vaccine and no one would be the wiser. Most scientific discoveries are rationalised after the fact, in top-down directed research terms, when in reality they were discovered after indeterminate periods of time at the onset of experimentation, after much trial and error, and a good deal of randomness.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan coined the term “stochastic tinkering” to give a name to the process which is the true driver behind innovation, both of knowledge and technology. Here ‘stochastic’ relates to randomness and serendipity – aiming for ‘A’ and discovering ‘B’ instead, and “tinkering” means adjusting and experimenting, usually in small amounts. 

To put it in simple terms, when Columbus set out on his famous voyages to the New World, to find sea routes to India, China and the Far East for Europe, he instead discovered the Americas. When Alexander Fleming, studying influenza returned to his laboratory from a two-week sabbatical, he found that a mold called Penicillium moulds accidentally contaminated a staphylococcus culture plate, which prevented the growth of the deadly bacteria. And that when the radio astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias were building a radio receiver and trying to remove all interference from it (even attempting to repel pigeons from their antennas) they discovered that some radiation was acting as a source of excess noise, finding this radiation to be the Cosmic Background Radiation emanating from the Big Bang and being the key to understanding the origins of the universe.

Thus stochastic tinkering requires experimenting in small ways, noticing the new or unexpected, and using that to continue to experiment. The general principle is: Do as little as possible unless the system shows you have to do more, then do only as much as you need to keep the process going. Expose yourself to events with a large upside of potential discovery, and little to no downside, an idea also known as convexity.

Techne vs. Episteme

The ancient Greek dichotomy between Techne and Episteme, illustrates this problem of knowledge and the discovery of it well. The Greek word Technê by definition is the kind of knowledge that can only be learned through practice; it is the kind of knowledge learned through the absence of certainty and Platonic notions of theory or forms, through experimentation and practice. Epistêmê on the other hand is knowledge that is simply known; it has nothing to do with craft or practice but is purely theoretical and is reached through reason and rationalism rather than observation and empiricism.

This tension between the two schools of rationalism and empiricism didn’t stop with the Greeks. When the scientific revolution occurred during the Enlightenment in Europe, with the birth of the scientific method, we saw the culmination of deductive processes and empirical observation into one system. The fatal flaw however, of the public perception of the scientific method, is that when scientists have a particular goal to learn and discover a specific phenomena and gain understanding about the underlying processes behind them, that this goal remains unchanging and static and that the way to achieve breakthroughs is through more manpower, funding and lab equipment. Unfortunately, this is not the way breakthroughs occur, as anyone who’s ever studied for a test intuitively knows; progress is often non-linear. One can be revising, note-taking and poring over their textbooks and flashcards in preparation for their big exam yet make no progress, until all of a sudden they have an epiphany of clarity that made the whole process until that moment worth it.

And so it is for the natural and social sciences, across all disciplines. Science doesn’t work on timetables and schedules. Talented people expose themselves to their subject and hope to find something of interest to leverage, and then always suddenly and abruptly a breakthrough occurs.