It was nothing more than dumb luck that I saw this twit.

@nytopinion @BretStephensNYT This is so irresponsible. For many readers, anything that comes out of the times has its authority. They don’t know you hired an idiot.

— Monica Potts (@MonicaBPotts) April 28, 2017

Not that anyone cares what Monica Potts, whoever she is (but she has that blue tick, so she must be twitter-important) says, but Nate Silver, tarnished though he may be after his botch of the election outcome, says so too.

The Truth Is More Important Now Than Ever, Except If You’re Reading Our Op-Ed Page

What made his head explode? The New York Times published the first op-ed by former Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor, Bret Stephens. In a curious juxtaposition, they also posted an op-ed by that brilliant political pundit, George Takei, to soothe the burn.

Stephens uses his inaugural Times op-ed to make two points. The first is about heterodoxy.

In the final stretch of last year’s presidential race, Hillary Clinton and her team thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.

Right on the merits. Confident in their methods. Sure of their chances. When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.

When all you hear is what you want to hear, what confirms your beliefs, what you know to be true, there is a fairly decent chance you’ll be wrong, no matter how totally certain you are that you’re right.

There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.

We’re awash with rhetoric about the evils of disagreeable views, and why anyone who utters them deserves to be beaten to death in the name of tolerance. Stephens point is that we’ve been near-certain many times in the past, and yet here we are, still alive. Today, with our adoration of empiricism, the push of certitude is even stronger, as it’s not just mere religion, but religion backed up by numbers. Numbers don’t lie, though interpretation, efficacy and predictions based on numbers, combined with a potentially toxic mix of confirmation bias, may blind us to the fact that the numbers don’t always add up the way we want them to.

Those who believed with all their heart in the certainty of their positions demanded extreme cures to prevent the coming Apocalypse, for the end of the world was surely upon us otherwise. Stephens reminds us that we’ve been there before.

We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.

The last two words are a poke in the eye of New York Times readers. But as sore a point as the election of Trump may be, Stephens goes straight for the jugular his first time out of the box.

With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.

Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.

Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?

And this is why Potts lost her shit, and why Silver called the Times into question for its failure to tell “the truth.” Stephens could barely be more of a liar than had he written that “guns are fun and don’t kill people.” The notion that there is any argument to be made, any facts to be claimed or questions to be answered, when it comes to climate change and the end of life on earth if we don’t go to any extreme necessary to fix it now, isn’t just wrong. It’s “irresponsible.” It’s not “the truth.”

I’m deeply ambivalent about the Times’ giving real estate to Bret Stephens. On the one hand, it’s great, bordering on incredible, that they would let a heretic besmirch their pristine page of truth. On the other hand, this bodes poorly for my secret hope of Jesse Wegman calling me up and begging me to accept their obscenely rich offer to join the ranks of Times’ columnists.

Stephens is not only an exquisite writer (as opposed to my vulgarisms), but a serious thinker. He surely knew that his post would make heads explode. Indeed, he even said so. But knowing that his post would be met with cries of anger and anguish, he threw his skunk into the Times’ garden party. And to their enormous credit, they let him. Hell, they paid him to do so.

And despite the worst fears of the truthers, the comments to Stephens’ op-ed challenge him, take him to task, dispute his facts and arguments. Thus, two things happened. First, Stephens made people think. Second, Stephens’ op-ed demonstrated that people aren’t always so gullible that anything that appears on the Times editorial page is taken as mindless gospel.

Better decisions, better thinking, comes from challenges to certitude, and this is as necessary in the age of empiricism as it was in the Dark Ages. We survived the latter and will survive the former. Blind Faith was a great band, but is no way to go through life.