The Start?

I’m not the greatest person to be putting his ideas online. I don’t read enough. I’m sure I can add something to the philosophical/political conversation, but probably not anything that someone else could do more easily. There is one thing that I would like to do, though. And it could be the start to more posts.

I think I have accumulated some knowledge of the world and how it works and how it doesn’t work. I know I’m a young guy but I’m also not set in my ways. I find that motivations, beliefs, and feelings become a matter of habit with age. The same has happened with me, but I try to stay open-minded. No one will ever know everything about the world. And yet our ever-increasing conviction that we are the ones who understand the world is normal. It’s a natural result of 1) needing rules that simplify our perception of the world and 2) confirmation bias.

I think it would be difficult to go through life without ever coming to a conclusion about how things worked, about which social norms mattered, about what values we stood for, about who was right and who was wrong. It might cause us to drift in society, not being fully part of a similarly believing social group. And leaving everything up in the air might cause unnecessary uncertainty in our day-to-day decision-making processes, making each decision that much harder. I think there’s social pressure and natural pressure to stop sitting on the fence and pick a side. Pressure to decide soon. And not only soon, but once and for all because there’s not enough time to think about it. I don’t know how much of that is cultural/social pressure and how much is the actual need for heuristic decision-making, but both ways are worth considering (if you care to think about this subject — honestly, I’m just writing because my brain needs a breather from this really dull training module. Just think about how dull this training module must be for me to be writing at length about what is actually just stubbornness).

The other solidifying agent is confirmation bias. There are mountains of evidence suggesting that, as we take in and process new information, we favor the data that affirms or coincides with our existing beliefs. I’m too lazy to go cite anything but it will be more impactful to you if you search it out yourself (I myself like Google Scholar, but you can use what you prefer).

Anyway, I like to think that the strength of our beliefs comes from our perceived probability that our beliefs are wrong. And if you receive information daily that has even chance of agreeing with your beliefs or disagreeing with them, and you only retain the information that agrees with those beliefs, your perceived probability of being wrong will surely dwindle.

I don’t know if confirmation bias has anything to do with pitting our beliefs against others’. I think that’s called arrogance or pride. Think of someone you know who repeatedly claims that they can’t be wrong and at times they’re still wrong. Maybe even after being shown differently, they still have difficulty accepting that they could maybe have been wrong. It may not even be pride; it could just be gullibility. (I have to laugh at myself because I didn’t think ‘gullibility’ was going to be a real word). Naivete that makes them too confident in what they hear.

I find these polarized views (close to either 100% chance of being right or 100% chance of being wrong) to be too inflexible in the complicated world of ours. I prefer to hedge my bets and collect more information when I am uncertain (because stats says precision increases with sample size). Because of this, there are few things that I will tell anyone with absolute certainty, but I do want to share those few things. They may not be the hot topic of the day, but I think they serve as good guidelines for personal conduct and direction. Plus, I think they are reasonable and agreeable to the majority of people.

I already shared one of them with you: “No one will ever know everything about the world.” The other I’ll share now is, ironically, “Be careful with absolutes.”

Both of these stem from the assumption that humans are limited beings. Our influence and understanding are finite. For example, we cannot return to the past unless time travel were to be invented. But even then, there may not be enough time in the rest of eternity to record every event that has ever occurred. We may be able to approach a total knowledge of the universe, but that’s what math calls an asymptote. Our knowledge increases, yes, but there’s nothing telling if that knowledge will ever be complete.

There are thousands of other reasons why humans can’t know everything, but essentially knowledge is a good and our decisions are constrained by limited sight and time, meaning we can only accumulate knowledge so quickly and for so long. That is why humans can’t prove negatives. You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist, you can’t prove that a theory or hypothesis is 100% correct, and you probably will never know if the Earth will be invaded. You’d have to search the entire earth’s crust, mantle, and core before you could prove that unicorns never existed and then the stars too. You’d have to try every variation on a theory (and there are infinite) to prove that yours was the perfect one. Alien invasion? Have fun waiting. But we don’t have infinite time for those things. (I ignore here the possibility of an immortal being.)

That’s why I say humans can’t know everything. And by extension, we should be careful with absolutes. I don’t like to play with the words “all,” “never,” “only,” or “always,” etc. Use too many and you might end up believing something that is untrue, or getting someone else to believe it.

I hope you find this entirely too long explanation of some very simple advice helpful to you in some way.

• No one knows everything (unless they’re God)
• Be careful with absolutes

Best,

Landon

P.S. Another thing to watch out for is the assumption that your experiences apply to whoever you are talking to, when that may not necessarily be the case. Your experiences may not be representative of everyone else’s. I use the pronoun ‘you’ here but I try to add ‘may,’ ‘might,’ and ‘maybe’ as an out in case I’m wrong. I think it more appropriate to apply content to oneself or to the plural ‘we’ more exclusively than I have done here. Another great example of human assuming to know something that he couldn’t.

P.P.S. I warned you I was an abstract thinker.