How do you know?
The twin errors of certainty and ignorance
The other day I got into two different conversations that had to do with human knowledge. Not knowledge about humans, but… ya know… how we know stuff.
Both were a little frustrating, but in wildly different ways.
In the first, a friend of mine and I were having a rambling discussion of physics, cosmology, biology, astronomy, higher mathematics, the origins of man, and the like. Really heady stuff.
My frustration with him was just how certain he was about all of his beliefs in this area. He didn’t claim omniscience about all things, but he definitely tended to think that whatever his currently favored theory about any subject must be true.
Every time I brought up the zillions of times in the past when our current working theory about any of these fields was overturned, he was unphased.
That was before. This is now! We figured out all the errors. All these pieces are correct! We just need to discover a wee bit more to understand the whole jigsaw puzzle of everything!
It was all very weirdly dogmatic for a scientific discussion.
Later that evening at a party I chatted with a fellow who was equally off base, but in the exact opposite direction.
This guy wasn’t epistemologically hubristic. No sirree. He didn’t suffer from any pretense of knowledge. He wouldn’t dream of being so cocksure.
Instead, this guy noticed that our senses and our ability to reason are faulty. Mirages, deja vu, mental errors auditory hallucinations, etc. Heck, we can perceive so little of our environment with our weak eyes and ears as to be darn near deaf and blind!
Add to that the fact that we constantly make errors when theorizing, heck, we shouldn’t trust anything we claim to know!
I wondered how the fellow crossed the street.
Obviously, both these extremes in how to understand the world outside our minds are mistakes. And equally obviously, most of us share these two mistakes to some small degree — though usually the first mistake is more common.
Wisdom lies in always seeking truth and assembling a non-contradictory understanding of the world as best you can — while simultaneously being very skeptical and careful not to overstate your claim.
A certain amount of doubt about what you know is an ingredient to wisdom.
Too much doubt, though… and again, how do you know when or how to cross the street?
Thanks, as always, for listening. Let’s grope towards understanding together. It’ll be fun!
Naturally,
Adam
Wanna know how I know stuff? Check out Liberty Classroom. I love this online dashboard university. It filled holes in my high school and college education I didn’t even know I had. And learning stuff is fun — even if it might be wrong.
I would say the reason we know what we know is because of failure. Most of the last 30 years society has been obsessed with optimism as a mechanism for success. "If you build it, they will come" pretty much sums up the western worldview since the 1980s. Failure is a harsh tutor, but also an expedient one. We know that the equations used for building bridges are correct, not because they worked, but because all the prior calculations didn't. Once we could calculate the basics well enough it was only then we could iterate and get creative. We now know what works only by learning what doesn't.
We know that communism/collectivism/socialism doesn't work. We know that the state suppressing ideas just makes them grow. We've done this time and time again because there are those of us who think they can do it differently. And initial success blinds them to harsh reality, then they seek to punish those who are deemed enemies. This is known. It happened in the time of the Romans, it happened in Maoist China (only 50 years ago, BTW). History does repeat when you try the same failed experiments over and over.