Uncertainty

[billroper]

One of my frequent observations is the following:

"I know I make mistakes. I have a compiler that tells me so every day."

Of course, that's the trivial case. That's easy and usually easy to fix. Many things are harder.

I try to keep track of the facts. Facts are important, because you've got a much better chance of avoiding mistakes if you're operating from the right set of facts. Part of that is being able to assign the right set of probabilities to the "facts" that you're working with, because some things that once were facts (the continents don't move) turn out to be not-quite-facts (ok, the continents move, but not very quickly on a human time scale).

So what I end up with are little piles of evidence that I keep handy and use to inform my opinions. Some times a piece of evidence turns out to be bogus and is discarded; other times it turns out to be well-founded and ends up being given more weight.

What this means is that I'm seldom certain that I'm right. (That may come as a shock to some of you.) I'll operate based on the best evidence that I've got, but my natural instinct is to be careful about perturbing the system, because you don't know what's going to cascade out the other end of the process when you do. You may think you know what's going to happen, but you could be really, really wrong.

And that doesn't mean that I'm never in favor of doing something, just that I am going to worry about the results. If doing something looks like the right alternative given the available evidence, well then, we may need to give it a try and keep our fingers crossed.

But I live with uncertainty, with the knowledge that I might be wrong, and that I may not ever know everything that I need to know to make me comfortable with making a particular decision.

I suspect that many of you don't feel that way. I'd like to say that I would love to be that certain about things.

But I don't want to be that certain. I don't want to automatically discard evidence that challenges my beliefs, nor do I want to preface my statements with "always" and "never" instead of the -- in my experience -- usually more accurate "usually" and "seldom". And recognizing that I may have the piles of facts misweighted and that -- depending on the exact situation that I'm looking at -- what I thought to be "usually" and "seldom" might be exactly reversed in the real world.

Certainty is overrated.

Comments

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Very very nicely put.

Age and time taught me that while I'm good at synthesizing out the big picture and doing perceptual jumps, this is all dependent on having the right info in the first place to base my logic, and not having overstated the connections because I'm looking for result Y.

In other words, I broadly trust my sense of synthesis and my ability to spot stuff, but I usually will blow it if I overweight stuff at the base or the info I have is crap.

Which means that when in doubt, recheck your facts, and be as unbiased as you can be. I hate looking stupid in public, and age has taught me that you don't have to rush out with a conclusion. There's no fire going on. You can wait.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

There's almost always a fire going on somewhere...

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

And in many many areas of human experience, that's a perfectly valid standpoint. I am almost never certain, and in the general way I'm anybody's for a plurality of ideas. Science, religion, the best way to cook eggs, all up for discussion in my book.

But sometimes I am certain. And I think it does no harm to anyone if I say so. Am I wrong?

[billroper]

The short answer (which goes along with the original post) would be "Maybe".

The longer answer would include factors like "Is this something that it is logically possible to be certain about?" (one can usually be certain about what one believes, but I'd personally find it difficult to posit certainty about how the universe works -- and some days, should work) or "Is there a point to doing this?"

Stating "This is what I believe" is much less likely to be offensive or harmful than saying "This is truth".

What's the line Pilate has in "Jesus Christ, Superstar"? "All men have truths. Are mine the same as yours?"

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Pilate, yes. Just before he had someone flogged with no evidence of criminality to save his own skin from an artificially induced riot. Good example.

And yes, I'm sure if I prefaced every statement with "I believe" or "maybe" or "I don't want to offend anyone, but have you considered the possibility that..." fewer people would be upset at me, because no-one would have to be concerned that I might be right. I do too much of that anyway. There are truths. I am alive. It is not raining here right now. There is a war going on. And while there may not be issues that are black or white (though I think there may be), there are infinite numbers of shades of grey, and some of them are so close to black as to be easily distinguishable from the shades that are close to white. (Not recognising that fact is apparently called the Fallacy of Grey; someone linked to it in another context.)

Your whole country is based on some truths that some old white guys held to be self-evident. I think there are a few they left out. Possibly because they thought they wouldn't need to be spelled out.

[billroper]

Yes, there are truths, but the truths that you list there are objective truths that are fairly easy to verify and fall into one of the safer categories that I mention above.

Subjective truths can be more slippery.

[rdmaughan.livejournal.com]

The flippant side of me wants to answer this with "I don't have a compiler but I do have a wife".

The serious side says "Well said, most problems in the world seem to come down to somebody knowing they are right and the other person is wrong and then using this to justify actions."

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

What this means is that I'm seldom certain that I'm right. (That may come as a shock to some of you.)

. . .

I suspect that many of you don't feel that way. I'd like to say that I would love to be that certain about things.

And I suspect that this goes both ways, that others actually aren't that certain.

[billroper]

Quite possibly. :)

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

Well said, sir.

I do think there are some absolutes. Very few, but some. The classic example of Evil, for instance, is Hitler - but he was neither the first nor the most recent. And for the most part I am horribly uncomfortable with absolutist thinking. That brings us things like the Inquisition, or William the Bastard's Harrowing of the North of England.

But for the most part, as you say, you do the best you can given the information available to you at the time a decision has to be made, knowing full well you may be missing something important but knowing as well that to do nothing is itself an action. Then you accept the consequences of that decision, good and bad, and move on. I once heard someone say "absolute certainty is for Deities." It seems to me that for the most part that's true.

I wish more people were aware that "always", "never" and "impossible" are unlikely to allow for accurate analysis.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

You're right that there's very little in this complex world that we can be truly certain of. Unfortunately, uncertainty seems to make humans very uncomfortable; I suspect that this is part of human nature. Confronted by a world filled with contradictory propositions, many of which are stated as certain facts, most people appear more comfortable to choose one set of "facts" that they're comfortable with and refuse to listen to any contradiction that might force them to recognize that the world really is uncertain.

There's a very small distance between being absolutely certain you're right at any given time and being totally unwilling to ever admit you've made a mistake in the past.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we all make mistakes, happily most of them are tiny and easy to fix, or at least clean up after. Spilled milk, sydlexically switching letters in a word, and so on. If only all mistakes were so easy to deal with, in the aftermath.

You’re right that the most frustrating things are the complex ones where the evidence points in two (or more) directions, and coming to a decision about what’s really going on, and what to do about it, is a matter of weighing the evidence you have, and trying to guess which is most true, and most important. If someone says A to you, and B to someone else, who is he lying to? Or were the questions asked significantly different in his ears, leading to different utterances?

One of the things that is fascinating and frustrating when comparing surveys is that the questions aren’t the same. And often they, or the answers you can choose between, are slanted. The recent survey one television news show cited as to the people who thought the economy was “good or excellent” vs. the people who thought the economy was only “fair or poor”, for instance. The percentages on the screen, plus the small number of “don’t know” folks, added up to 100%. They apparently didn’t offer people the option of saying they thought the economy was “bad or abysmal”. Somehow I don’t think that survey gave an accurate picture, but they reported those percentages as having the same newsworthy certainty as poll results…

The more complex things are, the less certainty you can have. Touch one part to measure it, and the interaction has affected it—the whole thing, not just the part.

I think that’s one of the reasons I do Sudokus. When life gets too complex and emotional, when I can’t bear to simply wait and see, but I don’t have enough information to think I can choose a reasonably good action, it is very nice to bury my mind in squares of 9 columns, 9 rows, 9 boxes, and 9 symbols, with no ambiguity. Each little square can hold only one of them, and I can be certain about the rules. No rule weighs more important than the others, none of the symbols are lying or mistaken or have ulterior motives. No one blames me for making mistakes, I can pull out my eraser and start over with no dire consequences. And every puzzle can be solved.

I don't want the real world to be that simple, but it does make for a nice micro-break from frustration, and the really hard ones can even bounce me out of mental ruts, for a moment at least. But sometimes a moment is enough so that when I return to pondering the messy, complex, and fascinating realities of life I have a chance to find some traction and to explore in a direction besides the ones that already proved less than helpful.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

What you said.

I quarrel with only one phrase in your post -- "most of you."

I can think of very few in our common acquaintance who do not have open minds. Of course, I can also think of very few who don't word things as if they were certain (as in the speaker is certain that what she/he says is a certainty.)

On the other hand, I don't know all of whom you place in the category of "most of you," so I am not stating that you are certainly wrong.

:-)

IMHO

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

Actually, Bill, I will venture to say that what you have described is a True Scientist's mindset: aware of the other possible experimental outcomes besides the working hypothesis.

Of course, I also ascribe to this predilection/mindset/paradigm such characteristics as:

Grown-up and not childish;

Closer to what's true and real in this world than anything else short of supernatural;

Mine (hopefully most of the time).

(Probably sounding less humble than I meant to).

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Certainty is not overrated. Certainty is deadly. I am a much happier and more pleasant individual since I realized that I "know" absolutely nothing--what I have are conjectures with varying degrees of evidence to support them.

I covered this in my 55th birthday posting last June 29, and I'm very glad you brought it up again. (I knew there was a reason you were my brother-in-law...)

[it-aint-easy.livejournal.com]

Bill, I still find it fascinating--especially considering how little we have actually interacted in all our time at the same events, and the fact that our political leanings are pretty far apart--that you sometimes say things that sound like they're straight out of my own head.

Yes, I likewise feel that I know almost nothing with surety. And I've generally been proud of that, and likewise suspicious of those who so quickly decided what the "right" answer was, and as quickly threw themselves into support of that answer. My world was somewhat twisted around though, when a friend of mine spoke glowingly of the beauty of Passion; of how she hoped that any children she might have would have that "virtue", as she saw it. There is some point to that. Passion being the opposite of reason (yes, you may argue shades of definition if you like, but it's somewhere between literally and approximately true), and reason being what keeps me from certainty, it has caused me to spend a lot of time in the intervening years thinking about the benefits of each over the other.

No neat, wise sum-up, I'm afraid. True to form, I'm still not sure what to make of the "conflict". :{)}

[billroper]

I can understand that.

I'm tempted to say passion is a good thing in moderation. And there are limits to reason as well -- who really wants to be Mr. Spock?

As an example, I could try to make a list of the reasons that I love Gretchen. But in the end, there's something much more satisfying -- and ultimately true -- about saying, "I love her for what she is. I love her because I do."

[it-aint-easy.livejournal.com]

Ah, but Spock (ironically) got all the girls, according to what I've heard about the show's fanmail.