Knowing

Last week I wrote about the difficulty of explaining moral rules to kids—how the rules are either unhelpfully broad or boil down to “it depends; use your best judgment.” This leads, in a sort of funhouse mirror distortion, into this week’s topic: how I often argue with my dad about knowledge.

We’re not philosophy devotees. But one reason it’s so disorienting to be a person in the world today is the constant effort applied to figuring out what is actually happening, and who is plausibly responsible. This has caused my dad to default into a mindset of “everyone’s biased, you can trust any sources of information and you can’t know what’s really going on.” Here’s the thing. I think he’s technically correct but I also think that rejecting this mindset is absolutely essential.

The allure of uncertainty

Because knowledge is always contingent, and emphasizing the uncertainty benefits people who benefit from uncertainty and need engagement.

Trump has brought this to a level I’ve never seen before (but for which there’s certainly historical precedent). By claiming every other source of information is corrupt and untrustworthy, he somehow generates this reaction: "“This guy says nothing can be trusted; I also feel nothing can be trusted, therefore he’s telling the truth about the ‘big issues.’” This is cynical and destructive but I can’t deny that it’s been effective.

Skepticism about knowledge is fair enough: the basic mechanisms by which things are discovered and disseminated—news gathering and scientific research—aren’t perfect and never have been. Furthermore, because of how time works, events from the recent past are easier to understand in context and with the weight of evidence more fully considered. Even before this current era of extreme distrust, we had presidents, for example, turn out to be lying crooks, to abuse their power to benefit donors, to endanger American lives for political advantage. These truths weren’t necessarily known at the time and took significant effort to unearth. Even “scientific proof” is more of a probability statement: the confidence interval is usually 95%. That sounds high, and it is, which is why it’s the usual standard. But this classic XKCD comic shows why a 5% chance of a coincidence is enough to create flashy results by pure chance.

No objective perspective

Furthermore, attention is bias. Merely by choosing what to focus on, you’re shaping your worldview in a non-objective way. But there’s no alternative. A simple stream of facts would not be a better way of interpreting and understanding the world. My dad yearns for some kind of absolute objectivity, but I don’t think such a thing is even theoretically possible. If you want to have an integrated picture of what’s going on, you need to understand the overall context, which means deciding what’s important.

So back to my dad’s larger point: yes, there’s no perfectly objective source of information. Yes, it’s impossible to know most things for certain. But saying all sources and all levels of confidence are alike is like saying a lighter and a house fire are the same thing. It’s the kind of precise truth that hinders understanding. You really do need to use your judgment and remember that uncertainty is an integral part of knowledge.

I don’t know if there’s a single prescription for confidence in this information environment. But I think we can make a good start by:

·      Realizing how contingent and mutable knowledge has always been

·      Remembering the track record of people who are out there making factual claims—and holding them to similar standards

·      Differentiating between sources that benefit from providing clarity (broadly, sources where you’re the customer) and sources that benefit from providing confusion (broadly, sources where you’re the product and engagement is the key metric)

As always, it’s possible my dad’s right and I’m completely wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. But in this particular area I hope not, for both our sakes.