Thoughts about thoughts

About thoughts.

• The majority view is often wrong; the minority view is often wrong; both are often wrong because the world is an unfathomably complex place, and no individual has either the time or the brainpower to work these things out. Decentralised knowledge and collective intelligence go a long way towards improving on individual knowledge, but they also play out like a massive global game of Chinese Whispers.
• The number of possible answers (‘sides’) to every question is near-infinite. For every meaningful question, there is a small and finite number of correct answers. The probability of any one answer being correct is extremely low.
• Experts know more than us (about the things in which they are expert), but they are often wrong because of a selection bias in the complexity of the problems they deal with.
• Everyone is often wrong.
• Just as there are good and bad answers, there are good and bad questions. “Are tax cuts a good idea?“ is a bad question. Tax cuts for whom? What kind of tax cuts? The question is badly-defined. One of the most important techniques in rationality/problem-solving is finding a good question to ask. Bad questions can’t have good answers. A nutty Slovenian philosopher agrees with me, therefore I am right about this.
• The surprising thing about knowledge isn’t how little we know. The surprising thing is how much we know, despite all the massive limitations on human knowledge. These include: universal complexity, material constraints, and most importantly, cognitive biases and social signaling among humans. Ironically, the biggest limitations on truth-seeking are a by-product of the greatest computational device in the known universe: the human brain. We argue, debate, and reason with others, not necessarily to discover the truth, but to persuade others that what we think is the truth, whether we know the truth or not. Truth is incidental to conversation.
• We will always know a humblingly small number of things, relative to the universe of facts. As we learn more things, we will also discover more things to be known about. To use the Rumsfeldian terminology: as we find the answers to things we knew we didn’t know, we discover many more new things that we didn’t know we didn’t know. The stock of unknowns grows at least as quickly as the stock of knowns.
• I am very probably wrong about all of this (and more).

Originally published at crimesagainsthumility.tumblr.com.