Nobody knows what's going on

One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?

Kind of a bummer to think about.

"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'"

(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.

The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.

A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it's them !), nobody knows why.

But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !

As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !

First hand experience is certainly better than second hand accounts bit it can be just as wrong. My example woild be, going to some foreign country, getting a few first hand experiences, then assuming those experiences match the norm in that country when the don't.

I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.

A really useful meta-question is:

How much work is it to answer that question?

A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer.

Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed.

Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions.

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Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0

If you design and build an airplane and it flies as expected, you know a lot about aeronautical engineering.

You cannot pretend it is flying when it isn't.

One of the reasons I chose to be an engineer.

I was tangentially involved in a news story a few years ago. The reporter went to a small town, interviewed a few people, then wrote up an article. Only problem was they didn't actually interview anybody directly involved, it was a lot of hearsay from the small town rumor mill, which they reported as fact.

Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.

“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

- (probably not) Mark Twain

Smug people tend to be wrong, because they are emotionally entangled with their beliefs.

> you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read.

This is interestingly close to what I think about claims of ChatGPT being ‘as good as an expert’ at, say, mathematics or medicine.

> Plumbing knowledge, for example, is constantly tested by whether the place floods after you’ve advanced your theory about what pipe connects to what. You need to get it right because it costs you something when you get it wrong.

Sure, for obvious failures where water is leaking in a spectacular fashion. But there's tons of shoddy non-obvious projects that work and look fine now. The problems come down the road, years later. Usually these problems come from either cutting corners or working under constraints.

You know those horror stories programmers or sys admins trade? How they saw something and couldn't believe their own eyes? Plumbers have those too, in buckets.

Maybe this whole paragraph about the plumbing is just a meta commentary on the "nobody knows what's going on". In that case, disregard the above.

An educated populace can better resist such issues. The solution is better journalism/reporting and better education.

Instead, the knee jerk reaction seems to be calling for further hollowing out of public education and less investment in traditional news media. I fear what that looks like after a few more decades.

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

— Superintendent Maillard

> If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about.

No, not always.

Related read: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/overconfidence-executives-as...

This is off topic, but can anyone tell where the photo with the caption “The situation is developing” was taken?

There aren’t many clues in the image, but the travel ad and outdoor dining point to somewhere tropical. Looks like a cool place.

A couple paragraphs in and I’m already like “Ah, here comes the Michael Crichton quote, the “papers’ full of ‘em” one.”

I’ve never read one of these that didn’t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide “might as well sling bullshit since it’s impossible to be totally correct” (if that’s not what the article is saying out loud, it’s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying)

Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared

The problem with knowing - of actually, REALLY, knowing - is that you can't do anything with it.

Not enough other people know, and so you find yourself fighting against the tide.

It gets lonely.

> The friend sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch knows I’m not independently wealthy.

Oh, right, because FI is about spending a lot on new things constantly...

There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.

"and the details are all false"

(Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807)

so how do people vet information and maintain this skepticism without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?

This article reminds me of a quote from George Washington, leader of the Rebel Army in American Revolutionary lore. He said, "Dayum, these pretzels are makin me thirsty!!!!"

That's what's so fun about deciding that you have a vanishing small slice of sorcery over the spectacle.

From a starting point of mereological nihilism, you can absolutely play to people's desire for ontological certainty. For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.