Finding the third way

Navigating between false confidence and uncritical capitulation.

Hello friends,

I’m now five sessions into the Interintellect series on not-knowing. Here’s what participants are saying about it:

“I found a lot of inspiration and food for thought, I will need a lot of time to digest it.”

“This was the highest value 2 hours in recent memory.“

“This conversation was really beautiful. I have wanted to have conversations like these for a long time, so it’s quite incredible to be in the company of people asking big questions along these lines.”

“Genuinely enjoyed every bit of it, and I look forward to the future sessions.”

“The content was off-the-charts engaging … There is so much depth that is both intellectually and emotionally satiating.”

It’s always online (on Zoom) and open to all — you should join for the next one.

Refinement of form requires continual attention to increasing levels of detail.

Our starting point for the last session was that the term “uncertainty” has been appropriated particularly by economics and computer science. During the session, we unpacked a few types of partial knowledge that are all labeled “uncertainty” in the AI/ML context. The conversation then went in a few unexpected directions after that. You can find the session highlights here.

Finding the third way

During the discussion, one of the participants made a throwaway comment to the effect that humans seem to have two broad types of responses when facing unknowns:

1. False confidence: The first type of response is to assume that the unknown is knowable and to quantify it so that it can be managed away. This results from applying the risk mindset to situations that aren’t risky. There are examples of this all over the place, including in finance (making up probabilities for outcomes and expected values when computing future returns to financial investments) and public health (same thing but for cost-benefit analyses for major policy decisions such as deciding whether or not to shut down international travel at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic).

2. Uncritical capitulation: The second response is to resort to various forms of mysticism and/or randomness, on the assumption that the unknown cannot be managed at all. Again, there are examples of this past (human oracles, haruspication, tea leaves, bone reading) and present (surrendering our decision-making to black-box algorithms, assuming that climate change and its effects are unavoidable, etc).

This passing comment has lived rent-free in my head for a few weeks because false confidence and uncritical capitulation represent two extremes which are both deeply unsatisfying for different reasons. At one extreme, false confidence is a wilful denial of reality that can result in terrible outcomes. At the other extreme, uncritical capitulation fails to see that not-knowing can provide a fertile ground for action and innovation, because everything that is new necessarily comes from a place of not-knowing.

Britannia between Scylla & Charybdis, by James Gillray (1793).

There must be a third way that navigates between these two unsatisfying extremes. My working theory is that figuring out this third way begins from explicitly acknowledging the existence of not-knowing, then actively exploring the varieties of not-knowing.

Having cleared the ground by working through the confused terminology around risk and uncertainty, we’re ready to explore different types of not-knowing. Right now, at least four types of not-knowing seem obviously distinct from each other:

1. Not-knowing about possible actions,

2. Not-knowing about possible outcomes,

3. Not-knowing about causation (the relationship between an action and the outcomes it produces), and

4. Not-knowing about the relative value of outcomes.

It seems pretty clear that each of these types of not-knowing offers different challenges of understanding and different opportunities for action. The next session in the discussion series is will explore the first two types of not-knowing. During “Actions and results,” (22/6/2023, 8-10pm CET), we’ll talk about questions including:

• What happens when we admit the possibility that there are actions to be taken that we don’t know about yet, and that they might produce outcomes that we haven’t thought about yet?

• How do new technologies and tools change the kinds of actions we could take in any given situation?

• How does the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of the world change the types of outcomes we have access to?

• How can we think about outcomes that are created or modified by conditions beyond our direct control? 

More information and tickets available here. As usual, get in touch if you want to join but the $15 ticket price isn’t doable — I can sort you out.

And as a preview, my working theory is that understanding the different types of not-knowing better is the first step toward developing a sort of third-way toolkit: A collection of ways of acting and working that are appropriate for different situations of not-knowing. I have some preliminary ideas about what this toolkit might look like.

Elsewhere at other times

1. JetPens on good pens for different usecases (2023).

2. Jeanne Marie Laskas on absurd restrictions on information about guns in the US (2016; 🙏 Diana Kudayarova).

3. Me on a site-specific, time-specific installation of trees and root sounds by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (2015).

4. Danny Hillis on counterintuitive properties that make things durable and counterintuitive definitions of durability (1995).