The illusion of certainty

Finding the limits of what you know

In 1911 it was well-known that the world was made of stuff. The fabric of the universe was assumed to be fairly, tangible.

Rutherford directed an experiment to fire positively charged particles at a thin section of gold foil. They used a fluorescent screen to capture the particles reflected but found that nearly all the particles passed straight through the foil.

It defied all working concepts of the atom. At the time, the most popular theory was the “Plum-pudding model” where all electrons were embedded in a large positive nucleus the size of the atom.

Rutherford famously said later, “It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”

What he eventually deduced was that actually, an atom is mostly nothing. In fact, a nucleus is 100,000 times smaller than an atom.

The world as we know it is 99.9999% nothing.

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Despite this fact being well-established for over 100 years now, it still doesn’t feel that true. Everything you can touch and everything you are is mostly empty space.

This leads us to the concept of the newsletter. Awareness of our own knowledge.

What do we actually know?

A lot of what we know is delusional nonsense. This ranges from comforting lies that hold us together to whopping assumptions that lie unquestioned.

As the story of the atom shows us, in reality, we know a lot less about the things we think we know.

The ways we fool ourselves on the daily are much more diverse than atomic science.

Interpretation of information

Listen to a podcast, read a book, or engage in conversation and you’ll notice your experiencing self is confident plenty is going in. We know the thing in the moment and expect that knowledge hangs around. It doesn’t.

Only testing our knowledge shows us what we do and don’t know.

We prepare for an exam because we definitely don’t know the answers to anything without working.

Yet when we read self-help books or take onboard advice to fundamentally improve our lives we do no such work. We fumble off in a rush for new knowledge and do nothing to check to see if we still know anything afterward.

Better to truly understand a few books than to read hundreds and forget them.

“The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”

Salvador Dali

Besides quickly forgetting everything, we also derive wild conclusions from things.

Our own personal experiences account for 0.000000000000001% of what is going on in the world. We really don’t have the apparatus for anything like the empathy required to understand most things we hear.

Most business advice is useless, not because the advice is bad but because we aren’t equipped to heed it. It is only once we have experienced the problem that we see the value in the advice we ignored. Coaching others probably holds as much value to the coach who reminds herself of what she knows as the entrepreneur who is usually just looking to be told they are doing the right things.

We are born to our family in our town in our country and we have no concept of what a different life would be like if we had been in the family next door. Let alone in growing up with a different level of wealth or status or love in your family. Wild concepts like growing up in a different part of the planet are impossible to imagine.

Most things we are told by others about their experiences and feelings we don’t truly relate to. We spend so much time trying to because it is important. Yet we would be much better at it if we recognized how bad we are at it.

Note how bad we are at reading books and the importance of testing ourselves. We would be wise to test ourselves on what people tell us to find out how much of it went in.

Shortcutting truth

When we use our brains to think about important stuff without any external tools we usually make one of two mistakes:

• We take giant shortcuts to conclusions that make us feel righteous

• We get surprised by other important things and completely forget to finish the thinking process.

When thinking things through in our mind we lack a sense of perspective on what we don’t know. Thoughts are so fleeting, it’s like trying to herd sheep.

Presented with a problem the brain quickly comes up with some possible solutions. The first idea to arrive that makes us feel correct is gladly selected as we dash on to solve something completely unrelated.

Alternatively, we experience some resistance to finding a good solution. Next thing we know a different problem arises that presents some greater opportunities to grasp a sense of progress. So we start thinking about that.

We aren’t designed to sit around feeling stupid and lost and questioning any answers that come up.

“The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”

Charles Darwin

Furthermore, we forget things so quickly when using our internal apparatus. There is no organized filing system or sense of order. Our thoughts and emotions swirl around in chaos with little self-control.

To truly follow a thought through we have to write a problem down or think out loud. The brain fires off in all sorts of directions which is why journalling or talking to someone can be amazingly productive.

External help allows us to stay on track and look at the thing we don’t know and repeatedly accept that we still don’t know it. Instead of running off like a toddler.

Internal help like meditation to learn how to quiet the mind is a humbling experience. It provides benefits hard to explain to anyone that has never embraced the concept of sitting in silence doing battle with the mind to stop it from doing much.

Lack of self-awareness

Considering how quickly we shoot off in the wrong directions it is no surprise that we lack self-awareness of our incorrectness. Following this we hold even less awareness of how wrong we can be.

Most people think they are good at driving. Yet few people know the actual statistics of their driving history or where they fit against all drivers. If they did they would still argue their bad choices had reasons that don’t reflect their true abilities.

We think we are making the best decisions in the supermarket, sorting out travel, planning our day, planning our week, and deciding our jobs.

Yet we have no data on how good our choices are because we don’t have the option of seeing an infinite set of universes based on the different choices we could have made. We just bumble along trying to make the best of it whilst simultaneously lying to ourselves that we are actually making the best of it.

We are making choices based on the information in front of us when so many of them could honestly be a lot more random.

There is no possible way to show how awful the majority of our decisions are for our future life. A possible guide might be how terrible our predictions are when it comes to planning.

Pitiful planning

When planning it is wise advice to expect that everything will cost you twice as much and take 4 times longer. Home repair, engineering projects, software, starting a business, or writing a book. You’ve never heard someone say these things happened faster or cheaper than they planned.

Our abilities for planning get much worse though. Some curious statistics of what we plan for and how it is completely wrong:

• 95% of smokers fail to quit if they attempt by themselves

• 90% of businesses fail in the first year

• 67% of gym memberships are unused

• 50% of politicians’ policy promises don’t happen

• 22% of marriages end within 5 years

These are some pretty giant plans we stake our time, money, health, and reputation on. And we’re mostly wrong.

Opportunities

The great news is that if we accept that we are all bumbling idiots, we actually uncover some giant opportunities.

The first giant opportunity is to be more reliable.

Reliability is a superpower.

To become more reliable:

• Do less - Most things will take you too long to bother

• Plan anything you consider doing - use writing and other people to stop fooling yourself

• Finish what you do

If you run a business one of the best ways to impress investors is reliability. Accurately state the activities you plan to undergo and how long they will take you and then follow through. It is wildly impressive.

Anyone that reliably does the thing they say they will is unstoppable.

The second huge opportunity is to be less emotional.

We throw so much blame, frustration, and disappointment around our brains that really doesn’t need to be in there. We would feel better if we assumed less and sat in a place of non-judgemental curiosity.

There is a famous parable about a Chinese farmer.

One day his only horse ran away. The whole village mourned his terrible loss but the wise farmer wasn’t phased and said “We’ll see”.

The next day the horse returned with three other wild horses it had made friends with. The village celebrated gleefully for the farmer’s good fortune. Again the farmer was unfazed and said “We’ll see”.

The next day his son was breaking one of the new horses and suffered a fall damaging his spine. The villagers mourned this tragedy but the farmer stoically took the blow calmly and said “We’ll see”.

The next day the army conscript came and took all able-bodied men from the village to fight in the war where they faced almost certain death. The villagers were saddened by their losses but told the old man how lucky he was that he still had his son around. He replied, “We’ll see”.

It’s easy to experience an event and assume we know what it means. We quickly determine our good fortune or bad luck when we really can’t make any conclusions.

Letting our emotions fly all over the place before we even know what something means is just annoying ourselves.

6 months ago I was in Lisbon due to fly home for my mum’s birthday.

I had a flight canceled at 2 am, seven hours before I was due to catch the flight… Slightly drunk I proceeded to waste 2 hours talking to the airline going nowhere. Eventually, I went to bed, cursing the airline.

I woke up 3 hours later with a hangover to catch a train to Porto to catch the next flight from there (whilst possibly being less than happy with my mother for having such an inconvenient birthday.)

In the queue for the plane in Porto, I met a lovely Portuguese lady who is now my girlfriend.

We have no idea what will happen next

We should stop fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise.

It’s handy to remind ourselves that as far as we know, 85% of the universe is dark matter.

Currently, we have no idea what dark matter is or what it means.

“To myself, I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”

Isaac Newton