While Doubt Is an Unpleasant Condition, Certainty Is Utterly Absurd
Or, why do we believe what we believe
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
When people experience uncertainty and lack of control, they are more likely to see patterns or regularities where there are none.
These patterns can range from visual illusions (such as seeing faces in the clouds) to seeing causality in random events and forming conspiracy theories.
Under these circumstances people are also more likely to turn to ritualised behaviours. This is known as the Compensatory Control Model: We compensate for lack of control in one domain by seeking it in another.
Whether this sense of control is illusory is of little importance. What matters is that ritual can be an efficient coping mechanism, and this is why those domains of life that involve high stakes and uncertain outcomes are rife with rituals.
Enough talk! On to this weekâs essay. Itâs about 1,600 words. Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday.
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Q: Why are people uncomfortable in explaining their beliefs?
Have you ever noticed that most people get very uncomfortable when asked to explain why they believe what they believe?
While they may be zealously enthusiastic in giving a very superficial and textbook explanation of why they believe what they believe â for example, why capitalism or communism (depending on whom you are talking to) is good for society, or the importance of capital punishment, or the drawbacks of meritocracy, or the benefits of government reservation â their reasoning breaks down like a house of cards when you go a couple of levels deeper; precisely when they run out of their rehearsed (and rehashed) answers and itâs time to come up with something original (and real).
Before I go further I should say that Iâve got a character flaw â not unlike Socrates â where I like to bludgeon people with pointed questions until they reach a breaking point.
But unlike Socrates, my purpose is not genuine. I have very little intention of helping others see things clearly. Rather, my primary motivation is point out how little people put their thoughts and opinions under scrutiny â and how majority of their âthinkingâ is just a blatant regurgitation of somebody elseâs thinking.
However, in this âselfishâ pursuit, Iâve observed countless times that there comes a point when someone isnât able to âdefendâ their beliefs anymore and they become visibly uncomfortable (read: angry).
There are certain things that are too complicated to be expressed in words. By constantly pushing it, we might kill the thing that makes us human â our innate ability to focus on the right things despite our inability to figure it out intellectually.
Socrates was put to death because he made people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. He disrupted something that was working just fine.
Having said that, if we solely rely on âinstinctâ without any kind of examination, we run the risk of being easily manipulated by slightly more intellectually superior beings, i.e., people who know how to think for themselves. We often call them leaders, gurus, pundits, or influencers.
Today, letâs talk about beliefs. More precisely, letâs talk about what, as these inquisitive living beings, we should do about our beliefs so that we donât start believing anything and everything and make a fool out of ourselves.
There are two giant hurdles that make believing in anything a very complicated task. The first hurdle is that attaining certainty, for all its intent and purpose, is impossible. The second hurdle is that you can believe anything and everything, but it doesnât need to have to do anything even remotely with truth.
Letâs dissect them one at a time.
Even though certainty is impossible, the great paradox of scepticism is that we canât even be certain about the fact that certainty is impossible. But even if certainty is possible, it seems very clear that finding it through the process of âSocratic questioningâ is like a wild goose chase.
Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state. He famously said: Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
What Voltaire (and, by extension, many of the Enlightenment-era thinkers) were trying to say is that you donât know anything for certain. You may think that you know things for certain, but you donât.
You may have a very âstrongâ belief about something. And that belief may be backed up by some very very strong evidence that support it. And that could be constantly reinforced by your experience of the world that you live in. But you still donât know that thing for certain.
For example, when you look around you, you see a lot of stuff that âexistâ in the physical world. It seems like this table exists, that lamp exists, the human beings, with whom you can strike up a conversation at any moment, exist.
Based on your âexperienceâ about your surroundings, you are convinced that you are not living inside a simulation like that shown in The Matrix.
But, do you know for âcertainâ that all these stuff around you actually exist? On that same note, do you even know for certain that you exist? Do you know for certain that youâre a thinking being, on the lines of Descartesâ conjecture: I think, therefore I am?
Well, a lot of people would argue against it. They would point to the famous Cartesian Circle â the practice of using a proposition as both a premise and a conclusion in an argument â asserting that Descartesâ clear and distinct ideas could have been deceived from the very beginning.
So, if you donât know anything for certain, what does all of this mean? What are its implications? Well, to put it simply, to believe in anything is to take a leap of faith.
Even something as obvious as the objects in front of you â with a seemingly endless amount of evidence that you can pull from, to reinforce their existence in the physical world â arenât without assumptions that you donât even realise you are making all the time.
Now, we may be making leaps of faith all the time whenever we believe something, but all leaps of faith are not created equal. Some leaps of faith might be plain absurd. And this brings me to the next very strange hurdle: belief has nothing to do with truth.
Most people in Indonesia believe in ghosts. But if you told these same people that there were goblins sitting up in the trees constantly watching them, they would never believe you.
But in reality, goblins and ghosts are equally as unfounded. Itâs just that ghosts correspond more with what theyâve been told is acceptable, so they believe it.
Some people vehemently believe in ghosts. Some people vehemently donât believe in ghosts. The two viewpoints directly contradict each other. They canât both be right. Yet both sides are devout believers in their side of the operation.
If you asked 100 people why they believe the things they do, 99 of them would say that they believe things because itâs the truth or itâs the closest thing to the truth.
But if you press them hard, what youâre inevitably going to find is that they believe in things for a lot of reasons. And not many of them have anything to do with truth.
A friend of mine believes in gods and ghosts simply because he likes to believe in a spirit world. Itâs because at some level he fears death, and the eventual end of his mortal existence. So he likes to think that if there is some spirit realm where he can retire in his afterlife, he doesnât need to fade into eternal blackness one day.
People believe things because theyâre convenient to believe in. Itâs very difficult to accept reality on realityâs terms, so people prefer to believe whatâs useful to them at a personal level. Maybe their belief serves some personal narrative, or addresses some fear, anxiety, wish, etc. People can also very often believe things out of sheer laziness.
Let me reset this. Certainty is impossible, and there are absolutely no limits to what you can believe. So, how do you go about making sure that your beliefs, despite their drawbacks and biases, arenât completely absurd?
The least that the Enlightenment-era thinkers and Voltaire would want is for you to be honest with yourself first â that you have created your beliefs mostly out of convenience.
Next, they would love for you to take a step back and consider all the different ways that you could be wrong about what you believe in, or, on that same note, think about all the different justifications you could be subconsciously using without even realising to believe in what you believe.
They would want you to take up this lifelong responsibility of putting your beliefs under a microscope.
Now, even after all of this, you still cannot know for certain if your beliefs are at all true, or even how close to the truth they actually are. But, this practice would surely ensure that your beliefs arenât at least based on false pretences.
This needs questioning your faith about everything constantly. This needs putting your opinions to the test all the time. This needs coming up with counter arguments against yourself. If your beliefs break down in front of them, they are false. If they hold strong, then you carry on with the task. The longer they stand the bludgeoning, the stronger they become, and the closer they get to the truth.
Having a belief is easy. The work required to actually test their authenticity is the hard part. Sometimes it would be a waste of time when your beliefs breakdown in front of stronger arguments. But at least youâll have the opportunity to take up newer and stronger beliefs. And more importantly, you wonât harbour any false beliefs.
A scientist is someone who can take a hypothesis and put it under constant experimentation so that the hypothesis remains true only for as long as it is not proven false.
Similarly, a thinker (or dare I say, a philosopher) is someone who can do the same with a belief.
You arrive at the truth, or rather, you get closer and closer to the truth by doubting your beliefs.
Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Today I Learned
Heart cells are different in many ways from other organ cells.
Take the liver for instance. You can take half of an adultâs liver and transplant it to another person. And the missing liver regenerates itself within a few weeks. This is an extreme example, as most our organs do not do this, but it highlights a key point: organ cells generate new âdaughterâ cells often.
The heart, however, does not. And this is what makes the heart different â and exquisite â compared to other organs. Half of your cardiac muscle cells survive from the time youâre born until you die â pumping away from 80+ years. Cardiac muscle cells do not undergo mitosis (i.e., the splitting of one cell to create two new âdaughterâ cells) to the same extent as other cells in our body and organs.
This is primarily because cardiac muscle cells are engaged in a highly choreographed electrical dance to keep the heart pumping as one. If some cells stopped to split in two, and then those new cells had to have enough time to develop and learn the âdance,â there could be catastrophic consequences to the performance of the heart. So, evolution has crafted cardiac cells that are built to last.
But this relative lack of mitosis has big consequences. First, it means that damage to the heart, from heart disease or a heart attack, kills massive amounts of cells. And because they donât regenerate, scar tissue forms, weakening the performance of the heart and blocking electrical paths for good.
We also see this manifest in the lack of heart cancer. You might have never really thought of this, but do you know anyone who has had heart cancer? Probably not. Because cancer is a malfunction of cellular division (i.e., mitosis), and cardiac muscle cells donât divide, there is no malfunction to manifest as cancer. Pretty neat!
Timeless Insight
When things go wrong at a workplace (as they often do), it leads to these automatic internal narratives â the other person is bad at their job, they were slacking off, they arenât smart enough, etc.
We start blaming others, and this happens automatically, without our conscious thought. But this feedback is either withheld to avoid conflict, or itâs blurted out violently. âYou know you screwed that up. Why did it take so much of time? Why isnât the quality up to the mark?â
Both of these are red signals. Both of these are examples of failure to actually work out the confusion from our internal narratives. A good feedback loop incorporates a good exchange of dialogue between the stakeholders.
The correct way would be to start by working out your confusion. For starters, you have to be explicit about your expectations with yourself, and then with other stakeholders. You have to be clear about what looks good, and how the team is going to go about achieving it.
You should sound like, âI just want to be explicit about the goals, and how everything should work out.â The idea is to set a standard and get in sync with all the other team members before a project even begins.
The next part of the conversation comes after a project (or a sprint, or a work cycle, or a batch â same idea, many names) is either midway, or just finished.
Regardless of things going well or not, you should start by talking about your experience. If things didnât go well, your goal is not to cast blame on somebody. In fact, your goal is not even to diagnose the project. You are just sharing what youâve experienced. âThis project wasnât delivered on time,â or âIâm confused why did we have to wait so long before shipping this feature?â
Your aim is to give your teammates transparency into your confusion, and try to figure out what they themselves have experienced â are they in sync, or was something not clear. This gives them an opportunity to share their side of the story, and prevents the build-up of a one-sided narrative in your head.
If you hear something like, âYeah I delivered it a bit late because I miscalculated the timelines and my effort,â or, âI hit a roadblock, and it took me quite a while to figure a way around,â you are most probably on the right track.
Ask your team to detail out their experience. Itâs not a short process. Give them enough time and room to do their thinking and find out what went wrong.
Now the team and you can clearly see the difference between the standard that was set early on, and what has actually happened. The gap between the two things is the gap of performance.
This is the feedback that you are trying to deliver. But rather than saying it in words, and pointing things out, youâve now incorporated your team into the process and get the conversation started.
What Iâm Reading
At heart, statistics is always about making judgment calls. It is the science of educated guesses, if you like. It looks like maths, it smells like maths, but thereâs none of the perfect certainty we associate with maths.
â Michael Brooks, The Art of More
Tiny Thought
When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Before You GoâŚ
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ