The crisis of certainty

Our culture has this debilitating obsession with certainty, and I'm not sure what we can do about it.

Our culture is obsessed with certainty. The most viral bits of content (and so, the bulk of content that we see) take strong, polarizing stances. The movies and TV shows we watch frame protagonists as overconfident showmen, not measured thinkers. We even elect public officials not in spite of, but seemingly because of their delusional self-assuredness. It’s surprising, as precious little truly comes close to certain. Let’s discuss how certainty became such a pervasive part of our culture, and why this situation is so precarious in our modern world.

We’ve always liked certainty, because we’ve always liked winning.

I imagine the world has always had a tendency to overvalue brash certainty. So many of the world’s constructs are zero-sum games, so it should come as no surprise that we value winning in all of our endeavors. Certainty, being the mechanism by which you win arguments, goes hand in hand.

And of course, if all things quantize to a binary outcome (winning), there's little reason to posture yourself in a way that decreases your probability of being on the right side of the quantization, unless you maintain intellectual honesty as your primary objective. Bertrand Russell famously commented on this, speaking on the cultural state of Nazi Germany, lamenting: “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

The problem: our knowledge systems are not optimized for giving you knowledge.

Now of course, certainty itself is not necessarily so bad — Russell is complaining about a correlation between stupidity and certainty, rather than suggesting that confidence is an indication of stupidity. Relative confidence in an idea can be a useful metric in an argument between two people in pathing quickly to truth, and generally speaking, confidence is not a bad thing.

But the problem is that our world is different than it used to be — it’s not all about two-person debates, but about information networks. The way knowledge is disseminated has changed. We have social graphs, and unfortunately, temperance is not optimized for over social graphs. In the past, news headlines would at least be tempered by the need for news outlets to preserve their reputation, nodes on social graphs have no such need — influencers are playing a game of relevance, and that’s one where you need to come up with one viral thing every so often. Moreover, the rate of information ingestion/production has massively increased, giving you less attention to pay to any given person.

Furthermore, the resulting increased quantity of content decreases our capacity for anger against any particular post. Combine this with the sheer volume of new content creators, and you’ll find that any outrage you can muster is spread across too much content and over too many people — our anger is spread thin by the curse of dimensionality. And so social media has created a media system absent of any self-regulating incentive structure.

But to bemoan influencers and their content isn’t really the point — this dynamic is not really the fault of any one person. The crux of the problem is that we’re ingesting information through mechanisms whose sole aim is not to convey information with high fidelity, but rather to make money by capturing your attention, and attention is captured best through strong emotion. Our objectives are unaligned: our knowledge constructs are built to hijack our brains, not to disseminate knowledge. So of course we can’t help that our culture becomes one where discord fueled by overzealous certainty is the norm.

Of course, this would be fine if this cycle of stupidity would restrict itself to social media. But unfortunately, with amplification comes power/influence.

What can we do?

I don’t know. I used to think we should be more zealous about what we believe, as Bertrand Russell once suggested:

"Perhaps we shall have to realise that scepticism and intellectual individualism are luxuries which in our tragic age must be forgone, and if intelligence is to be effective, it will have to be combined with a moral fervour which it usually possessed in the past but now usually lacks.”

- Bertrand Russell

But the problem is that when you’re wrong, you lose trust, and one of the scariest things that can happen is when society starts mistrusting the wrong people. Moreover, this solution seems particularly egregious in today’s circumstances — must we all become influencers? Perhaps — the issue is that the system itself is broken, after all. Attention is the currency of modern systems, so if you don’t optimize to capture the attention of others, someone else will. Competition is efficient.

That said, I have some hope that we’ll become inoculated against poor quality information over time, the same way we collectively learned that we don’t actually swallow 8 spiders a night in our sleep and that we probably shouldn’t believe everything we read on the internet. The question, though, is this: will this happen on a short enough timescale that our world will actually self-correct, or are we doomed to reach a new steady state where we can’t even introspectively talk about fake news without the whole discussion itself being co-opted by overconfident demagogues?