Alif Wahid

The Clarity of Doubt

I feel that the English language cannot accommodate a strange sort of logical consistency, which is implicit in what I can only label as the clarity of doubt. The premise on which this stands is that of a choice between not knowing the answer to an open question and believing in a manifestly wrong answer to said question. As a result, doubt is the necessary condition in order to reach sufficient scepticism that plays the decisive role in filtering out much of the ambient noise that one is immersed in. The seemingly antithetical nature of this conception is not new, since Descartes explained this a few centuries ago (not to mention the ancients before him). But he did not write in English.

My frustration lies in the subjective observation that virtually everyone I have ever come across in person, for whatever reason, prefers the illogical choice of believing in the wrong answer to an open question. What is worse is the stigma associated with and the peer pressure inflicted on anyone demonstrating the virtues of doubting, dithering, deferring, etc. I say virtues because these are the actions that give one the kind of clarity that leads to an honest admission of the full extent of one’s ignorance (regardless of whether it is guilty or blissful in nature). The boundary of one’s empirically falsifiable knowledge is all that demarcates the burden of belief within from the clarity of doubt beyond. Thus the logical choice of doubting over believing is deductively obvious to too few of us, sadly.

Part three of “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

This part of the book spans six chapters (19 through to 24) and focuses on a study of Overconfidence. Kahneman begins by discussing the illusion of understanding, which is the flawed tendency of us humans to always construct coherent narratives in order to explain past events without adequately acknowledging the role of luck. I think the following excerpt from chapter 19 summarises his thesis rather eloquently.

I have heard of too many people who “knew well before it happened that the 2008 financial crisis was inevitable”. This sentence contains a highly objectionable word, which should be removed from our vocabulary in discussions of major events. The word is, of course, knew. Some people thought well in advance that there would be a crisis, but they did not know it. They now say they knew it because the crisis did in fact happen. This is a misuse of an important concept. In everyday language, we apply the word know only when what was known is true and can be shown to be true. We can know something only if it is both true and knowable. But the people who thought there would be a crisis (and there are fewer of them than now remember thinking it) could not conclusively show it at the time. Many intelligent and well-informed people were keenly interested in the future of the economy and did not believe a catastrophe was imminent; I infer from this fact that the crisis was not knowable. What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion.

It’s the age old argument about the virtues of scepticism since at least the time of David Hume - never pretend to know exactly how the world ought to be based purely on how it is. This inductive fallacy is indeed “pernicious” and it leads to all kinds of overconfidence and biased optimism in a wholly unjustified manner. Kahneman gives many examples, beginning with his own mistakes at different stages in his life. He also examines various modern day scenarios where the effects of overconfidence have real costs both for individuals and society at large, e.g., over-optimistic project plans that inevitably fail in more ways than one, the flawed judgement of “experts” in the face of uncertainty that often costs lives, and “the engine of capitalism” which frequently grinds itself to a halt.

Far from being a doom and gloom preacher, he actually offers insightful and practical steps to mitigate overconfidence that have been well researched and  trialled previously. There are sound suggestions on how to go about estimating the time it will take to complete a task for project planning as well as valuable guidelines on when to trust the intuition of experts that are always too willing to hand out advice on matters of health, finance, law etc.

Overall, I found the politically incorrect tone of Kahneman’s prose utterly refreshing! Scientific truths must be told exactly as they are - no fudging and no disguising to make them more palatable :P He doesn’t hold back from squarely taking aim at clinicians who diagnose by “instinct” rather than by “checklist”, financial wizards who claim to know the exact reason(s) for why the market behaved the way it did on any given day, and all the pontificating “pundits” who dominate the daily news agenda without even knowing what it is that they’re talking about :P Now I feel primed for part four - Choices.

Hmm…Open Journalism anyone?

The Guardian newspaper in the UK have started a campaign called Open Journalism on their website. The Editor-in-chief has posted a few short words, exemplifying what that means. I am happy to applaud their attempt at distinguishing themselves from the Murdoch Media. But judging by the advert that they’ve put out - I have a suspicion that mass populism is what their conception of open journalism is. If so, then how can open journalism (underpinned by social media) anchor any public discourse within close proximity of the truths in this world?

The problem with relying on social media to underwrite and underpin the mainstream media is that viral hits, by definition, are manifestly relative and they drive various cycles of mass populism, hysteria, elation, mourning, etc. In other words, every emotion known to man can be multiplied by the size of the population and propagated to all corners of the planet in order to garner the most irrational response from the populace. I assert that this is distinctly not the role of mainstream media.

I think that the role of mainstream media is to establish facts, first of all, and then to disseminate facts throughout the globe. Not emotions, not rumours, and most definitely not viral hits (which propagate themselves automatically by the way). But don’t get me wrong - I also think that social media has a vital role in helping people organise themselves in order to register a dissent and exercise their right to free speech. However, it does not have a track record of propagating truths.

I derive any measure of quality in journalism from the normative standard of the facts reported. In the subjective universe that is social media, one cannot objectively establish the validity of a factual claim by testing to see what (if any) truths it bears out in reality. This is the task that journalists had traditionally prided themselves on. It also happens to be the bread and butter routine of scientists. But it is a task that is inadmissible to The Guardians’ conception of open journalism because of the underpinning role played by social media.

Ultimately, I feel that any requirement of factual validity simply loses out to the constraints of basic economics, and money of course. The Editor-in-chief was smug enough to point that out among his few short words (boldface added by me below).

The newspaper is moving beyond a newspaper. Journalists are finding they can give the whole picture better. Over a year the readership grows – a little in print, vastly in digital. Advertisers like it, too.

So the scepticism that I hold at the moment is because it matters not whether the populist opinion holds sway in the public discourse, driven by an endless cycle of self-propagating viral hits. Rather, what matters is the validity of normative truths that should anchor the public discourse so that it cannot drift toward unbounded irrationality. I am not convinced that open journalism will make any contribution to that end.