We Can Never Really Be Sure

The confusing events all around us, and why you should be comfortable not understanding them with certainty

Hurricanes Helene and Milton were unmitigated, and, in fact, I believe, anti-mitigated disasters. But how do I know that? Do I know that? How bad was it? How bad is it? Is FEMA the hero of the situation? Or the villain? How many people were killed? Hundreds? Thousands?

It’s been over a month since these hurricanes hit North Carolina/Tennessee and Florida respectively, and the people affected by the disasters probably have some sort of idea, but I, and anyone not directly affected have very little idea of what’s actually going on.

Sure, we have easy access to images and video clips galore, but for all this evidence, what do we really know about the situation as a whole?

Very little.

The question of contention, that of how well the situation was handled, remains, if one looks at the total of the evidence presented and statements made, fundamentally unanswered. On an objective basis at least. People on the political left have claimed that the situation was handled well by FEMA and the federal government, while people on the right are mostly claiming that FEMA and the Federal government were obstacles to aid reaching victims. Each side of the argument can point to facts justifying their conclusion, so neither side, at least is 100% wrong. Evidence points to the federal government and FEMA doing things that benefit the hurricane and flood victims. However, evidence also seems to point to the federal government blocking private aid and rescuers from reaching survivors. Which is true? Is the government helping or are they the primary problem?

One can’t answer this in a truly objective sense without some sort of omniscience about all the facts on the ground, a lot of spreadsheet tabulation, and knowledge of the intentions of every individual involved in the situation. If you could analyze every detail you could come up with some metric like the government is doing things 49% right or 72% right, something which would be generalized to government/FEMA bad. Even then, however, such a generalization, as is the case for most historical events and questions, also implicitly implies its opposite. Yes, that the government is doing things 72% right in the hurricane response is generalized in some minds as “Yay for FEMA. They’re the heroes.” But even this implies that, yes, those who come to the opposite conclusion are also, to a degree, correct. The government did fail 28% of the time.

Of course, the situation, when it comes to really understanding what’s happening is worse than this. No one has omniscience about the situation. The data points and evidence that present themselves are conflicting, and also reach people of differing political views in divergent proportions. Even individual data points are sometimes ambiguous. Was the FEMA helicopter that destroyed a privately run aid delivery site intentionally doing so? Or were they just scoping out a landing site and accidentally blew around all the supplies?

But almost everyone has a simple, straightforward, sanded-down, and smoothed-out opinion: government good or government bad. This means that everyone is imposing a subjective filter on the data and evidence to arrive at their conclusion. This is the rule by which each group accepts some evidence and data points and rejects others. Frequently, as with the impact of social media algorithms, what evidence and data people from diverging political sides receive is pre-filtered, making a true sense of what is going on even harder to achieve.

And we haven’t even gotten into the subjective intentions of the people involved in the situation. Is Pete Buttigieg competent? Incompetent? Is the FAA blocking aid flights for air safety reasons or to prevent aid? Do “they” as some claim want Republican voters from Western North Carolina to die so they don’t vote in next week’s election? One can never really know the secret intentions and thoughts of the heart of another with absolute certainty.

This is not to say that there is not a real answer. There are numerous reasons to be skeptical about really knowing for sure what is going on. Constrain the realm of data to facts that fit a specific narrative and you can, conditionally, come to an understanding, but only conditionally. On an objective basis with human events, it’s just extremely difficult.

In the realm of repeatable, testable events, physical science at sizes larger than the atom, statistical reasoning can be used to solve all these kinds of questions and arrive at answers with calculated degrees of certainty and uncertainty. That’s how we know as much as we currently do about how gravity works.¹ But history and politics (and individual relationships) are not like this. You can’t perform a Fisher Sign Test trial on say, how FEMA responds to hurricanes and come up with a certain law on how competent vs. incompetent vs. ill-intentioned they are. Any test you do would in fact affect the outcome because you are dealing with human actors and human intentions. History and politics (present-day history) are contingent and particular, and for those very same reasons, ambiguous.

What this means is that even with all the technology and communication media we have, we actually know very little about what’s going on in the world right now.

Take another example. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it can at least be unambiguously stated, is an unmitigated tragedy for individual civilians caught up in it. But look at how different commentators are covering the war and you can come away with perfectly well-structured, but entirely divergent takes on what is going on. Avoid the question of even the justifications of each side for fighting and continuing the war. Looking just at the seemingly objective facts on the ground we, objectively, can’t even really be sure who is winning right now. Most Western sources say Ukraine is winning, most of the time. And they back up their claims with sources, quotes, images, videos, etc. But look at a Russia-aligned (even if published in English) source like Simplicius the Thinker’s substack and you’re presented, simultaneously with exactly the opposite conclusion. And, of course, he also backs up his claims with at least as many sources, quotes, images, and videos as the Western media.

Look at another source, like Vologda Mapping which presents a huge random mix of facts and claims without making a meta claim about what is really going on in toto (who’s winning) and you’ll come out, at best, with the answer: it’s complicated.

You could become a political partisan in American politics, filter your sources, and soon persuade yourself one way or another about FEMA. I happen to mostly think they bungled the operation.² You can also be a partisan one way or another about Ukraine and Russia. But you can’t both be a partisan claiming certainty and be absolutely sure you’re right.

You could be right but for wrong, or deficient reasons. But the facts on which you base your opinion, your generalization could also be correct and you still could have come to a false conclusion, if your facts were an improper sampling of all the relevant facts out there about the topic in question.

So what does one do with such uncertainty about present reality or past history? Can we come to a certain conclusion? Can we ever really answer a question like “what is going on in North Carolina or in Ukraine?”

At the level of perfect certainty, I believe the answer, for anything larger and/or more complicated than a single individual human interaction or single action, is no. We can understand a single murder³ or a car crash, probably with great but not perfect certainty. But we cannot really have any clear idea at all what to think about a war, a government’s response to a hurricane, or what is really going on with the presidential campaigns, potential election interference or fraud, China’s relationship to Taiwan, etc. The constantly shifting opinions of history with regard to even the most studied historical events proves this.

We can never have perfect invincible intellectual certainty in any of these cases. Again, any attempt to force or claim perfect certainty is inevitably but a demonstration of foisting experience through a subjective filter and then forgetting that we have used such a filter.

But while we cannot have certainty with a total absence of doubt, Hume’s problem of induction at its extreme, we can trust, perhaps, that we have at the very least a practical certainty for action. We must start by admitting our biases, admitting the filtering we are intentionally or not, imposing upon the sense experience of the world. Our filtering, in other words, is crafting a narrative or telling a story, a simplification of the world. Any narrative or story we make will be partially true and partially false. But so will anything we ever arrive at. We should admit that our story could be wrong, and are actively willing to adapt it should sufficient evidence compel us otherwise.⁴

This means holding these overarching stories or narratives as tentative, or in a state of superposition. “FEMA was blocking aid and bungling rescue operations”, “Russia is winning the Ukraine war”, or “Election fraud shifted the 2020 election outcome": All of these could be true, or they could be false, when taken as a whole. One should not build one’s entire worldview and make moral choices on the basis of such grand narratives. Again, you could be wrong.

But if you divide a large situation, into smaller concepts, which, does, of course still mean you bear the weight of some uncertainty of interpretation, as the uncertain truth of the whole affects the truth or falsity, or meaning, of the parts, you can make evaluations that are certain enough to act upon. You can have, in effect, a practical certainty.

With regard to questions and uncertainties about the election, for example, one cannot be absolutely sure that fraud will not render your vote useless. But you can be sure that the effect of your voting is not nothing. The actions and potential fraud of others are not things that you can likely control. But voting or not voting is something you can control. Even if fraud later takes away its value, there are limits to fraud, and your vote at least “could” mean something and is therefore something.⁵ You can be uncertain of who is winning the Ukraine war, and therefore be uncertain about the relative strategic merits of U.S. aid packages and NATO expansion. But you can be far more morally certain that actions to protect widows and orphans in Ukraine are justified. FEMA may or may not be bungling the aid operations to North Carolina, but you can probably be sure that they could do better.

I call this having thoughts in superposition. Maybe it’s just a cop-out. Or maybe it’s just prudence. It’s quite a novel thing in history actually for most people to have, and, more importantly, think they have to have, opinions on subjects and affairs far from their daily lives in impact and/or scale.⁶

The average peasant in Northern France in the 14th century, for example, wouldn’t have really understood the complexities of the Hundred Years’ War. Many take this now as an opportunity to make fun of the backwardness of pre information-technology civilization but is there anything that they really lost by not knowing the social-political relationships between the English lords of Aquitaine or the particular crimes and conspiratorial monarchical relationships with marauders in Yorkshire. They knew what was going on in their village, they understood their relationship with their lord—and their Lord. They knew enough of what they could affect to make moral choices where they could affect things. Perhaps they were far more cognizant of the things that really mattered to them and which they could change than we are.

Today, one must, it seems, be an expert on everything far from oneself in distance, impact, and scale to the almost complete exclusion of those matters that are actually close to you. I’ve obsessively, as with most Americans, followed such minutiae of the U.S. presidential campaign as which podcasts each of the candidates has appeared on, what Nate Silver’s opinion of the early vote count looks like in each state, and where each candidate is holding rallies, even as it takes me a lot of effort to even remember the mayor of my own town. We are also near-compelled to be able to explain and claim to understand lithium mining, Iranian counter-ballistic missile technologies, drone warfare strategies, crime policy in El Salvador, … Georgian (the other one) internal politics, and the varying effects of rocket launches and wind turbines on the psychological outcomes of seals and whales.

One hilarious X account, the New York Times Pitchbot parodied this disjunction quite brilliantly:

Perhaps we ought to be far more willing to just not take a position on events and affairs complex and far from us. Such knowledge is again of the most uncertain and changing character, and even if we do understand it well, somehow, and have great certainty, somehow, in our own understanding, what can we really do, for example, to change the state of affairs in Belarus?

Again, even with all the technology and communication media we have, we actually know very little about what’s going on in the world right now. In fact, I would take this further, and say that because of all of our technology and communication media, we actually know less about what we truly should know about and what we can affect change in. We’re too distracted by drama in international affairs to know our own mayors or town councils, let alone affect them, or in other ways serve the needs of those around us.⁷

The demand, the call of charity, is universal, but it is always expressed through particulars. These particulars, those things close (or at least closer) to us that we can know with greater certainty are where we are called to work, and all that we are called to understand. You can be certain, whatever may really be going on in North Carolina, that it is alright to help them, and even more so for your immediate neighbor in need. The narrative you may or may not have about the meaning of the entire situation is orthogonal towards and does not always aid the call, and actions of charity. Often it just hinders you by making you feel like you need to understand absolutely everything in the world perfectly before doing anything.

So when we ask the question, “Do we really know?” perhaps we first should ask ourselves, “Do we really need to know?”

1. Even here, there is also a lot that we don’t know, or could be very wrong on. More on that later.

2. See this episode of Conspiracy Pilled: Weather Wars: Hurricanes Helene & Milton - CONSPIRACY PILLED (S5-Ep5)

3. But perhaps we can’t even fully understand a single murder or attempted murder, as the examples of JFK and the attempted assassinations of Trump may show.

4. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…

5. Giving up to despair means you are in effect choosing to lose before the game has even started.

6. I know that I’m being slightly hypocritical here, but I think this is a claim about history that is “mostly true.” At the very least at least. My recent sources for the Middle Ages that bear out this claim are A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchmann, The Building of Christendom, The Glory of Christendom, and The Cleaving of Christendom by Warren Carroll as while as The Forge of Christendom by Tom Holland.

7. I am also being slightly, or majorly, hypocritical here, as many of the things I’m covering are distant from everyday experience and everyday practical necessity. My response is simply that I try things back from the complex and distant to the immediate and practical. And I will try better to do so in the future.