3 Ways We Fool Ourselves

Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand?

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"Should reality be something that only a handful of the world's most advanced physicists understand? One would expect at least a majority of people to understand it. Should reality be expressible only in symbols that require university-level mathematics to manipulate? Should it be something that changes from year to year as new scientific theories are formulated? Should it be something about which different schools of physics can quarrel for years with no firm resolution on either side? If this is so then how is it fair to imprison a person in a mental hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for 'failing to understand reality'? By this criterion shouldn't all but a handful of the world's most advanced physicists be locked up for life? Who is crazy here and who is sane?"

- Robert Pirsig

Early zoologists classified mammals as those that suckle their young and reptiles as those that laid eggs. So when they came across the duck-billed platypus in Australia—an animal that laid eggs but also suckled its young—it created quite a paradox, with people claiming some sort of trickery or manipulation. Except there wasn't. The platypus wasn't doing anything exceptional, unordinary, or nefarious. It was doing exactly what it had done for millions of years: laying eggs and suckling its young. It was the zoologists' classification system that created the paradox.

So how did they come to terms with this unpredicted version of reality? They created a new classification—the Monotremata—that included the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater. That's it. That's how they circumvented the problem of the duck-billed platypus: they just made something else up.

Reality is formed by the language we use to describe it. Words and theories come and go, and the scientific theories that explain our world today will be obsolete tomorrow.

As humans, we crave understanding and even go as far as spending a lot of time and a lot of money trying to understand something that happened 13.8 billion years ago (the Big Bang). We're filled with dread when something happens that we aren't expecting (like finding a mammal that also lays eggs), so we have to tell ourselves all sorts of stories and reverse-engineer with the benefit of hindsight to conclude that actually, we did know that thing was going to happen, and of course mammals can lay eggs—we just need to say they can!

But what happens when you step outside of your ego and sincerely believe that you might not know everything, and recognise that learning to deal with uncertainty is far more important than knowing what you do know?

Here are 3 ways we fool ourselves about uncertainty:

1. You undervalue what you do not know

Anti-knowledge is a concept that teaches us that there is more to be lost (and gained) from the things we do not know. Umberto Eco was a writer with a personal library of over 30,000 books. When people visited his library, they typically fell into one of two types: those who were impressed by his large collection and asked him "how many of these books have you read?" and a small few who understood that a library is a research tool, not an ego-boosting showcase.

There is far more to be learned from the unread books on your bookshelf than the ones you have already read. Books cost you roughly £5–£25 and can contain entire lifeworks. It's about as low-cost, high-payoff as you can get. This isn't about reading 'a book a week', but recognising that the value of the knowledge you have yet to learn is worth more than your current understanding of reality.

2. You don't understand the importance of disconfirmation

You could see a thousand white swans but could never be sure that 'all swans are white', yet a single black swan could prove that not all swans are white in an instant. Disconfirmation is more powerful than confirmation. Just ask Darwin.

It's not a case of being able to predict Black Swans, but ensuring that when they do come along, the harm to you is minimised. This is similar to the 'unknown unknown' quadrant from the Rumsfeld Matrix concept, where an American Marine in Fallujah not knowing that there's an IED on the other side of the door he's trying to kick down could blow him into a thousand pieces.

3. How we rewrite history with the benefit of hindsight

Charlie Munger warned us to be wary of expert opinions, especially when they have incentives for you to believe what they said was true. How many 'experts' predicted the 2008 financial crash? How many predicted COVID-19? Or how about recent geopolitical conflicts?

We're generally terrible at predicting what will happen today, let alone tomorrow. Yet after every major unexpected event, these same experts emerge with detailed explanations of how the 'warning signs were obvious' and how they 'saw it coming all along'.

So the next time you catch yourself predicting something will happen, write it down in a notebook or in your phone. This way you can prove you're not just falling for hindsight bias but actually have some remarkable gift for prediction.

Final thoughts

These biases are insidious because they prevent us from learning. If we convince ourselves we 'knew it all along', we never develop better uncertainty-handling skills. We remain trapped in a cycle of overconfidence, surprise, and retrospective rationalisation—but never actually getting better at navigating an uncertain world.

Until next time, Karl (The School of Knowledge).

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