I have an acquaintance who I follow on instagram, I will not name him. Daily, he posts political memes. They are the sort of ‘gotcha’ political memes that try to paint the side he dislikes in as preposterously buffoonish. Some have truth in them, some have happily untethered themselves from the reality of our world. The other side, if you were to live in the world of these memes, is loud, brash, arrogant, and most of all confident. 

Bertrand Russell famously said “the problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

At a broad level, there is clearly truth in this. We can all sip cocktails and gesture broadly at the state of the world saying everyone who is hyper-confident of their ideology is a moron – especially those committed folk who we don’t quite agree with. I suspect many who recite these kinds of quotes don’t fully appreciate how hard it is to be genuinely skeptical of the world. To operate in the world at all you need to have some assumptions you assert. 

Have you ever been trapped with one of those philosophically insufferable people who hit you with questions like “how do you know I’m not a part of your imagination??” That’s where you land without some basic assumptions. 

So this is all just a matter of how willing we are to feel certainty and how quickly we’ll admit when we’re wrong. I’ve always liked looking at science as a microcosm of this. The sciences have an impossible task: real truth. Despite how we feel as humans, we’re basically feeling our way around in the dark on the world around us.  Hell, it’s looking like our entire understanding of this universe is probably wrong. We’re making this all up, and we’re wrong a lot. 

Percival Lowell was an astronomer around the turn of the 20th century. He made a number of improvements in designing telescopes and theorizing a ninth planet that would later be found in Pluto. He’s been described as one of the most influential popularizers of planetary science in America and he has numerous science facilities named after him across the world as well as an asteroid. Most famously, he confidently declared that he’d discovered canals on Mars and Venus. 

I’ll spoil this – there aren’t. 

He was laughed out of the room at the time, but defended his theories vociferously. Later, when he was long dead and we’d visited those planets with robots, it’d be theorized that he was just seeing his own blood vessels in his eyes reflected in the narrow light of the telescope. He was a scientist of scientists. He was one of the most culturally influential ever. He knew the method well and still, despite careful research, felt confident you could have a rower sing you Il Carnevale Di Venezia on Mars. 

In 1973, J.O. Berkland and La Raymond claimed that in the ice age, the southern Appalachian mountains in what is now North Carolina had a glacier on them. This would be significant, given that previously there were no glaciers known to be south of what is now Illinois. They were saying that as recently as 20,000 years ago we had fundamentally misunderstood our world’s history. They cited straight lines carved into the bluffs, a classic sign of glaciers long gone. A separate team came up a year later and found a metal cable lower on that cliff, snapped. It had been used for earlier mining, and that cable down the hill matched the marks perfectly.  No glaciers were in the Carolinas. Youtuber Aidin Robbins even went back up and found both the marks and the cables still present today. 

Berkland and Raymond did what they could to advance our science and failed. Their failure was of the best intention and includes their expertise fully applied to the subject. This happens all the time, even in science. Where someone does actively care enough to take the time to schlep another research team out into the boonies to check your work. How much luck do you think you have with your assumptions?

We can sneer at others who seem to be Russell’s fools yelling into phones, loudspeakers, firing off social media posts, etc. and we can think of ourselves as his humble wise person full of doubt and intrigue. But we’re all inhabiting the same spectrum. Russell’s recommendation seems to be that the world would improve if it was more quiet and contemplative, but it’s not, and it won’t be. Plus If I’m quiet and full of doubt, I’m useless. Totally paralyzed. So, pick your line. Don’t think you’re immune from false certainty because the next guy is a loud moron. We all do it, you are he and he is you. And when you’re inevitably wrong, self assess honestly and get back out there. We need you against these fools and fanatics. 

Colin