A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don't know where the pictures came from. And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up'. Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you 'have an idea' could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?
-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, from the chapter describing the birth of Aslan and Narnia
We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated." As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.
...............war is a runaway train and we just don't know where it will take us.
The nature of discoveries is that they are unexpected: they may not fit neatly into our existing edifice of knowledge. Although the research may be originally motivated by a perceived gap, the knowledge resulting from the discovery may in fact not complete any part of the wall but instead may lead to the construction of a completely new and unexpected area: we may be forced to build a new wall orthogonal to the first, or even to tear down parts of the existing structure. This is an uncomfortable concept for many of us, who would prefer a tidy and beautiful universe, where a rational process helps us to illuminate the world. And yet, the most interesting unknowns of science are unknown unknowns—gaps that we were not even aware of before chancing upon them.
-Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher.
via the wide wide world of Tim Ferriss
When it comes to the purpose of the Socratic method, Socrates had colossal ambitions. He believed that all of the trouble we have leading our lives, all of our dissatisfactions, all of our failures to progress, all of our moral imperfections, all of the injustices we commit, large and small, stem from one source: ignorance. Socrates' claim that "I know that I know nothing" isn't an empty gesture of skepticism, but rather a plan for life. It tells you that the key to success, whether you are navigating difficulties in your marriage, your terror at the prospect of death, or the politicized minefield of social media, is to have the right kind of conversations. Given that we cannot lead lives based on knowledge—because we lack it—we should lead the second-best kind of life, namely, the one oriented toward knowledge.
-Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Live
The night before the D-Day Invasion, Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next.
“To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.
-Morgan Housel, from here
“Tech Sector Sees 64,000 Job Cuts This Year Due to AI Advancement.”
“Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw,”
-Cal Newport, from this episode suggesting No One Knows Anything About AI
A wave of revolutionary change emanating from the human/AI mind is about to crash into the institutions, inaugurating a cycle of demolition and reconfiguration. The experience will feel excruciating, like open-heart surgery without anesthetics. The objective will be in part nihilistic—wrecking the hated hierarchies—and in part utopian—democratizing and rehumanizing the ruling structures. The actual outcome remains in doubt, but we know that the whole of society, as it has functioned during the “long 20th century,” is up for grabs.
-Martin Gurri, as excerpted from here
I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of uncertainty about different things. But I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about. I don't feel frightened not knowing things.
An expensive and recurring problem in the technology and investment communities is the simple inability to say those three words, "I don't know." . . .
Saying "I don't know" is a superpower.
-Barry Ritholtz, How Not to Invest
At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves how little we know about the present and how completely unexpected events can be in the future.
-Barry Ritholtz, from here
I may know who and what I am. I cannot know in advance who or what I could become. There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Are stock prices too high? I don’t know, and neither do you. I am too much of an Efficient Markets adherent to believe otherwise. Though, I am also Schumpeterian. So, yeah, we just may be in a new AI-powered economy where we will be much more productive, and the firms best poised to make money off this are worth a lot—and will be worth much more than what they are now. But until we figure many things out, and that could take decades (possibly many decades), there will be some froth along the way. We will make big bets on the wrong horses. Or some companies that seem poised for greatness will falter after a while. Or companies that seem unstoppable now may not exist then. Who the winners will be and what winning even looks like is unknowable right now.
.....................in a much better way if we all took this to heart:
And I can still remember what he said to my graduate school class in summarizing this point: “I have been an economist long enough to recognize that ‘I don’t know’ is an intellectually respectable answer.”
-from this Gary Galles essay
There is so much we don't know. And not just about the future, but the past.
History knows three things: 1) what's been photographed, 2) what someone wrote down or recorded, and 3) the words spoked by people whom historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed.
What percentage of everything important that's ever happened falls into one of those three categories? No one knows. But it's tiny. And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memory.
-Morgan Housel, as cut-and-pasted from here
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