Not knowing is like having an itch somewhere you’re not supposed to scratch in public.
For eighty-four years I’ve been trying to make things explain themselves. I’ve taken things apart, asked people questions they probably wished I hadn’t, read instructions only after other methods failed, and developed explanations for things about which I possessed considerably more confidence than evidence. You probably have too.
Something happens, and almost immediately you want to know why. If the answer isn’t available, we all start manufacturing candidates. Sometimes that’s useful, somtime’s not. A possible explanation gives us somewhere to look next. The trouble begins when we forget which part we actually know and which part we supplied because an empty space makes us uncomfortable.
I think we do that more often than we’d care to admit.
That Damned Blank Spot
I usually have an idea while taking a shower. You’ve done it too. You know the idea occurred. You may even remember the exact moment it arrived. Perhaps you’ve been struggling with a problem for three days and suddenly there it is, apparently reporting for duty while you’re shampooing what remains of your hair.
Where did it come from?
You can probably construct a story. You were thinking about the problem yesterday. Something you read last week may have contributed. Your conversation at breakfast might have stirred a memory. Perhaps your mind continued working on the problem while you were doing something else. All of those explanations sound reasonable, and one of them might even be right.
But which one happened?
We don’t know, and that distinction seems embarrassingly obvious when written down. It becomes surprisingly slippery once we start explaining things. A plausible explanation has a way of becoming the explanation, particularly when it fits what we already believe.
I’ve encountered that problem repeatedly while trying to understand where my own ideas came from.
Eighty-Four Years Is a Lot of Missing Evidence
This website grew partly from a project I started late in life. I began going backward through my own experiences and asking where some of my ideas might have come from.
I have accumulated a fairly ridiculous inventory to search. I’ve been a farm kid, soldier, radio and television fellow, restaurant operator, commercial lender, businessman and inventor, among other things. I’ve encountered machines, people, systems, mistakes and problems that disappeared from daily use decades ago. Now I am trying to see whether some of those old pieces later turned up in things I created or decisions I made.
That sounds easier than it is.
I can sometimes establish that I encountered something. I worked in a particular business. I used a particular machine. I knew a particular person. I solved one problem years before confronting another one that seems oddly related. Those are pieces of evidence because I have records, memories or other information establishing that the earlier encounter actually happened.
Then comes the temptation.
If something I encountered in 1965 resembles part of an idea I had in 1995, it is enormously tempting to draw a nice clean line between them and announce that we have found the source. Maybe we have, but the earlier experience proves only that the material was available to me. It does not prove that thirty years later my brain went rummaging through the mental junk pile, retrieved that particular piece and used it.
Unless I remember doing that, wrote it down, told somebody at the time, or have some other evidence connecting the two events, there is a blank space between them.
That’s occasionally irritating. It is also where some of the most interesting questions live.
A Guess Isn’t Useless
You may already be preparing to object that if we refuse to consider anything we cannot prove, we aren’t going to get very far. Much of human inquiry begins with somebody saying, in more respectable language, I wonder if this damned thing works like that.
I agree.
The problem isn’t speculation. The problem is unlabeled speculation.
There is an enormous difference between saying, “This happened because…” and saying, “I wonder whether this happened because….” The first closes the gap. The second points at it, and once we’ve pointed at the gap we can start doing something useful with it.
What evidence would we expect to find if the guess were right? Is there another explanation that fits just as well? Does somebody else’s experience show the same pattern? Has anybody studied the question? Can we devise some way to test it?
A guess can be the beginning of an investigation. It just shouldn’t be allowed to sneak across the border disguised as knowledge.
I Have Artificial Minds Helping Me Get Into Trouble
There is another reason this matters particularly on The Old Gits Website.
I work with artificial intelligence. Actually, I work with several AI systems, which may tell you something about either my curiosity or my inability to leave well enough alone. I give them memories, stories, questions, old records and half-formed notions. They help me compare things, look for relationships, challenge interpretations and occasionally notice something that makes me sit back and say, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
They are also spectacularly capable of producing explanations.
Give an AI two events and ask how they might be related, and it can often produce a beautifully coherent bridge between them. The bridge may be psychologically plausible, historically plausible and elegantly expressed. There is still the inconvenient possibility that the bridge never existed.
Before you blame the machine, however, I should point out that I can do exactly the same thing. So can you. Being human does not confer immunity from making a good story out of incomplete evidence. If anything, we’ve had considerably longer to practice.
That is why, as we investigate ideas on this website, I want us to keep track of what sort of thing we’ve actually found. Sometimes we’ll have good evidence that two things are related. Sometimes we’ll have a reasonable possibility worth investigating. Sometimes we’ll have nothing more than two things that look suspiciously alike.
And sometimes we simply won’t have a clue.
That’s Not Where the Conversation Ends
“We don’t know” is not surrender.
If we have examined what we actually know and reached the place where the evidence stops, then “we don’t know” tells us where the boundary is. Instead of hiding the blank space with an explanation we haven’t earned, we can finally look directly at it.
If I tell you confidently why an old memory returned to me after sixty years, you can either believe me or argue with me. If I tell you I don’t know why it returned, but I can tell you what happened immediately before it did, now we have something to examine. What might have triggered it? What else could explain it? Has the same thing ever happened to you? Is there research that might help us understand it?
Now your experience matters. Research matters. Contradictory examples matter. Somebody telling me, “Old man, you’re looking at the wrong damned thing,” matters too.
That is much more interesting to me than protecting an explanation merely because I thought of it first. If something contradicts what I think is happening, I don’t want to throw it away merely because it is inconvenient. The contradiction may be telling us that we’re missing a condition, that our explanation works only sometimes, or that we’re examining the wrong mechanism altogether.
Being wrong doesn’t necessarily wreck the investigation. Sometimes discovering exactly where we’re wrong is the investigation.
Here’s Where I Think You Cheat
Now we get to you.
You have explanations for things you don’t actually know.
You know why your boss rejected your suggestion. You know why your husband or wife didn’t answer you. You know why customers stopped buying something, why your daughter made that decision, why the dog is staring at the refrigerator, and probably why Uncle Fred hasn’t called since Christmas.
Some of those explanations are undoubtedly correct. The uncomfortable question is which ones you know and which ones merely fit.
I’m not suggesting you go through life refusing to reach conclusions until a peer-reviewed research team has investigated Uncle Fred. I’m suggesting something much smaller. Every once in a while, catch yourself explaining something and ask what evidence you actually have for the explanation.
If the answer is not much, don’t necessarily throw the explanation away. Change the label. It might be maybe, I suspect, one possibility is, or I wonder whether.
Those aren’t cowardly words when uncertainty is real. They’re handles. They let you pick up an unexplained thing and turn it around without pretending you’ve already finished examining it.
The Place Where We Haven’t Got a Clue
That’s why there is a category on this website called We Haven’t Got a Clue.
It isn’t where questions come to die. It’s where I want to put questions whose explanations have outrun their evidence. We can preserve the question, say what we actually know, identify what we’re merely guessing, and see whether another encounter changes anything.
Some questions may stay there forever. I am eighty-four; forever has become a somewhat more manageable research period.
Others may encounter a reader who knows something we don’t. One may bump into research we hadn’t found. Somebody may tell us about an experience that contradicts ours completely. A question may eventually acquire enough evidence that we can move it somewhere else on the site.
I don’t know which ones will.
That’s the interesting part.
So here’s your chance to tell me I’m full of it. Think of something you are absolutely certain you understand, particularly something involving another person’s motives, your own memory, or where one of your ideas came from.
Now remove everything you inferred and leave only what you actually know happened.
What’s left?
If the answer turns out to be “I don’t know,” don’t hurry to fill the hole. Have a look around in there first.
There may be something interesting we haven’t got a clue about yet.