What we don't know might save us
In 2008, a 30-year-old math whiz named Nate Silver was flexing his reputation as a next generation baseball analyst, using his Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm to predict the career arc of MLB players. As Silver explained PECOTA to a reporter that summer, Oakland A’s rookie infielder Daric Barton had a 44 percent chance of enjoying a breakout season, while at the same time had an 8 percent chance of being a major league bust.
A few months later, Silver decided to take his talents to the political stage, where his highly accurate predictions of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections made him a media star and wealthy consultant. He did, however, hit the wall when it came to anticipating Donald Trump, which Silver attributed to both abandoning his original predictive model and Trump being a tricky outlier.
As of this writing, Trump remains President and Silver is still courted by investors, pollsters, gamblers, and cable news networks. But nobody’s quite sure how America got to this place.
You can’t blame Nate Silver for seeing a need and filling it. There are millions of people out there demanding answers, no matter how often those answers are wrong.
The term agnostic is most often applied to software platforms and religious faith – or lack thereof. But at its Greek roots agnostic simply means “not know” as in “I don’t know” or possibly “that’s unknowable.” People don’t get paid to admit they don’t know and that’s a problem.
The profession most dedicated to knowledge is science, and they are terrible at certainty. Scientists are smart enough to understand that knowing is a moving target; more study is needed, predictions change with fresh evidence, and catty peer reviews will expose the slightest doubt. That proved to be a disastrous model during COVID, when anyone with a social media account could declare themselves wiser than the world’s befuddled and compromised eggheads, while stitching together their own hand-crafted or God-given truths.
Faith in science has never recovered.
Much as their political cousins rely heavily on polling, businesses need to know consumer preferences before investing in products and services. This has spawned a cottage industry of focus groups, a rare opportunity to get horse’s mouth knowledge from a target demographic. Yet if you’ve ever witnessed a focus group in action, you may have gotten the creeping suspicion that these paid informants are telling the people behind the one-way mirror what they think they want to hear. Or you may have witnessed the session being taken over by someone in love with his own voice. The irony is that people who volunteer for focus groups aren’t reliable predictors of their own behavior. At the end of the day, you may have learned nothing.
Perhaps the richest playground for misplaced confidence is Sand Hill Road venture capital. 100 percent of start-up entrepreneurs will claim to know how and why the product will succeed. Of those who get funded, it’s a galling fact that 97 percent will fail. In the ecosystem that most celebrates risk, you can’t afford to admit you just don’t know. And you don’t.
Now there is AI, the most promising tool in the fight against uncertainty. When prompted, Google AI claims its advanced statistical models and artificial intelligence can help a football handicapper correctly predict outcomes around 55 percent of the time. When the same prompt is slightly rephrased, Google AI bumps that number up to 65 percent. Google AI is sporting enough to admit that football’s “inherent randomness and many variables make it difficult to call with certainty.” You can apply that to life itself, but you probably shouldn’t bet the house on it, although Kalshi is willing to take that investment.
And of course there’s our omnivorous cable news networks, the know-it-alls who turn five-minutes of real information into 24 hours of team speculation. Imagine how refreshing it would be for Erin Burnett to say “we don’t know enough at this time and will return after gathering vetted reporting” before cutting to Andy Griffith reruns.
Agnosticism is often misconstrued as a weakness of faith or hedging bets for the afterlife. But most of us have experienced that odd liberation of admitting we don’t have slightest fucking idea what’s going to happen next.
The Bertrand Russell paradox is that the ignorant are cocksure while the wise are full of doubt. It actually takes courage to say “I don’t know” and right now we could use more of that. Humility may be the very thing that unites us.
For what it’s worth, Daric Barton went on to play 8 years for the A’s, finishing his career with a .247 batting average, 30 home runs, and 184 RBI.
Now you know.
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