The last point ended with an urge to seize upon every flicker of doubt. Not only is seizing upon doubt and tracking it down not contrary to contrasting a theory of the world and its parts and having theoretical principles that one is intellectually conservative about, the two tasks are partners.
Tracking the thread of doubt (and even purposely exposing one’s self to possibilities of doubt by reading outside one’s field, eavesdropping, studying random things–since one cannot know where doubt could come from) is a way to keep your theory “honest”, but a theory of the world–if it’s worthwhile–will help you find doubt.
Taleb in his book The Black Swan gives the example of a turkey being fed every day. If you plot that and the turkey’s “confidence” that it’ll be fed the next day, it’s impossible to extrapolate from that data that one day before Thanksgiving, that turkey will be killed instead of fed. One predict that with the “data” that turkeys in certain contexts are being fed to be killed. If one simply “doubted” the latter data, one would be just as confused as naively extrapolating from the first set of data. One can learn to doubt data sets of the first kind, even if one doesn’t know what the more necessary data is. Theory guides and clarifies doubt which clarifies and guides theory.
Tags: doubt, Life philosophy
