It’s not what you know, it’s how you know it.

When it comes to knowledge there is an important concept that seems either not understood or easily forgotten in the court of public opinion. It is the idea that a person can be wrong to believe something even if later it turns out to be true. This is an idea that can seem quite counter intuitive. It seems natural to think that if someone makes a prediction that turns out to be true they knew it was going to happen. Having a blind spot for the idea of being right by chance seems to be something that is quite common.

The idea of being right but wrong to believe it can be illustrated through an example of someone playing roulette. For this example the person playing noticed the number 25 twice in one day and took this as an omen. So they withdrew all their money from the bank, mortgaged their house and headed to the casino. They place their bet on 25 and watched the ball completely confident of the result and then there it was, 25. They’re set for life, they quit their job and move to the tropics where they meet a lovely person get married and live happily ever after. The question is, did this person make a good decision when they bet their money at the casino? Were they right to believe they would win? This is where our brains really work against us, we find ourselves focusing on the fact that they did win. Before the outcome we may have felt quite confident that the person was making a mistake, however, after an outcome that is so positive we may find it more difficult. Perhaps we would feel we would have robbed them of their fortune had we advised them against it. To clarify things we have to think whether we could recommend to someone else they use this persons method for getting rich? If they were fated to win would they be wise to use this method of determining their fate to make future predictions? When you look at this situation with a clear head you can see that this person had very poor odds of success and the risk they took was entirely unwarranted. To notice the same number twice in one day is not significant evidence to suggest a change in their odds of success. This means they made a bad call when they chose to take the risk they did based on the information they had available, regardless of the outcome. If they had ended up loosing all their money their decision would have been no worse.

One of the commitments we must make if we wish to call ourselves rational agents who seek the truth is that we commit ourselves to making our decisions based on the evidence we have available and accept the consequences no matter how dire of being wrong. We must commit ourselves to making good decisions based upon that which is most probably true rather than which we would like to be true or that which we fear being true.

There are many ideas out in the world that do not pass the test of being the most probable answer yet they are widely accepted. People hold onto these beliefs under the guise that they might be true or we cannot prove them false. They do not understand that it is not that what they claim is necessarily false that makes them wrong, it is the grounds on which they believe their claim that makes them wrong.

We are always correct to reject and wrong to believe claims that are not supported by evidence . Even if later we find the claim to be true, our decision to reject the claim prior to the evidence is still correct. A disciplined adherence to rational thinking will not guarantee we are always correct and opportunities will be missed , disasters will be allowed to happen. However, rational thinking gives us the best chance we have of being right and the capacity to understand why we are wrong. Maybe sometimes with faith and instinct you’ll be right but at the end of the day you’re right because of luck, not because you have any understanding about what’s going on.

You really have two choices when it comes to knowledge, a system that is capable of change and adaptation which becomes more accurate in it’s predictions over time or an instinctive approach where you just trust things because they ‘feel’ right. The second approach doesn’t stop you from being right, it just prevents you from developing any coherent understanding of why you’re right and provides you with no means to improve your odds.