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Chapter 2: Truth, Logic, and the Problem of Induction

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Chapter 2: Truth, Logic, and the Problem of Induction

Overview

“If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

―Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Imagine life in an ancient world. You are a hunter-gatherer. Sometimes your food consists of an animal you managed to hunt and kill, but other times it might be foraged fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Every day might bring forth a new plant, or a new mineral for you to eat. But how do you know what will provide sustenance, and what might poison and kill you and your tribe?

Well, the most basic thing you could do would be to simply find out which foods work best through trial-and-error. You simply eat whatever looks fine to you, and, if you survive, you can assume that the food is probably safe to eat. But can you be certain that this food will always be safe to eat, under all circumstances? What about foods that look similar to this one?

You are facing a situation of extreme uncertainty, which you need to handle—your life literally depends on it. Although you might not be conscious of it, you will go through a two-step thought process. The way you handle this situation is through the following process:

First, experimentation: You try it, see what happens, and hopefully don’t die.

Second—all being well—you come up with some conclusions (and therefore theories) based on what you experienced.

Not All Uncertainty Is Created Equal

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Not All Uncertainty Is Created Equal

A good way to start talking about uncertainty is to address the heterogeneous kinds of uncertainty. The first thing we must understand is that uncertainty can come in different shapes and sizes. For example:

We face uncertainty about the future. For example, what will the weather be like tomorrow? Will the economy be in good shape in two years?

We face uncertainty about right now. For example, the Secret Service might be wondering whether there is someone right now planning an attack.

We face uncertainty about the past. Think about all the historical events for which we have no clear idea why or what really happened. What about the Kennedy assassination? Or history before the written word?

We face uncertainty about measurements and data collection. How can we be 100 percent certain that, when we measure a specific quantity, our measurement is correct? Sometimes instruments can be faulty. Maybe a blood sample is corrupted. Maybe we conducted a poll, and the data collection process was biased.

We face uncertainty around cause and effect. How can we know that a medicine is really effective? How can an intervention in an economy change the inflation rate? How do we know that a policy is effective?

Chapter 1: Where Are We Now? A Brief History of Uncertainty

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Chapter 1: Where Are We Now? A Brief History of Uncertainty

Overview

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Think about the things in life of which you’re certain. It could be things that you know about yourself: your name, your hair color, your address. There are also things that you likely know about your immediate physical environment: what the building next door looks like, what color the tree outside your window is today, or the name of your nearest supermarket. Without wading into an epistemological quagmire of how exactly we qualify these “knowns,” they are, well, known.

You might also be fairly certain what the weather will be tomorrow, or what the inflation rate will be for the next three months. But how certain can you be about those beliefs? What if I asked you how certain you feel about the inflation rate in 12 months’ time? Or the temperature seven years from now? You might be able to give me a plausible range, but could you give me the exact temperature of a specific location down to the tenth decimal digit?

Humanity has long fought a war against uncertainty. The powers of logic, science, and reason have enabled humans to create tools, methods, and, more recently, algorithms that can help us predict the future and control uncertainty. The hope, of course, is that in mitigating the unknown, we can improve our lives.

Preface

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Preface

Author’s Note to the Curious Reader

Uncertainty takes us on a journey through ancient philosophy, to renaissance mathematicians, to modern machine learning practitioners. It discusses how our minds and our brains handle uncertainty, and how and why the uncertainty caused by humans might be unconquerable. It also discusses modern technological developments, such as machine learning and blockchain, and explains how they affect the economy and the world around us.

I make the case that the common thread that connects the history of humankind to our current technological progress is uncertainty.

In the first chapter we’ll explore a brief history of uncertainty – how the unknown has shaped civilisation, the manifold ways that it can encroach on our lives, and the different kinds and guises of uncertainty.

In the following chapter, we’ll tackle one of the most important philosophical problems. Inductive reasoning is the process through which we create theories about the world; it is the foundation of scientific thinking. Methodologically speaking, it is one of the most important tools in our arsenal in the war on uncertainty. But why and how it works are questions that have baffled thinkers for more than two thousand years. We’ll discuss how the problem was approached by philosophers of different eras, and what this has to do with some of the current tools that we use against uncertainty.

In chapters 3 to 5 we’ll take a look at probability theory. We will see how this theory came to be, and we’ll address some alternative theories to probability.

In chapter 6, we’ll take a look at information theory, and the work of Claude Shannon – the first person to quantify uncertainty.

Prologue

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Prologue

A man in a tribe in 8,000 BC is delighted to have killed a gazelle. However, this happiness is short lived, as the food is barely enough for a family of five. Will he be able to find food the next day? A high school graduate just received a letter from Princeton. She holds up the letter with a mixed sense of anxiety and thrill and gets ready to open it. A whole nation is mesmerized by watching the returns. Which party is going to rule the country for the next four years? A couple is on their way to the airport to go on their scheduled holiday when they learn that all flights have been canceled due to a pandemic.

Experts debate whether humanity is facing environmental catastrophe in the 21st century. As the debate rages on, different opinions arise about the impact and the possible solutions to follow, but no one is sure what will happen.

What do all these, seemingly unrelated, anecdotes have in common?

Uncertainty is a common thread of existence. Recent advances in technology are simply the materialization of efforts to fight this enemy that humanity has faced since its beginnings. Philosophers dealt with questions around the nature of true knowledge and the state of the world. Mathematicians came up with ways to measure uncertainty and its opposite—information. Uncertainty is a part of life, one many of us would rather not live with, but one that we can’t avoid.

The world is changing, and one of the major changes we’re seeing is the increase of information, interconnectedness, measurement, control, and prediction. In our 24/7 connected world, there are few secrets left. We do not believe that dragons live at the edge of the world, or that monsters exist in forests outside our cities. Rather, those dragons and monsters now live in the future: in the unpredictable financial crisis, the unexpected illness, the unanticipated traffic jam that might cost us our job, or the unforeseen consequences of our choices, be they political or personal. We are gradually conquering the frontier of uncertainty, but some walls still seem impenetrable.

Tasmanian garden wins prize for world’s ugliest lawn

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Tasmanian garden wins prize for world’s ugliest lawn

Winner says people can save water, help animals and free themselves from the tyranny of lawnmowing

It is not so much a lawn as a moonscape: pitted craters dug by bandicoots, exhausted tufts of withered yellow grass plucked by wallabies and pitiful plants shrivelled brown under the Australian sunshine.

But Kathleen Murray is the proud winner of the first World’s Ugliest Lawn competition after the Swedish contest to encourage water-saving, environmentally-friendly gardening went global.

Murray’s lawn in Sandford, Tasmania, beat competition from parched grass patches in Germany, France, Canada, Croatia, Sweden, the US and the UK.

“It’s pretty shock-and-awe,” said Murray of her lawn. “The bandicoots love digging – that’s how they find their favourite food. Now my back yard looks like a real-life Hungry Hungry Hippo game. I also have an echidna that helps, and some chooks.”

Murray lives in an area without mains water, and so rainwater collected in tanks is too precious to waste on the lawn. If she and her four teenage children run out of water in summer, it can be a two-week wait before more water is delivered via tanker.

“I used to think the bandicoots were wildlife of mass destruction invading my lawn, but now I see that they’ve actually liberated me from ever having to mow it again,” said Murray, who is the proud owner of the inaugural trophy – a commemorative T-shirt. “I’m all for guilt-free weekends, especially since my ex-husband left with the lawnmower back in 2016.”

The Vinted phenomenon: how one woman sold her clothes – and created a billion-dollar company

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The Vinted phenomenon: how one woman sold her clothes – and created a billion-dollar company

In 2008, Milda Mitkute and a friend set up a website to clear out her closet. It soon grew exponentially. Now Vinted has 16 million UK users and is the first Lithuanian ‘unicorn’. Can it make secondhand our first choice?

The founder of Vinted, Milda Mitkute: ‘Clothing was my expression.’ Photograph: JurijSi Photo/Malvina Stankute

Fashion

The Vinted phenomenon: how one woman sold her clothes – and created a billion-dollar company

In 2008, Milda Mitkute and a friend set up a website to clear out her closet. It soon grew exponentially. Now Vinted has 16 million UK users and is the first Lithuanian ‘unicorn’. Can it make secondhand our first choice?

Sirin Kale

Sirin Kale

@sirin_kale

Tue 9 Jan 2024 06.00 CET

164

When is a jumble sale also a billion-euro tech startup? When it has 500m items for sale and 105 million users.

I am in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the headquarters of Vinted, the slick, easy-to-use app where users can buy and sell secondhand clothes, shoes and gadgets. If you haven’t used Vinted yet, you certainly know someone who has. In the UK, it has an astonishing 16 million users – nearly one-quarter of the population – and is taking on more established rivals, including Depop and eBay.

Every day’s a school day: the great-grandmother who goes to primary school

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Every day’s a school day: the great-grandmother who goes to primary school

A 92-year-old woman, in an area of India with low literacy rates, is inspiring others to learn how to read and write

he age range at Chawli primary school in Bulandshahr, northern India, has been wider than at other schools since the 92-year-old Salima Khan enrolled. The great-grandmother – who is known as Amma – struggles to walk far these days but for the past two years she has turned up as often as she can to the school in Uttar Pradesh, alongside her great-granddaughter-in-law, Firdaus, 35, and has learned to read and write.

Her enthusiasm for learning has motivated many young girls as well as married women in the area to enrol in school, including two of her daughter-in-laws. As her story has spread across social media, Amma has become a source of inspiration for women across the wider region of Uttar Pradesh, where about 30% of women are illiterate.

“I have been going to school for the last two years. I have studied for the most part,” says Amma, grinning as she says she was first attracted to the school by the free lunches that were supplied.

Amma, the 92-year-old great-grandmother who is inspiring generations of women to learn in her area of Uttar Pradesh.

Amma, the 92-year-old great-grandmother who is inspiring generations of women to learn in her area of Uttar Pradesh. Photograph: Jyoti Thakur/The Guardian

As a child, Amma had no chance of education and was married by the age of 14, two years before India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947. With limited opportunities, she worked as a subsistence farmer while raising four sons and a daughter.

‘Greener, cheaper, much warmer’ – heat pump owners laud their new system

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‘Greener, cheaper, much warmer’ – heat pump owners laud their new system

Report finds users even in Victorian properties and older rural homes are noticing cheaper bills and warmer homes

Gillian Woodward, 50, says her house has been “completely transformed for the better” by installing an air source heat pump. Woodward, a community nurse in north Wales, was “astounded” to discover that she was eligible for a government-backed means-tested grant that covered the whole cost of insulating and installing a heat pump in her home.

“A lot of my friends have said they’re not sure about heat pumps,” says Woodward. “But the technology has improved a lot and satisfaction levels, even in old homes, are high. I thought it was worth the risk.”

Gillian Woodward

Gillian Woodward. Photograph: Guardian Community

Her experience chimes with the findings of a report by the thinktank Nesta last year that found satisfaction levels for heat pump users in Victorian or older properties were 83%, challenging the idea that the heating technology is only suited to those in newly built homes. The survey found that two-thirds of heat pump owners and 59% of gas boiler owners were satisfied even without extensive energy efficiency upgrades.

Woodward’s 1880 two-bedroom end of terrace house, which had been awarded an EPC F rating, previously relied on a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) combination boiler. During the winter, Woodward used to get through a £75 gas bottle every 10 days, on top of monthly electricity costs of about £100 this time last year. “The costs of heating were astronomical even for the most minimal amount,” she says.

Ancestral spirit: can brewing a traditional moonshine help Colombia’s youth avoid gangs?

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Southern frontlines: Latin America and the Caribbean

Ancestral spirit: can brewing a traditional moonshine help Colombia’s youth avoid gangs?

Viche, a sugar cane-based drink made by African-Colombian communities for centuries, is slowly gaining legality and respectability

by Dimitri Selibas in Triana, Colombia

Supported by

Open Society Foundations

About this content

Thu 4 Jan 2024 13.00 CET

The thick forest buzzes with life in the background as a circle of women meet in an open-air hall in Triana, a mountainside hamlet in Colombia’s verdant Pacific region. Doña Gloria walks up to each person and pours a shot of viche from a herb-infused bottle.

“For us, viche is a distillate of wisdom, ancestry and culture,” says Gloria, a master viche maker and leader of the Association of Black and Indigenous Peasant Women of Buenaventura (AMUCIB). “Viche is the blood which runs through our veins. Without blood, there is no life.”

Viche, a sugar cane-based alcoholic drink, has been artisanally produced by African-Colombian communities for about 300 years. When mixed with specific plants it can be a medicine, a midwife’s aid for childbirth, or an alternative morning pick-me-up in a country renowned for its coffee. Now, the drink has also become a way to fight the threat of armed gangs recruiting young people of the African-Colombian communities.