In defense of radical uncertainty

A Halloween conversation with my teenage son has me reflecting on what it means to "know"

Last night, our four children went in three different directions. Our youngest two, living the thick of the Halloween dream, went with Nikki and friends; our second son, age 13, went with friends and no supervision for what he says is his last trick-or-treat hurrah. His haul was particularly impressive and brings an occasion for me to demonstrate, through the Dad Tax, the power of progressive taxation (I checked this morning – he has hidden his bag of candy, the tax evader; an enforcement action will be filed aggressively when I get home today.)

Our 15-year-old stayed home with me. We had dinner together and watched a psychological thriller. We also, at his prompting, had a long conversation about what it means to know something, how he can be confident (or not) in his opinions, and how to evaluate contested claims that seem important but come to him second- or third hand.

Our conversation was one of my favorites that I have had as a father because it allowed me to explain my own ideological commitments to my son, and even what it means to me to think about ideology. My son, always thoughtful, was thinking in slow motion and asking hard questions about all the competing claims on his attention and worldview.

Carrots and Eyesight

The conversation started in the way they often do, as part of a check in on the day. He told me that his 13-year-old brother came home proud to announce that the old truth that carrot consumption improves eyesight is false, that in fact carrots have nothing to do with eyesight. My eldest said, in his usual big-brother way, that this was old news, that he had known that carrots are not related to eyesight for a long time.

And then he caught himself. He acknowledged that, in fact, the same early certainty he had had about carrots in the old regime is based on the same knowledge production that he had now about carrots in the new regime. He had no idea for himself; he was just trusting what he was told from others. If he was honest, he had no idea what carrots do or do not do to you.  

What it means to “know”: Loyalty, Ideology, and Expertise

In my business ethics class, I teach this very concept to my students in a discussion on epistemology. In that conversation, I explain to MBAs—and now introduced to my teenage son—that what we mean when we say we “know” something usually refers to at least three different categories.   For many of our ideas, we “know” something because people we love have taught us to know it. This kind of loyalty-knowledge is very powerful. It permits us to build communities of common interests and common language, literal and figurative. Much of our knowledge claims in religion, society, hobbies, tastes, politics, and more stem from our loyalties.

Recognizing knowledge as a derivative of loyalty is valuable for two reasons. First, it helps us appreciate just how deeply embedded our worldviews are into a generational dialogue about what the world’s complexities actually mean. Second, and more important, it allows us to accept that others’ views about those complexities might necessarily reflect their own loyalties. Divergence, then, in even deeply-held views may in fact be a function of the fact that we live in a polycultural society with a lot of different kinds of prosocial community-oriented loyalties.

For my son, at age 15, much of what he knows about the world is a reflection of his loyalty to us. His membership in our church is something that he inherited from his parents, as we did from our parents (and they did from theirs back to the Mormon pioneers). His view on politics is profoundly influenced by ours. His sense of what matters for his generation politically has a lot to do with what his friends also believe. And vice versa: loyalty to him has shaped the views of people at church, at home, at school, and elsewhere.  

Ideology is different. Ideology is our worldview, the set of rules and heuristics that reduce complexity to actionable insights. It is informed by our community loyalties, but also evolves over time. The key insight here is that ideology is about reducing uncertainty artificially. It makes it possible for us as humans outmatched and outgunned by the world’s indeterminacy to make meaning by placing that uncertainty into prefigured narratives.

The greatest temptation of ideological knowledge is to assume that we have, for ourselves, reduced our ideological uncertainties and declared knowledge on the basis of expertise, where our intellectual opponents have not. We are smart and objective; they are dim and addled by their worldviews. There is no more potent ideology than the one that assumes it is no ideology at all.

Finally, there is expertise. There is the kind of knowledge that we can test, assess, organize, and create. For my son, an accomplished musician, he does not accept on loyalty or ideology that the key of E minor does not include (without more) a G#—that would be E major. I have been a musician for much longer than my son, his loyalty to me is very profound, but no amount of my insistence would shake him from this point. He knows what a G# does in the key of E minor, when he wants it included and why, for the most part, he keeps it out.

The key here is that expertise—knowledge for one’s self, first-hand, without filter—is extraordinarily rare. Claims of expertise are much more common. Knowing the difference is a very difficult enterprise.

The power of ignorance

My son then posed a question to me. In the election of 2024, were he eligible to vote, he would have a preferred candidate. It would be the same as the one that both Nikki and I support. He hears claims filtered through others from and about the other candidate with skepticism; he hears claims filtered through others from and about his preferred candidate with much more sympathy.

But, he confessed, he does not actually know who will be a better president. He doesn’t even know what that question means. He hopes that as an adult he would do the necessary research to form a non-ideological view on who deserves his vote, but he asked: is that even possible with so much uncertainty and so little expertise?

I told him—and tell my MBAs in the same kind of discussion—that I didn’t know the answer to that question. A vote is a very complex act, a blunt instrument that expresses some loyalty, some ideology, some (limited) expertise, some performance, some identity declaration.

More importantly, we talked about why non-alignment on the vast majority of contested and important issues is not a copout, not nihilism, not laziness. It simply acknowledges that the number of important questions in the world is necessarily much larger than the number of important questions on which he can have an informed view.

The question then becomes this: what do you do with this fact?

Becoming a radical uncertaintist

I left this to him to reflect and decide. For me, it is the most liberating of insights. Because I disclaim expertise on nearly all of the important questions that we face in the world, I recognize that my opinions and actions are motivated by loyalty, ideology, or ignorance. I recognize too that the opinions and actions of others are motivated by the same phenomena. This reality permits me to see those who disagree with me as neither corrupt nor stupid, nor necessarily even wrong. They are simply engaged in very similar exercises as my own, but tracking pathways that I have never followed.

My son asked me if a radical uncertaintist is simply practicing moral relativism. I don’t think it is. I do think that there are (very few) instances of objective truth that is available for us to understand through the development of “expertise”. My point is that the number of such categories and processes is tiny relative to the number of knowledge contests that we encounter in the world.

(Readers who know their Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James will recognize their influences everywhere in this discussion – outside of my own religious tradition, no one has influenced me more than these two thinkers.)

All of this leads to the label that I would affix to my world view. I am a radical uncertaintist. That means that I evaluate almost every certain claim I hear from others – and, importantly, from myself – with profound skepticism. I simply don’t believe that most people who express knowledge in the register of expertise in fact possess that expertise. This has shaped my research: my skepticism of claims of technocratic expertise by central bankers who participate actively in political processes is borne of this same sensibility. My work on bank supervision pushes against the idea that one version of risk management is always permanently superior than another; bank supervision is best seen as a space for constant negotiation of those risks.

It influences my approach to my religion. When I make claims about what I know as a Latter-day Saint—and to be clear, lest there is doubt, I am a devout and practicing Latter-day Saint—I am sometimes reflecting expertise (I know a lot about the Church’s history and governance), sometimes reflecting on personal emotive experience that may or may not be portable to others, sometimes reflect resolutions of uncertainty favorable to my contested ideology, and sometimes reflect loyalty to my community. More often than not I do not express my spiritual sensibilities in the register of “knowledge” at all.

And it influences my approach with Nikki to parenting these marvelous Conti-Brown brothers, open to a future that we can neither predict nor control. We must love them, protect them, and invite their independent explorations as they find their way in a world of such complexity and, yes, radical uncertainty. The rest will be for them to navigate.

At this point in my conversation with my son, we hit a thoughtful mutual silence as we thought through our one-on-one dinner conversation. It was getting late and we had a movie to watch.