You Don't Have to Predict The Future

Knowledge over certainty

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I don’t want knowledge.
I want certainty.

—David Bowie, Earthlings on Fire

When I was a kid, my first introduction to David Bowie was the album Earthlings on Fire. I listened to it every night when my mom was having her first schizophrenic episodes. It was so weird, it made me feel normal.

The lyrics from “Earthlings on Fire” have stayed with me over the years. Eventually, I learned that Bowie was alluding to British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who once wrote “What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.” I didn’t really understand that observation. But now, I get it.

Boy, do I get it.

You?

That line explains so much about what’s happening now. All the strange behavior, all the bizarre positions and hot takes, all the hills people are choosing to die on, all the arguments over trifles, it’s all because so many of our friends and families aren’t seeking the knowledge that would save us. They’re seeking the certainty that makes coping easier, even if it makes things worse.

It’s also gotten very fashionable to try and predict things.

Recently, there was another round of speculation about Donald Trump’s health. A handful of writers and journalists started to insist that he’d died (again) and that the government was trying to cover it up, only for Trump to emerge back into public life the other day. We’ve been through this a few times.

This time, I was struck not by the possibility of Trump’s death, but by the certainty of the writers who turned out to be wrong. They just wouldn’t let it go. And it’s not just them. Everywhere you look, a growing number of people in every political party and ideology are increasingly certain about their beliefs, hungry for arguments, and completely unwilling to consider the possibility that they’re wrong. It’s almost like the more chaos we endure, the more stubborn everyone gets.

Have you ever heard of Scott Galloway?

A marketing professor with a reputation for predicting things and telling the rest of us how to live, Galloway enjoys a net worth of $100 million. Back in 2023, he predicted that Donald Trump would withdraw from the 2024 election as part of a plea deal, citing all kinds of evidence and presenting his call as fairly certain.

We know the rest…

It’s interesting how the same handful of “experts” continue to dominate our feeds with their increasingly conspiratorial headlines and lousy predictions. A few years ago, they were the ones bashing doomers and telling everyone to be cautious before running with sensational headlines.

Now they’re the ones doing it.

They’re still making the same mistakes, though.

A few years ago, someone told me about dragon king theory. Introduced by Didier Sornette about two decades ago, dragon king theory describes events like black swans, with one important difference. You can predict dragon king events to some extent. You have to pay attention to the outliers.

99 percent of experts out there dismiss anomalies and outliers because they assume they know how systems operate, but those small factors often reveal patterns or principles that explain why an unlikely event can happen, something big, without apparent warning. It’s not that the warnings weren’t there.

They were just subtle.

Dragon king events are becoming the norm now. So many of our beloved podcast hosts and opinion columnists are trying to understand this world with outdated paradigms. They still don’t get it. The record floods, the storms, the wars, the surprise upheavals in politics, the fact that the Epstein files didn’t spark a revolution, and so on, all these things that were confidently predicted didn’t go the way anyone said they would, because they’re not looking at reality. They’re looking at a version of the world they want to be true.

They’re clinging to certainty, not truth.

It’s strange.

We live in a time of prediction markets, where you can bet on everything from basketball games to wars. Everyone wants to know what oil and gas prices will do. Everyone wants to know how a crypto will perform. We’ve got endless online grifters running around acting like prophets. As the world becomes more and more unpredictable, everyone seems to crave more certainty.

People who offer certainty are enjoying more popularity than ever.

Even if they’re wrong…

I’ve been digging through social psychology again, and it confirms this behavior. Humans value certainty over objective truth. The less they know, the more confident they feel about their opinions. They don’t want to read more or learn more, because that introduces complexity and ambiguity.

It’s the opposite of certainty.

So it makes sense that as the world unravels, people will seek certainty over nuance. Haven’t you noticed it? They don’t want to consider three or four points of view. They don’t want to hear the both/and arguments.

They want either/or.

They don’t want to acknowledge that three things can be true. They don’t want to stop and examine their assumptions. They want to make up their minds, and they want to proceed on that. If you complicate their narrative, they’re going to lash out at you. They’re going to feel threatened.

They’re going to attack.

It doesn’t help that our minds often conflate being wrong with physical pain. Put it all together, and you have a recipe for the current mess. People will accept a bad prediction over a nuanced one. They’ll seek a bad explanation over an honest one, especially if it lets them preserve their ego.

They want certainty, not knowledge.

That’s a bad recipe for the 2020s and 2030s. One thing we know for sure is that the world is going to become more unpredictable.

The billionaires and their puppet politicians are going to act with increasing indifference toward all the old principles that govern the world. More and more, they’re going to act out of motives that only make sense to other psychopaths, or the motives will be entirely hidden from us.

It won’t stop an army of podcast hosts from trying to predict what’s going to happen next, and an audience increasingly convinced that they know better than everyone else what’s going on and what we should do.

These days, it feels like overconfidence is the new currency. It doesn’t matter how right you are. It only matters how confidently you say it.

How certain…

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself going through a strange transformation. Yeah, all the threats remain real. Pandemics. Famines. Ferocious storms. You name it. But my family has found peace and even comfort in focusing on preparations, and not just the kind you can buy, but actually learning skills. For the last several months, I’ve been building things, planting things, stripping wire, and making plans. When you do that, then your worldview changes.

In a world that craves certainty, I’m choosing knowledge.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s going to happen later this year. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the 2030s. I know what I’ve read. I know what’s likely. I know what I can learn and what I can make to prepare.

That feels like enough.

I’ve made some predictions that turned out to be true, and I’ve made some that weren’t true. I don’t regret preparing, because it was always a path to knowledge. It wasn’t sitting around trying to predict the date of some politician’s death or what month famine will arrive at our door. You can’t predict things like that. All you can do is stay informed and keep learning.

The most important thing right now is to avoid certainty. Avoid groupthink. Question yourself. Consider multiple viewpoints.

Resist the urge to make up your mind.

Listen.

I’m choosing to be okay with uncertainty because I’ve got knowledge. It alleviates the need to predict things or speak with beaming confidence. It helps you plan for multiple realities. It helps you sleep at night. In my experience, the certainty doesn’t solve anything. It only makes you more anxious. It only makes you angrier. It only makes you more scared, not less.

You want knowledge.
Not certainty.