Facing the facts about humility
Being humble about what we know recognises the truth of human experience
The organising insight of this Substack - Humble Knowledge - is epistemic humility: the idea that we need to be humble about what we know and recognise that we can easily be wrong. This principle, closely aligned with the broader concept of intellectual humility, is often discussed across range of fields. It is often cited as an intellectual virtue, often in recognition of the biases or flaws in human thinking processes. While these analyses are justified, they miss the full force of the argument for epistemic humility.
Framing humility as a virtue suggests it has value but is not essential: you will do better if you have humility but can get away without it. Similarly, focusing on humility as a response to human biases suggests that as we reduce our biases we can decrease our humility. Neither approach recognises a foundational fact about human knowledge: our information sources and ways of building knowledge are necessarily and inherently limited.
Accepting epistemic humility simply recognises this truth about the nature and structure of human experience. This does not mean that we can never know anything with a high degree of confidence or certainty, but that these situations are the exception rather than the norm. They therefore require significant justification.1
I recognise that this is a strong and uncomfortable claim, especially as our broader intellectual culture is built on an assumption that certainty is common. But I would argue that epistemic humility cannot be avoided when we think seriously about human knowledge. It should be the starting point from which we understand knowledge, information, decision processes and action, rather than something we consider later.
This means, for example, that we should not set up decision processes on the assumption that we can have certainty about our informational inputs. For this assumption is not justified and says more about human hopes (or delusions) than anything about the real world.
Evidence for humility
To say that epistemic humility simply recognises the truth of human experience is a strong claim, but there is a lot of evidence behind it. I have already covered lots of strands of evidence in previous articles, so this article will mostly aggregate previous information.
Nevertheless, we can start with an academic estimate of the amount of information contained in the visible, physical universe. A few years ago, physicist Melvin Vopson estimated that “there are ∼6 × 1080 bits of information stored in all the matter particles of the observable universe.” We should not take this as definitive, but a reasonable ballpark estimate.
By comparison, if we approximate the total of human knowledge by the amount of information stored on the internet (which clearly is not accurate, especially as the evidence for the Dead Internet Theory keeps growing), then human knowledge (or at least the internet) contains about 1 x 1027 bits.2 For context, this means that if the information stored on the internet doubled every year, it would still take almost 200 years to match the amount of information stored in the physical, visible universe. However you look at these numbers, the volume of human knowledge is insignificant and rounds to 0 under all approximations compared to the volume of things to know in the universe.
Of course, it can be objected to this that human knowledge is coded more in theories, especially scientific theories, about how the world works rather than disaggregated data or information. But the present state of science only adds weight to the arguments that we are fundamentally limited. Some of the most foundational and highly successful scientific theories developed in the twentieth century, like quantum mechanics and chaos theory, explicitly build in limits to our knowledge to the core frameworks of the theories. Even more seriously, there are modern discoveries of physical problems that are logically unsolvable and so can never have an answer.
We can also look at the many discoveries in psychology about limitations to human reasoning and knowledge, of which cognitive biases and heuristics are the most well-known. Or, more generally, the very structure of the scientific method, the most consistently successful approach for building knowledge, is founded on an explicit epistemic humility.
This same pattern shows up if we look at the history of philosophy and structured thought, which is a long story of repeated failures to establish any basis for certainty about our knowledge, including via formal logic or mathematics.
This isn’t just a historical perspective, but if we pay close philosophical attention to the structure and nature of personal human experience, we find the same results. Human knowledge, whether individual or group, is always tied to perspective and is theory-bound. This doesn’t mean it isn’t reliable or generalisable, but that it comes with inherent limitations. Instinctual human behaviours about knowledge recognise this and actively track a nuanced scale of trust for knowledge claims that doesn’t reduce to the simple true/false dichotomy that logicians focus on.
Given it is a fact of human existence, humans behave in many ways that recognise the limitations of their knowledge. Longstanding principles like requiring multiple witnesses, or checking your sources, reflect this understanding. However, the way we theorise about knowledge and have built it into formal processes often misses these insights. We try to avoid the fact of our limitations and often build neater and easier processes that leave out the messiness required to deal with human epistemic limitations. However, if we want long term success in the real world, we can’t avoid facing the truth of our human limitations and need to accept epistemic humility.
And yes, my claim here is that we can be very confident, even certain, that human knowledge is limited and we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do. So I need to bring lots of evidence to back this up, which is the purpose of this post.
This source estimates total data stored online at 181 zettabytes, or 1.81 x 1020 bytes, and 1 byte = 8 bits.