Hard Limits to Knowledge

 There are hard limits to what can be known. I cannot know how long I will live. I cannot know whether a new purchase will make me happy-- or for how long the feeling it produces will last. I cannot know how others react to me, or how I may react to them.

I can form models: 'models of behavior' based on past experience-- and present and future experience in many things don't stray too far from what has already happened.

It is not that there is a limit to knowledge because all things are random, but because many parts of experience have an unknowable degree of randomness to them. Some activities for example, like exercise, have been done in the same ways since the dawn of writing. The greeks started the olympics, no? I know that if I lift a weight I'll get some muscle, or that if I run my stamina will increase over time. But other activities, while most of the time they do not vary, will sometimes spike wildly up or down.

Consider the unexpected dose of humor or sadness or feelings of affection that can stir in one's heart from reading a book. I don't know that these moments will strike me: 99% or more of the time, I don't feel very strongly when reading a book, but then whatever it is hits and I will laugh or cry on the spot. It is this second category of experience where the hard limits of knowledge are most wonderful and also most dangerous.

Taleb calls these two categories of randomness Mediocristan and Extremistan. It's important to know which category a given whatever-it-is is in. Death is in Extremeistan. I didn't die today, or any of those other prior days. So therefore, I won't die tomorrow or any of those other future days, right? Wrong: at some impossible for me to predict time in the future, it's all over. The limits of my knowledge here mean I am certainly in the dark to some degree, no matter how much effort I put into my own safety and longevity.

My laundry comes from Mediocristan: it builds up gradually, it is cleaned regularly. There are no odds that all my clothes will magically become dirty, or that they'll all be cleaned in an instant. There are shifts here: but even the most extreme are visible: all my clothes could become clean in a large enough machine, all my clothes could become dirty if I skipped laundry day for a few months. Though there are shifts and even outliers to laundry, it's all known enough. Known unknowns.

Well, I stepped away from this post and lost my train of thought. So this is it for now. >.<