I'll read the rest of the poem tomorrow

I caught this quote in a film once.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, LITTLE GIDDING

I really like it. I find it very compelling. I don't want to leave my family – I don't want to go exploring – I don't need new friends when I've got such good ones in my daily life already. (I suppose I'm taking an optimistic viewpoint on that last line, but that's well within my liberty.)

The quote seems relevant in light of college graduation. "Where to?"

I don't want anyone to leave. And I want everyone to come back.

I've contracted abulia

Abulia. Who gave it to me? Marianne said she's had it longer than I have...

On "On trust and understanding"

I drafted a post one month ago call "On trust and understanding". It began...

The dichotomy between trust and understanding is new to me. I don't know when exactly I recognized it or by what prompt, but it swept through my thoughts as a unifying duality. You needn't trust something if you can instead understand it.

I recognized that I nearly always prefer to understand than to trust. I'm not religious. I'm hesitant to take advice. And I'm a skeptic and an empiricist – I consider the scientific method to be the best known recipe for true wisdom.

It ran real thin after that, so I stowed it. What I wrote put me in a dark place, hence The Silent Month (The Big Silence, Annie?). Now I'm cannibalizing that post in an attempt to liberate myself from myself (57"?). My favorite part comes after a break-neck discussion of moral skepticism, the futility of all prediction, and life goals.

So pick something and shoot for the stars, huh? What if I shoot for the stars and accidentally take out a jetliner full of infants? Or what if I become so committed to shooting for the stars that I wipe out an entire culture because I need their resources for my giant star laser?

That was for giggles, this is for my emotional blog photo.

I don't know what I am for. I don't know what humanity is for. I don't know where life or the universe came from. No one does. No one ever will. So I only permit myself to wonder about that stuff. How do people choose who or what to trust, anyway? They pick the one that makes them comfortable. Or maybe the one that positively challenges them. Whatever the reason, it comes from inside and inside alone and usually incurs a fair amount of close-mindedness thereafter.

It terrifies me what we sometimes do based on such a silly choice.

I still feel that way.

The heart of the problem actually occurred to me as I put aside "On trust and understanding" and wrote that Ben Stein rant instead. As the opening paragraph showed, I think the scientific method is pretty savvy. But I realized I trust it. I believe in it. I'd brushed that off before as "well, it's different," but now I can't look past it. Even the scientific method is turtles all the way down and that kills me - I thought I was standing on bedrock.

I had put Understanding on a pedestal only to realize I couldn't reach that high. I have principles, yes, but no reasons for them. Realizing that brings a lot of doubt and I'm still trying to choke it all down.

As far as I can tell, moral skepticism can't be directly denied; its biggest problem is its impracticality. Add in Hume's problem of induction and I've got quite the quarter-life quagmire. (That is a 24 Scrabble-point alliteration.)

I'm more lost in life than I've ever been; the ground is not real - there is no ground.

Puberty is awkward even for a superpower

ushistory.org preserves Thomas Paine's prominent works. In The Crisis (1776), one particular remark quivers with applicability in an otherwise dated paragraph.

Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.

Ain't youth great? Every clean slate whispers promises of greatness – having nothing to regret afforded America and her founders such hope! Two hundred and thirty years later, she's effected the very opposite situation.

Were her regrettable actions benevolent? Malevolent? Unforeseeable? Short-sighted? All of the above for the aggregate. Certainly, all were encumbered by ignorance. But action is for the courageous, and inaction the weak. (Or was it the wise?)

I regret that the gravest decisions must be the burden of so few.

Ignorance is OK, indeed

Ignorance is OK. My newest mantra. It's a refreshing thought. Obviously, it can be misconstrued, but it's memorable, eh?

The notion is intended to help you relax when making decisions of any kind. It is not intended to let you claim, for example, that purposefully not reading warning labels excuses feeding puppies drain cleaner (cf. Sarah Connor's technique, 0:30 mark). I'll elaborate while you rid yourself of that visual. (The puppies are happy. Wagging tails. So trusting.)

Donald Rumsfeld said it best, emphasis mine.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

I quote Rumsfeld just to paraphrase him. There are things that we know we don't know but we refuse to acknowledge it. There's so much pressure to make a decision nowadays. I'll take "WMDs" for the win, Peter. Take a moment and consider how awesome it would be if high ranking civil servants admitted to not know what was best for us all. Of course we ought to attempt policies, just stop assuring me that it's a sure shot.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has two popular books, Fooled by Randomness (didn't read it) and The Black Swan (did read it). This is the first place I saw the notion presented on its own. Taleb's work is rooted in the stock market, where people are payed fat cash to make decisions. There is uncertainty à gogo, but people can't resist claiming to have conquered it. (... fat cash? Who am I?)

To be fair, sometimes it's tricky to know what we don't know even in simple situations. Daniel Gilbert writes in Stumbling on Happiness about results of psychology experiments related to making decisions, big and small. One notable result: we are hard-wired to be unaware of our ignorance (à la our blind spot) about some things. Not only is it a habit to make decisions, it's an instinct. I'm sure it's served us well for millennia, but I think it helps to be aware of that automatism.

Next time you're weighing the alternatives and it's looking too close to call and they're breathing down your neck, consider shrugging your shoulders and smiling. It could be the most professional, mature, honest choice.