Be Wary of Absolute Language

Every Trump supporter is not a white supremacist

You can never be sure you’re right. You can only be sure you’re wrong.

I’m paraphrasing the great Richard P Feynman — one of the most influential physicists and minds of the 20th Century.

Science isn’t about proving things true beyond any irrefutable doubt. It is about developing a less wrong or more right view of the world, based on what we know about it.

But there are usually far too many variables to control for, and far too many unknown variables, for us to know ‘for sure’ that something is absolutely true.

As Feynman puts it, you might observe a game of chess and figure out how the individual pieces move. A pawn moves only forward. A bishop moves diagonally. A rook moves horizontally and vertically. You think you’ve got this chess thing figured out! And then, seemingly out of nowhere, both the king and the rook are moved at the same time — effectively jumping over each other — and you realize that you‘ve got to update your understanding of the game.

That’s a little like our understanding of the world. We only know so much based on what we’ve observed in our relatively short modern post-Enlightenment history, and in a complex and befuddling world, we need to be wary of dogma and…