Certainty

Be careful what you wish for. A world of certainty is a world of no doubt, no mystery, no je ne sais pas; no contingency, no disclaimers that past performance is no indicator of future results, not because it suddenly is an indicator, but because that accursed inductive mode of reasoning is at long last obsolete, all data is at hand and the future can be arrived at deductively, from first principles, the same way that rice pudding and income tax can be deduced from “cogito, ergo sum”.

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown File:Certainty.jpg I don’t want knowledge. I want certainty. In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.

—Rory Sutherland

If there was certainty, ninety-five percent of you wouldn’t show up for work.

—The Jolly Contrarian

If there was certainty, ninety-five percent of you wouldn’t have any goddamn work.

—Also the Jolly Contrarian

A certain universe is a determined universe, where each stem in the great branching bush of causal chains is fully taxonomised, catalogued, worked out — if not in theory, then in principle — down to the individual particle in a Saharan dust storm, where the trajectory of each crisp packet that blows across St Mark’s square can be calculated, anticipated and predicted, as can all the trajectories if crisp packets that didn't, but might have tumbled across that palazzo, had the circumstances been different, even through, by immovable presumption of your philosophy, they cannot have been.

A certain workplace is one in which all decisions are made, all outcomes knowable by derivation, all misconceived strategies, all branding misadventures, governance shortcomings, trading disasters and promotion outrages of the future are as inevitable and unstoppable now as the countless ones that have happened and one’s hopes, piled against hopes, that there is something one can do, however feeble, to influence how things might be improved, made better or that any decisions one can make are even capable of bringing about personal betterment or reward

It’s relative

If only you knew. “Oh, JC, you silly old duffer,” you say and punch me on the arm. “I know certainty is an impossible state — everyone knows see that — but, like a prisoner shackled to a cave seeing shadows on the wall, it is an idea we can apprehend and aspire to; our advantage is pressed not by finding certainty but getting nearer to it than the competition. Isn't that the definition of a competitive advantage?

See also

• Doubt