Belief vs Knowledge

Let's say there is a mysterious room. No one knows what's inside the room, and it has only one doorway as both its entrance and exit. You saw a baby crawling out through the doorway, and not long after, another baby followed. Say you observed eight more babies coming out of the mysterious room. 'Can you confidently conclude that everyone in the room is a baby because you just saw ten of them emerging through the door?' That was the question posed by a guest speaker - a scientist - of the INTEL Science Camp in Nilai which I attended when I was Form 4.

Today, I have to return the three books I borrowed from a local library two weeks ago - one of which is 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (which inspired me to write this post). In its prologue, there is a list of items in two collumns, named 'Table of Confusion'. Under the 'general' section of the table, the following items were put in the same rows respectively: Luck vs Skills; Randomness vs Certainty; Belief/Conjecture vs Knowledge/Certitude; Theory vs Reality; Anecdote/Coincidence vs Causality/Law; Forecast vs Prophecy. As the name of the table suggests, these are the things people commonly get mixed up with. Unravelling the confusion was the central idea of 'Fooled by Randomness', which - true to its nature - I've discovered only by chance.

Last weekend I met my best friend and we talked over supper about a rumor going on regarding one of our friends getting married to a rich, much older man. The only verifiable fact is that this friend of ours has just got engaged, as evident by a list of well-wishers, replied with gratitude by this person when she changed her Facebook relationship status to 'engaged'. I told my close friend that as far as rumors go, it could be either true or false. Whatever the case was for this particular rumor (or for any others), I know for sure that it won't affect the taste of my tea on that supper. I took a sip of my tea. Then I asked, "What if the rumor is true?". I took another sip. "My tea tastes the same", I said. "But what if it's pure conjecture?" Then I took another sip. It was as sweet and as bitter as before.

My dad told me yesterday that one of his acquaintance (an engineer) suggested that my father should invest in FOREX after his retirement. That advice came after my dad sought this person's opinion about what he could do when he's retired. I told my dad, sure, people could get rich by getting involved in this kind of investment - at least that is their claim - but knowing very little about its system, risks and legal implications, I strongly advised my dad to flush away his friend's idea of investing in FOREX. The scheme actually sounded good, at first: He invested RM20,000 (borrowed from the bank) to a certain company ('Dan something') and during the course of 10 months, he gets RM2000 each month. After that 10-month period, whatever investment returns he collects will be pure profit. I asked my dad how long has his friend got involved in this scheme - he said 6 months.

Not only did this person still work as an engineer (if his FOREX scheme is so good, why bother having a day job anymore?), he has yet to receive his full investment returns (it would take him another 4 months). Of course he believes that by giving RM20,000 of borrowed money to a certain company, he would make easy money in a long run (he'll start to profit after 10 months), but since he's only 6 months into this scheme, he would never know for sure if that's going to happen, not until August. The same goes for the assumption that everyone in the mysterious room is a baby - you could only believe that's true from your observations, but you would never know for sure until you check the room for yourself. We also like to believe in some rumors because they are so exciting, but until we have the evidence, we could never know it they were true or otherwise. The difference between one's belief and knowledge is perfectly and comically illustrated in the cartoon below:

(taken from http://www.lukesurl.com/)

Although the terrified person likes to believe that he's more frightening to the bear than the bear is to him; the bear knows for sure that it is a bear.