Nobody Knows Anything - by Rohit Krishnan
Strange Loop Canon
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Nobody Knows Anything<br>on living with ignorance
Rohit Krishnan<br>Aug 16, 2026
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I have not published much of what I wrote the last month. This wasn’t due to lack of writing, but because I got extremely busy with a forthcoming major project. Some of you already know, and this will get launched properly soon! But meanwhile.<br>I.
As I’m beginning to work on some knotty problem, I start to think about something that I think about fairly often as it is, which is how nobody knows anything. In almost any of these kinds of endeavours with respect to human life, if you think you actually know something about this, you probably don’t.<br>Almost every piece of advice that you hear is basically entirely filled with survivor bias. What that means is that you probably can’t take any of them at face value and you probably can’t follow any of them without effectively just trying to follow someone else’s beaten path.<br>Now, this is not, you know, strictly speaking, always true for everybody because there is a large number of paths that have high beta. Basically, you can follow someone else’s path to become a doctor or to become a lawyer or basically do any kind of profession. In fact, a large part of success in life is effectively when you are able to take something that is difficult for many people to do, but possible for you to do, and try to make that your success criteria.<br>But if you’re trying to do something different, if you’re trying to succeed in some sense on your own terms, then there is almost no chance that you are going to be able to take someone else’s advice and follow along. Or at the very least, not without it trudging into such problem that at which point might not have bothered in the first place.<br>It’s a conundrum that’s not really talked about much at all, especially in an era that is as filled with advice as our own. For example, most of the interesting questions are basically like this. They’re not questions that anybody actually knows how to answer because the knowledge of how to answer is what makes questions become less valuable over time.<br>Whether it’s questions about the future or whether it’s questions about family or whether it’s questions about what one should even do ... They’re all like this.<br>Quoting myself from before.<br>Jeff Bezos, perhaps the best manager of the century, said a key to his success was “Disagree and commit”. You must have had teams you worked in to do projects during your time here. And if they were anything like mine, there would have been a lot of arguments.<br>Bezos says that at some point, when arguing back and forth is no longer useful, you should just say “I disagree with you, but I commit to doing it your way”. And then the chips fall where they may. No recriminations, no “I told you so”.<br>It’s great advice, right? Jeff Bezos created one of the most impressive companies of all time, presumably by following through on his advice. It’s about as valuable as advice gets. It’s constantly referenced in speeches, in books, in articles. A true piece of management history.<br>Now, Steve Jobs, also no slouch when it comes to building iconic companies, was asked this question too; how does he manage conflicts?<br>He said something different. Which is that his job, and the job of senior management, is to make the absolute best decisions they can for the company. And, he said, being humans we naturally are less willing to fight to get to the truth, or do our best work if we don’t think what’s being done is right. And knowing what we’re doing is right is crucial. In other words, he thinks “disagree and commit” is both intellectually dishonest and impossible to make work.<br>So which one do we believe? Which one do you follow?
II.
The fact is though that even though we don’t know much about the right ways to make decisions or the right things to do for success, and yet we live in wondrous civilisation. We have whole cities and medicines and semiconductors and a dizzying array of choices for anything our hearts desire. How?<br>There’s this quote I love by Alfred North Whitehead.<br>Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
To live in civilisation however is to live in ignorance, of exactly the type we’re stuck in from listening to advice. Almost everything you do, or care about, or rely upon, is built by an incomprehensible array of people and efforts often going back centuries. And we can’t know its full extent even if we wanted to.<br>There’s an old essay, called I, Pencil. If you haven’t read it already, you should do so immediately. It’s an autobiographical story from the perspective of a simple lead pencil, and explains just how staggeringly complicated it is.<br>I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can...