More Information Does Not Guarantee Better Reasoning

What If the Problem Isn’t the Answer?

By Kris Hollon | XKenosis

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We live in a strange time. We have access to more information than any group of humans before us, and somehow we haven’t become proportionally better at agreeing on what the hell is actually true.

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Give ten people the same event and you’ll get ten versions of what happened. Give them more information and you might expect those versions to move closer together. Sometimes they do. Other times everyone just gets better ammunition for the version they already had.

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That bothered me.

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Eventually I started wondering if we’re spending too much time looking at answers and not enough time looking at what happened before the answer existed.

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Every answer begins with a question, but every question already contains a map. The words we choose determine where we look. They can quietly decide what’s relevant, what gets ignored and which possibilities are allowed into the conversation at all.

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Ask why someone failed and you’ve already accepted that they failed. Ask why someone lied and you’ve already decided there was a lie. Ask which of two explanations is correct and you may never notice the third explanation sitting outside the question.

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The question isn’t neutral.

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That’s easy to recognize when somebody else does it. It’s considerably harder to catch ourselves doing it.

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Most of us think we’re reasoning from facts toward conclusions. In reality, there’s a lot happening in between. We observe something, interpret what it means, connect it to things we already know, fill in whatever is missing and eventually arrive somewhere that feels reasonable.

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The trouble is that the finished conclusion doesn’t come with those steps attached.

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We remember where we landed. We don’t necessarily remember every assumption that helped us get there.

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That’s why one of the simplest questions I’ve found is also one of the most uncomfortable:

What would have to be true for me to be wrong?

Not “Can I defend my position?”

Most of us can do that all day.

Not “Can I find evidence supporting it?”

With a phone and five minutes, almost anyone can.

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The harder question is whether we can identify what our conclusion actually depends on.

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Imagine having ten reasons to believe something. Ten sounds pretty convincing. But then you notice several of those reasons depend on the same underlying assumption. Suddenly you’re not looking at ten separate supports anymore. You’re looking at several branches growing from the same trunk.

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If the trunk moves, everything above it moves too.

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That doesn’t mean the belief is wrong. It means you finally know where to look.

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This matters even more now because information has become ridiculously cheap.

Search engines gave us access to nearly everything. Social media gave everyone a publishing platform. Artificial intelligence can now produce an explanation, argument or counterargument almost instantly.

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Our problem is increasingly not whether we can find an answer.

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We can drown in answers.

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The harder problem is deciding which questions deserve to be asked, which assumptions deserve to be challenged and which pieces of information would actually change anything.

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There’s another uncomfortable part of this. We tend to think changing our minds is what happens after somebody proves us wrong. That’s a terrible standard. By then we’ve turned understanding into a competition.

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A better question is what evidence we would accept before it arrives.

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If the answer is “nothing,” we’re no longer investigating. We’re defending.

If we can name it, though, something changes. We have created an exit door from our own conclusion.

That’s a surprisingly powerful thing to have.

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None of this requires abandoning intuition, experience or conviction. It doesn’t require becoming permanently skeptical of everything either. A person who refuses to conclude anything isn’t necessarily discerning. They’re just stuck.

The point is to understand the difference between what we observed, what we inferred from it and how certain we should actually be.

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Sometimes the evidence is overwhelming and the conclusion should be strong. Sometimes two explanations remain plausible. Sometimes one missing fact could flip the entire picture. Those aren’t the same situations, and pretending they are doesn’t make us more rational.

It just makes us more certain.

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XKenosis began around questions like these. Not because people need another authority deciding what they should believe, but because the space between information and conclusion is far more interesting than we usually admit.

There is an entire process hiding there.

And once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.

Arguments. Relationships. Business decisions. News. Science. History. The stories families tell about each other. The stories we tell about ourselves.

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Maybe better thinking doesn’t begin with knowing more.

Maybe it begins with becoming a little harder to fool, including by ourselves.

And maybe the most useful question isn’t always, “What’s the answer?”

Sometimes it’s:

Why did I ask the question this way in the first place?