I Don’t Know
It is my humble opinion that the wisest words that anyone can utter, are “I don’t know”. This issue has always been there for me, but has reared its head with more frequency in the past week. For example, some friends and I wen’t to go see the movie Religulous in theaters last night, and in the movie were many different religious leaders speaking so strongly about what they “knew” to be right. How is it that so many people can be so sure of something, yet all of them conflict with each others views? It’s not as if one of them is secretly lying to us; all of them really do believe what they are saying, and refuse to question what they believe. Why is it so foreign to them to simply admit the common truth, that none of them really truly know what the case is?
I appreciate the fact that I do not know this among other things, because it adds to the mystery and beauty of life. It’s not ignorance-is-bliss either, because there is no possibly way that anyone can truly know for sure about anything. This does not apply exclusively to religion either. Another example is when news pundits sit around a table after a presidential debate and claim that they know precisely how to fix the country, and specifically what each candidate needs to do to reach their solution. Again, there is absolutely know way that one person can know for fact what specifically needs to be done to solve all of the country’s problems, because it is simply to great of an issue for one person to grapple with, and each problem is a complex and dynamic one whose solution may vary by the week, day, or hour.
This also applies in the field of computing. For example, various sources are stating that they are absolutely certain that cloud computing is the way of the future, and that traditional applications have no place anymore. They could be absolutely right. But then again, they could be absolutely wrong. Can they predict the future? If we went back 4 decades, could anyone have predicted the internet? Or embedded devices such as iPhone’s or gumstick-size servers? The only truth I live by in this area is the one of uncertainty, because nobody knows.
If someone tells you for absolute certain that they know the absolute truth about something, they are either lying to you or have given up on questioning what the truth really is.
I am proud to say that “I don’t know” when it comes to the question of absolute truths and certainties.