Unknown unknowns and the narrative fallacy explains a lot (02-26-2025--Hour3)

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[00:00:30] All right, so I got turned on to this piece by a listener who sent me not the link because they knew I don't open links, but they sent me the title of the piece at Psychology Today. And the headline is The Natural Selection of Critical Thinking and the Socratic Paradox.

[00:00:53] This is barn burner type of material. Like that headline, like if I haven't captured your attention with that headline. No, this has practical implications and it connects to the two previous hours topics, the stuff we've been covering with the doge and the budget.

[00:01:14] And it is critical thinking. And I'll just refer to it as the author here, Christopher Dwyer, PhD, refers to it as CT. Critical thinking, CT. And he says it isn't about knowing something or not knowing it. Okay? Because you hear all the time, we should be teaching our kids how to think, right? We should be teaching not what to think, but how to think. We need to teach critical thinking skills, right? You hear that a lot.

[00:01:42] So what does that actually mean? Because it does mean something. And it's not just simply knowing something or not knowing a thing. It's about knowing the difference between the two.

[00:02:00] It's about understanding that here are the things you know, not to get all Donald Rumsfeld in here, but there are known knowns. There are known unknowns, right? And there are unknown unknowns. Things that you don't even know that you don't know.

[00:02:23] And recognizing that there are those things that you don't know. That's part of critical thinking. And that part is missing. That is missing from a lot of people's analysis in their social media posts, in their arguments online or in person, right?

[00:02:46] There is this either inability or a refusal to accept a premise that you don't know everything. And I know it sounds very basic, but there is no way to know everything. It's about knowing the difference between what you know and that you don't know stuff.

[00:03:07] And then applying certain thinking processes to efforts towards gaining that knowledge. You have to acknowledge what you don't know. I refer to this as trying to see all of the angles. And one of the angles is always that I don't know. And you hear me say that. I will say that a lot of times. I don't know. I'm not aware of this. All I could tell you is what I'm seeing based on what I'm seeing.

[00:03:35] And this is what it looks like. But, you know, in the first hour with the topic of the Ukrainian mineral rights deal that has apparently been struck between the U.S. and Ukraine. Right. People thought they knew they knew what was going on. They knew what Trump meant. They knew everything about everything when it came to Trump's efforts with Ukraine.

[00:04:01] And I don't. How could I? I'm not at the White House. I'm not talking to Donald Trump about it. I'm not in the negotiating room. I have no idea. Yeah. So that's a huge blind spot. So I can just look at, you know, what's being reported, public statements. And then with today's development, that there is some deal. Right. And I just caution. Give it a minute.

[00:04:26] That's what I was saying in the first hour. Just with all things in Trump world, just relax. Have some patience. Let's see what happens. Because that really has been, I think, the linchpin problem in trying to assess what is happening in a Trump administration is that. Trump says something or does something or one of his people says something or does something.

[00:04:53] There is this immediate, you know, flood the zone of overreaction. There is widespread ascribing of motive to Trump. Right. He's Putin's puppet and all of that. And not just him, but everybody around him. So there is a projection onto people about what is motivating them to do these things. Why? Because you don't know. You don't know why they did that.

[00:05:22] So you're going to assume that, you know, or if you're a reporter, you're going to go to somebody and ask them what they are assuming is the motivation. And then you'll print that. But that doesn't make it true either. You have to acknowledge what you don't know. Unfortunately, that's not very common. People don't like to acknowledge that they don't know something or a specific thing.

[00:05:51] I don't know why Donald Trump is doing that. And I know I frustrate people when I encounter them, you know, out and about. I'm at some event or, you know, go to a restaurant, run into people or whatever. And they ask, you know, whoa, what's going on with this? Why are they doing that? And they are dissatisfied with my response, which is, I don't know. Unless, like, I do know.

[00:06:15] But most of the times, I don't know why somebody is doing what they're doing because I'm not in their head and I haven't talked to them. All I can tell you is that this is what they did. So what do you think it means? This is Dunning-Kruger, by the way. The Dunning-Kruger effect by the researchers, Kruger and Dunning. That's why it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect. I think it's alphabetical.

[00:06:42] But this was a research project that they did where they put a whole bunch of – I think they were students. They were, like, college students. They ran them through a test. And they tested everybody. And then they asked them at the end, how do you think you did? And that was the real experiment. It wasn't the exam questions. It was, what did the students say when they were asked to give their prediction on how well they did?

[00:07:10] And what they found was that the kids who did the best on the tests thought they did the worst. So when you asked them afterwards, how do you think you did? Those kids that tested the best, they always said, or virtually always said, I don't think I did very well. And the kids who scored poorly, the worst, they were like, oh, I think I did all right. I did pretty good. Oh, I feel confident. They had a higher expectation of how well they did than the ones who actually did well.

[00:07:40] Why? Because the kids who knew more of the material knew that they didn't know stuff. And the kids who didn't know the material, they had no idea what they didn't know. That's Dunning-Kruger. There are more people, sorry, there are people who apply critical thinking, right? There are people out there that do it. And there are some who don't do it at all.

[00:08:06] And this guy, Dr. Christopher Dwyer, says that used to frustrate him that some people don't do it at all. And so he made it sort of his mission to get people to think critically and all of this. And he's now come to a place, a better place. He's just like, not everybody is going to do it. Not everybody is equipped to do it. And people don't want to do it. And that brings us to Socrates, a.k.a. Socrates.

[00:08:32] And a thing that he calls, or it's called, the Socratic Paradox. And Dwyer says, I always thought Socrates was a bit of a badass. He didn't care what people thought about him. He stood by his intellectual integrity and he was killed for it. Ironically, perhaps it's because of what people thought about him that he didn't care. Simply, they didn't know anything. Socrates thought at length about knowledge and the knowledge of others.

[00:09:02] He knew that he didn't know anything, but neither did anybody else. According to this take on the Socratic Paradox, when engaged with the Oracle of Delphi, who told Socrates that he was the wisest person in Athens, Socrates believed the Oracle. But how could a man who knows nothing, says he knows nothing, be the wisest man?

[00:09:26] Socrates concluded that if he knew nothing and was wiser than everybody else, then it must be due to him being the only person in Athens who recognized their own ignorance. That's the key. Is to be humble enough to recognize, I don't know. Well, and this takes us to a thing called the narrative fallacy. You know, stories are powerful.

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[00:10:51] And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creativevideo.com. Over at Psychology Today, a piece by Dr. Christopher Dwyer talks about, he mentioned the Socratic paradox where, you know, Socrates goes to the Oracle of Delphi and the Oracle says, you're the wisest person in Athens. But Socrates is like, yeah, but I don't know anything. And so therefore, I believe the Oracle. Why is that?

[00:11:21] It's a paradox, right? No. Because he's the only one that recognizes he doesn't know everything. That makes him wise. That makes him the wisest. Then there is a thing called the narrative fallacy. Daniel Kahneman, the late Daniel Kahneman, he wrote of the comforting conviction that the world makes sense and it rests on a secure foundation.

[00:11:52] Our almost unlimited ability to ignore our own ignorance. The comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a foundation that we ignore our own ignorance. Dwyer wrote about humanity's desire in the midst of their information processing to try to tie things into nice, neat little packages.

[00:12:21] This stance is well reflected in what we know about narrative fallacy. When events occur in the world, we often think in terms of a narrative chain to make sense of it. Why? Because we dislike uncertainty. We want closure. We want explanations for things. And so we fill in the gaps. Narratives provide a cause and effect story for what happened.

[00:12:49] And I've said this many times, stories are very powerful things. They have been passed down the entire human existence from person to person. We still know stories that were told thousands of years ago because they are so powerful. So narratives give us a cause and effect tale for what happened.

[00:13:14] A linear, sequential means of processing of information that helps us to remember it, to understand things or some other, you know, application. But it's a nice, neat little story. Unfortunately, most of these stories are fictionalized accounts of what might have been a real event. If it's not just straight up a fictional story, right? Aesop's fables and such.

[00:13:43] But if it's a story that is based on a, you know, real event, the story, the account gets fictionalized. And then we implicitly fill in the gaps with our own thoughts, our own feelings, our own attitudes when the information is missing. So then we start drawing links that may not exist. And this tendency creates a barrier to understanding sometimes random events are simply that. They are random.

[00:14:14] This actually gets to a lot of conspiracy theories. This is not to say conspiracies do not exist. I'm not making that argument. I would not make that argument. I don't believe that to be true. They do exist. However, I've said this for a very long time too, which is that when people are presented

[00:14:35] with the truly frightening reality that sometimes a few people can do very bad things and impact many, many others. 9-11 is a very good example of it. People did not want to believe, still do not want to believe that 19 guys with box cutters could murder that many people, that they could do something like that. Right? So people fill in gaps.

[00:15:01] This is the narrative fallacy because that's the way our brains work. We want a neat, nice little story from point A to point B, tells me the story. And if there are gaps, I'll fill them in. And by filling them in, it makes me believe that I know what actually happened.

[00:15:23] And you see it right now with so much of what is occurring with Trump and the Trump derangement syndrome sufferers. They are filling in gaps. Right? They don't know something, so they're going to fill in the gap that coincidentally abides by their biases, and now they know. And that's comforting to them. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events.

[00:15:53] And I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app, and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too.

[00:16:20] I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The Blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link, and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.

[00:16:47] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Alan with a tweet. It's a Pete tweet. Alan says, are you saying, Pete, that you don't know what's in Donald Trump's head? Did you not have the forethought to bug the resolute desk? How short-sighted are you? Apparently, that's a thing now. So, Alan, this is actually, I saw this story.

[00:17:15] So, people on the left have been criticizing Elon Musk for bringing his son to the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago for that press availability with Donald Trump. And Trump is sitting at the resolute desk, and Elon Musk's kid is there with Elon. And, you know, he's kind of walking around, and he's being a, what is he, like three years old or something?

[00:17:45] He's a toddler, okay? And so, he's obviously, you know, he actually was very well-behaved for his age. And at one point, he starts picking his nose. And they're like the left in the media, but I repeat myself, they're all like, oh, he wiped his nose on the resolute desk. They had to send it out to clean the desk and all of this. Now, I don't know if that's true. See, there it is again.

[00:18:14] I recognize, I don't know why they had to do this, but apparently the report is that they sent the resolute desk out for a cleaning. And the narrative that people filled in was because Elon Musk's kid besmirched it so, let's say. Okay?

[00:18:40] However, there is another theory that I have seen out there as well. I saw this yesterday. They keep sweeping the premises for bugs. Not insects. Listening devices. They're trying to make sure that the intel community is not spying on them. And that's why they sent the desk out. Imagine that.

[00:19:13] Along those lines. Oh, I know. That could never happen, right? No, no, they would never do such a thing. Yeah, of course they would. Nick Arama over at RedState.com. The FBI has now reportedly opened an investigation because now it's under new management, right? Cash Patel, along with the soon-to-be deputy director, Dan Bongino. The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation into a honeypot operation.

[00:19:44] This is a honeypot operation. These are operations. They're plans to try to entrap Winnie the Pooh, a.k.a. Xi Jinping of China. That's what a honeypot is. No, no, I'm just kidding.

[00:20:03] No, it's where you use an attractive person, usually a female, to seduce or at least flirt with in order to lead on a target, usually a dude. And you get the dude to say stuff and do stuff and compromise him, and then you use that against him, right? You use that to turn him if he's an agent or something. You make him a spy or get him to wear a wire or whatever. That's a honeypot.

[00:20:32] It's a trap, right? Oh, look at this honey. And then you wander into it and, ah, now we got you, you know? All right. So the FBI is looking into a honeypot operation that was launched by the FBI against Donald Trump in 2015.

[00:20:51] According to the Washington Times, a whistleblower has revealed to the House Judiciary Committee in a protected disclosure that this was an, quote, off-the-books action run by, anybody want to guess? James Comey. Then FBI Director James Comey. Off-the-books.

[00:21:18] And this goes to something that I have long been perplexed by. You ever watch a show like the example I always give on this, but there are many, many examples, but the one I always use is Blacklist with James Spader, right?

[00:21:36] And, you know, these types of shows, it's usually, you know, it's like some intelligence group or whatever inside the FBI or, you know, inside a police department or something. It's like some highly specialized unit, you know? And the show was all about this one unit. And they are the ones that are always involved in every single high-profile case, right?

[00:22:02] And Blacklist was notorious for this because, like, they were dealing with the most, you know, I don't know, threatening and, you know, international global terrorist kind of thing and attacks on the leadership of America and all this other stuff. And they're the worst criminals in the world dealing with, you know, the biggest operations and all this stuff. And the unit is like four people, right?

[00:22:26] Which is weird to me because, like, I see all these other people working at computer stations in the background, but they're never brought into any operations. Always these four. Four or five of them, right? And, like, whether it's, you know, going undercover to try to get somebody or it's kicking in the door on a raid. They're always at the front of the SWAT team even though, like, they're the least protected. They got, like, one vest on and they're running point through the door. And it's, like, I get it from a TV perspective. But it's not realistic.

[00:22:57] Except, of course, with the leadership of the FBI apparently in D.C. where there was, like, four people and they ran all of the high-profile investigations. Is that a coincidence? Is that weird? Like, why is, you know, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Comey, this one group, and they're always the ones that are running point on the investigations into Hillary Clinton servers, right? And Donald Trump's sex or the pee tape or whatever, right?

[00:23:26] They're always involved in these cases. It always comes back to them. And here's another one. So according to the whistleblower, two female undercover employees infiltrated Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign at high levels and were directed to act as honeypots while traveling with Mr. Trump and his campaign staff. The Trump campaign, I will tell you, knows who these people are.

[00:23:56] There is zero doubt in my mind they know who these two women are. Zero doubt. Because they are now, the FBI is now looking for these two undercover operatives. This was not a part of Crossfire Hurricane. That was a different operation. Okay?

[00:24:15] Anyway, this whistleblower, this agent, quote, personally knew that Comey ordered an FBI investigation into Trump and that Comey personally directed it. The investigation did not appear to target any specific crime, but was more of what agents would describe as a fishing expedition to try to find anything incriminating that could be used against Mr. Trump.

[00:24:43] The whistleblower said, according to the Washington Times, that the undercover operation was obscured from the Justice Department's own Inspector General, Michael Horowitz. Which might be why he never knew about it. Which once again raises the question, what the hell are we even doing with all of these inspectors general in all of the agencies when they never find this kind of thing?

[00:25:10] Quote, the case had no predicated foundation, so Comey personally directed the investigation without creating an official case file in the FBI's system. So you wouldn't know. According to the Times, one media outlet actually had a picture of one of the women. But the FBI told them, oh no, no, no, no, that's an informant.

[00:25:35] And if you publish the picture, it'll get her killed. So don't publish the picture. And after that story, or after that conversation about the publication of the photo, the operation, the honeypot operation, got shut down.

[00:25:55] According to this report, one of the people is at now the CIA and the other got a promotion and is now a, quote, high level FBI executive in a major field office. Like I said, the Trump campaign's got to know who these two women are. Here's a great idea.

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[00:27:37] There's just a whole bunch of letters. Taxing the wealthy, right? Oh, this was about the proposal to increase the tax on the endowments for colleges, going from like 1.5% up to 21%. Taxing the wealthy, right? Isn't that what the Democrats want? Pay their fair share and all? I would think so. Karen says, I think it says a lot more about these women were unsuccessful at compromising the people in the high levels of Trump's staff or Trump himself.

[00:28:07] I only say that because no information that would have been available was leaked. I don't actually know if they were successful or not. There's no indication either way on that. I have no idea what info they may have gleaned or if stuff didn't work. I don't know. But they had obviously infiltrated the campaign to some degree. I don't know to what extent.

[00:28:35] Eric says, the media is complicit until they start burning sources that are caught lying. I agree. Russ says, I kind of feel like the winners, or sorry, the whiners, who are not on board with the Doge mission, who have been sandbagging and leaking to the media, that leaving isn't going to bog down the musketeers the way they think it will. I mean, in theory, this was their job before Elon was there. And look how much they accomplished versus the new guy.

[00:29:05] Okay. Yeah. Well, not so much. Let me see here. I had a message also from Chris. He says, in keeping with the FBI director's tradition, I wager three to one odds that James Comey wears dresses. All right. Well, too soon, Chris. Too soon. Bob says, we engineers think in terms of contingencies, which often result in critical over-design specifications.

[00:29:34] I count my training in both engineering and contract law as great bases for critical thinking. Most students find these disciplines too hard, thereby resulting in their not even suspecting what they do not know, a.k.a. a life filled with blindside setbacks. Right. This is, I will tell you, like, outside of the office here,

[00:30:02] where I participate in, well, let's just say it's a board. I'm on a board. Okay. And in talking with people on the board, I have to keep reiterating to my fellow volunteers that, like, just because I am identifying a potential thing, a criticism or a concern, because, like, they'll, like, some proposal will come forward,

[00:30:32] and they're like, this is fantastic. I don't know why anybody would be against it. And so what I try to do is, like, well, I could think of a reason why somebody might be against it, and here's the reason. And then they start arguing with me as if I'm taking the position. And I'm like, I said, I'm, and I've had to say this, like, repeatedly over the years, like, I am not arguing for the position.

[00:30:57] I am simply pointing out that there are potential other views out there that we have to kind of keep in our heads that there might be some legitimate concerns that people could raise. You could disagree with those. That's fine. But to say that there's no opposition or that everybody would agree with you because this is a fantastic idea or something, like, that's not, that's not true. There's probably somebody with a differing opinion,

[00:31:26] and so we should maybe try to consider that or, you know, try to get more people into the mix to help us ascertain that. I don't know. I just, I mean, that just seems obvious to me. And again, that's not me taking a position. That's me simply saying that there might be other people with other positions, that we don't know, we couldn't possibly know, all there is to know. We have to recognize that our own knowledge base is limited,

[00:31:53] and in my case, severely so, on most things. But I appreciate you listening anyway. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening,

[00:32:22] and don't break anything while I'm gone.