Reasoning through what you can't see but must be

If you’re coming here from Twitter you are probably familiar with this picture and can skip the next paragraph.

If not, I want to tell you that it’s a depiction of planes returning from WW2 and where they got shot. You’d think to reinforce the planes where they got shot, right? But this is where the planes that didn’t fall down got shot. The planes that were hit non-critically and still made it back home. There are whole graveyards of planes that got hit elsewhere, and that’s where you should reinforce your planes. This is why this picture is so famous: it’s a great illustration of  “selection” or “survivorship” bias and the undue attention given to what is visible. 

I bring this image to mind because I want to use it to illustrate what I’m aiming to do here, what will tie all this writing together. 

You can imagine your first thought upon seeing the planes hit: ‘Oh, we should reinforce the parts where they get hit!’ as being Reason at work.

But you can also imagine Reason working further and going ‘Wait, wait, wait. I only thought that because I’m only seeing the planes that got hit and survived, but if I saw all the planes, including the ones that didn’t, I’d actually want to reinforce PRECISELY the opposite parts! Precisely where the planes got hit and DIDN’T survive!’.

Now, this further use of Reason, where you reason not about what you can see but instead about what you can’t see but must exist is what I want to explore in this series of posts. 

(Do note how reasoning through what you can’t see but must exist—downed planes—ends up giving you the opposite recommendation of just reasoning about what you can see.)

So I’m dividing Reason into two types: one used to deliberate about what is seen, about “known quantities”, and a second type used to infer to what you can’t see but must exist. 

And, within that second type—what you can’t see but must exist—, I want to make a further (and final, I promise) division: that between things you don’t see because you just haven’t looked that way, like the part of the map that you haven’t explored yet, still covered by fog of war, or other continents before the Age of Discovery, or what your new AirBnB looks like before you open the door. Generally, things that won’t “fight” to stay unknown. Things that are “casually” or “innocently”unknown.

And then, and then, a second type of things you can’t see but must be: things that are deliberately hidden from you. Things that aren’t “casually” or “innocently” unknown but are, rather, deliberately and purposefully hidden, from you specifically, or in general. (Ok, I lied.)

This use of reason—to infer to what must be but is deliberately hidden—is what I care for and what I will be writing about.