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you'll never know

2020-05-26 · letter vlog · John · 4:00 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health (also: Philosophy & meaning) · mode: Personal essay · tags: heavy topic, timely hook, self promotion

Starting from Skeletor's 'I could write a book about what you don't know', John reflects that we can never know most of the past or the future yet must make informed guesses, and argues that despite COVID-19 failures, expertise has not failed: we are watching it happen.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Skeletor's line and the many things about present and past John will never know

  • ★★ John recalls that in the cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Skeletor says 'I could write a book about what you don't know'; he didn't invent the phrase but introduced it to John. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John says Skeletor's plans were always foiled by something he didn't know, but he was right that there is a lot John doesn't know. — 00:00:00
  • ★ John says he will never know what it's like to be fluent in French, play soccer professionally, or understand the mathematics of quantum computing. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ John says almost all of history went unrecorded, so we'll never really know big answers, like why humans turned to agriculture, or small ones, like why cave paintings rarely show humans. — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — The future is unknowable too, so we make informed guesses, like John and Sarah's marriage; his guessing matrix is obliterated

  • ★★ John says increasingly informed speculation about the past can be productive and interesting and deepen our understanding, but we'll never know. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ John says the past is like the future: we can speculate about and even usefully model the future, but can't know it; he will never know 22nd-century life. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ John says that even about things we'll never know we have to guess, and do all the time, trying to make the best and most informed guesses. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ John says when he and Sarah decided to marry they couldn't know what decades together, raising children or facing loss would be like; they made their best guess and got very lucky, or at least he did. — 00:01:27 · Sarah Urist Green
  • ★★★ John says the matrix he uses to make guesses about the future, from what to study to how to spend an afternoon, has recently been obliterated, which makes this historical moment dizzying. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Tangent: uncontrolled mental illness feels like the floor might collapse, as in an Emily Dickinson poem

  • ★★ John says uncontrolled mental illness feels like going through the day fearing the floor might collapse at every step, like the Emily Dickinson poem where a plank in reason broke. — 00:01:56 · mental disorder

00:02:26 — What we don't know about COVID-19, the H1N1 death counts, and the pandemic's failures

  • ★★ John says the floor he counts on now feels less secure than it used to, and Skeletor really could write a book about what we don't know. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ John says we don't know if surviving COVID-19 gives long-term immunity, how effective mitigation strategies are, or how many people have had or died of it. — 00:02:26 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★ John says the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic had 18,631 laboratory-confirmed deaths. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ John says COVID-19 deaths are tracked better, but the statistics are still really incomplete, so we don't know most of what we need to know. — 00:02:55 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★★ John says there have been many COVID-19 failures: of preparation, of political leadership, and of the systems that distribute information, goods and services. — 00:02:55 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★★ John argues expertise hasn't failed: we are watching in real time how it happens, as our species learns a new virus's properties and then progressively better containment strategies. — 00:02:55 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★ John says later studies found at least 150,000 and perhaps as many as half a million people actually died from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. — 00:02:55

00:03:24 — Expertise hasn't failed: we are watching it happen and will get better at treating and preventing the disease

  • ★★ John says we are already making better guesses about what the future may look like and how to make it less catastrophic. — 00:03:24
  • ★★★ John says that over time, through shared expertise, we will get better at treating and preventing COVID-19, until someone writes a book about what we didn't know but found out. — 00:03:24 · COVID-19 pandemic

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: COVID-19 pandemic · expert · Skeletor · Uncertainty

Also: People: Emily Dickinson · Sarah Urist Green

Works: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe · I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

Concepts: cave painting · Intellectual humility · Marriage · mental disorder

Events: 2009 swine flu pandemic · Neolithic Revolution

Only in the description or credits: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor · Kurzgesagt · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast) · TikTok

Also centred on expert: Can You Trust Mainstream Media? · Trust and Fire - Thoughts from the Smoke · Things I'm Finding Encouraging

Also centred on Uncertainty: get your game on · On February 3rd, 2020, I Wrote a Video I Didn't Make. Here It Is. · How Actually Crazy is This Mess?

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