I haven't been lurking long, I just showed up because the site I was contributing to just seemed to be attenuating...I decided on the spot to try the Zone, although I had forgotten my password!

The chart is a good one, but it does have one serious consequence.

The older and wiser I get, the less I am convinced of the validity or infallibility of the concept of "truth". No, I'm not pushing the hippy dippy idea that reality depends on the observer, that truth is culturally determined, and that there is no means of externally verifying anything. I don't buy that, either, and I know it gives you the shivering fits just to think some people do.
I am convinced there is an external physical reality whose existence and properties are independent of our knowledge of it. But that really doesn't tell you much, does it? We already know how undependable and distorting our senses are.

But even in the hard sciences, like physics, highly qualified individuals interpret the same data in different ways, and bitter disputes result. These disputes are often only resolved by consensus, through the peer-review process, and somehow that strikes me as somewhat unsatisfying, having had some pretty sketchy peers in my past. Even the experimentum crucis has sometimes been known to lead us astray.

Our knowledge of physical reality is often based on the (purely arbitrary) models we devise to describe it. Is light a particle or a wave? Neither or both? Is the question even a reasonable one to ask? What does it mean that either model gives us the right answers to problems under certain circumstances?

If physics has these contradictions, can we be too surprised if the social sciences have them? And what about philosophy or the arts? Sometimes we even get contradictory answers because we ask the wrong questions, or phrase them the wrong way. Have you stopped beating your wife? Is it nature or nurture, predestination or free will, is the universe deterministic or random? And what happens when even the mathematics we use to describe phenomena and design machines depends on the scale which we are studying: statistics on the micro, complex analysis on the macro? Is the world digital or analogue, discrete or continuous?

By carefully picking our questions, we can always force whatever answer we want. That's fun in a high school debate, or an internet chat room, but what about in the legislature, in the courts? Suddenly its not just debate, we're talking people's lives and freedom.

We all learn sooner or later that much of our mental activity often occurs below the conscious level. We go into a bar and we know there's going to be a fight. The soldier looks down a street and he knows there is a sniper or an IED there. The person you thought you knew so well does or says something that makes you realize they have betrayed you. No, it's not ESP or magic, you're picking up on subliminal cues and processing them somehow. You know something is wrong, or you realize everything is ok, and you don't know why you know.

This is what we rely on when forced to make a decision based on insufficient data; and lets face, all the really important decisions have to be made with insufficient data. If you had all the facts it would be easy, right? Or would it?