Uncertainty Clouds: A Key to Navigating Today's Chaotic and Malicious Information Environment
Newsletter # 490 - Sept. 17, 2026
By Guy and Heidi Burgess
One of the biggest challenges facing citizens in today's democracies is the fact that it is so hard to find the accurate and reliable information needed to make sound political judgments. This is true even for people who take their civic duty seriously and are willing to spend the time needed to stay informed on key public policy issues. This essay starts with a quick recap of the many reasons why a high degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, and why it's dangerous to put too much confidence in our images of objective reality. It then goes on to explain what we see as the most promising strategy for dealing with this unfortunate reality.
Unavoidable Uncertainty
Much of the problem is due to unavoidable uncertainties surrounding today's big public policy debates. The scale and complexity of the world makes it impossible to conduct careful controlled experiments on a wide range of societal-level issues with their own unique characteristics and many complicating factors.
However, we are not helpless. Rigorous analysis can tell us much about the problems we face and the likely efficacy of strategies for addressing those problems. As Kenneth Boulding was fond of saying, because of these unavoidable uncertainties, "We should be prepared to be surprised about the future. But that doesn't mean that we have to be dumbfounded." There is much we can know if we apply ourselves to the task of looking for answers. (We talked about this in more detail in an earlier newsletter, "Sharp vs. Fuzzy Feedback — The Distinction That Explains Why Society Can Be Both Astonishingly Smart and Incredibly Stupid.")
Scale and complexity aren't the only obstacles to finding the reliable, objective, and trustworthy information that we need. There are a wide range of unscrupulous interest groups, who have figured out that it is to their advantage to mislead the public and give them inaccurate, but self-serving, images of objective facts.
Even more disturbing are the efforts of those who are attacking the very notion that reliable, trustworthy information is attainable. One strategy, pioneered by the Russians, is what the Rand Corporation calls the "firehose of falsehood." Steve Bannon (one of President Trump's influential early strategists) more crudely describes the domestic U.S. equivalent as simply "flooding the zone with sh*t." In both cases, the idea is simply to flood the information environment with so much contradictory information that people eventually conclude that none of it is of any meaningful value. They, therefore, quit asking hard questions about whether specific political proposals will be able to achieve the desired objectives because they assume that there is no way to know. So they just go along with the ideas favored by their side, and are against all the ideas favored by the other side without considering them much at all.
Somewhat surprisingly, these attacks on objectivity are being reinforced by a school of academic thought that challenges the very notion that objective reality exists and that experts can help illuminate it. At the broader societal level, this is something that is evident in the open hostility toward experts and technocrats that is exhibited on both the left and the right. These are attacks that resonate widely, given the intense conflict that exists between society's elites and its grassroots citizens.
Also contributing to the collapse of trust in expertise is the fact that much "expert" analysis is done by partisan think tanks that are more focused on making the case for a particular course of action than assessing the wisdom and fairness of that course of action. This has resulted in lots of competing opinions from supposedly high-quality experts and further erosion of the notion that experts know anything of value.
The widely expressed progressive belief that the only reliable source of information is personal "lived experience" — a philosophy that denies its followers the benefits of accumulated human knowledge and rigorous analysis — further exacerbates the problem.
All of this has created an information vacuum in which a great many people have quit looking for objective sources of information and have placed their trust in the collective wisdom of the identity group to which they belong.
Living with Uncertainty
Unfortunately, dismissing objective analysis and the objective reality that it seeks to illuminate doesn't insulate one from the consequences of that reality. Reality is still there and it can hurt you — potentially quite badly — if you don't take adequate steps to understand and adapt to it.
So how can democracy and its citizens better protect themselves in the context of such a noisy and malicious information environment?
The good news is that within the flood of contradictory, malicious, and deceptive information, there are some experts and journalists who are making honest efforts to think through today's tough problems, analyze potential solutions, and explain the foundations of their thinking. But the valuable insights into objective reality that they offer can be hard to find in a world where purveyors of deceptive information openly compete by marketing themselves as being the only source of fair and objective information that people need.
In my (Guy)'s own struggle to figure out how best to separate this genuinely useful and reliable information from the cacophony of destructive noise, I have found myself going back to a concept I learned decades ago when I was first learning about quantum mechanics as an undergraduate. While I don't remember much from those classes, I do vividly remember the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and being told that there was no way to know for sure where an electron was as it orbited around the nucleus of an atom. You just had a probability cloud consisting of all possible positions of the electron and some sort of estimate of the probability that an electron would actually be at each spot.
To me, attempting to divine objective truth on a wide range of social conflict related issues is a bit like trying to find the true position of Heisenberg's electron. At some level, the truth is unknowable. Still, we do know enough to be able to construct informal probability clouds in our head. We can be pretty sure that the truth lies within some range of possibilities, even while we acknowledge that there is still a possibility that the truth lies outside that range.
A second insight that I find useful in navigating our noisy information environment goes back to this simple description about how AI works and how AI models are trained. This widely cited description explains how computers are trained to read human handwriting. It then explains how the same process AI uses to do that is used to learn all the other things it "knows."
I was particularly struck by the key insight that makes the neural networks behind these systems so incredibly powerful. Rather than trying to develop explicit rules capable reading human handwriting in its near infinite array of variations, the system works by just looking at a very large number of examples of how different people write different numbers. Each piece of information from each handwriting sample is used to slightly tweak the decision rules that the computer is developing for identifying handwritten numbers. With enough examples, these systems were eventually able to tweak those rules to the point where the systems were good enough to be practically useful in places like the post office. In essence, what they are doing is using lots of data to focus the Heisenberg uncertainty cloud ever more tightly around the true answer.
We think that the combination of uncertainty clouds and the abandonment of the search for explicit rules tells us something very useful about how we can come closer to finding objective truth in today's chaotic and malicious information environment. It also suggests ways in which we can build a more accurate worldview image based on that information.
To do this, I try to look at the competing claims regarding the many objective facts associated with various public policy conflicts as just points in the uncertainty cloud upon which my evolving worldview image is based. As I do this, I also try to assign rough probabilities to the likelihood that each contested claim is actually true.
To do this, I try to look at lots of different sources of information — sources that include those expressed at the extremes of the right and left, as well as voices from the more moderate center. I also pay attention to the sources and reputation of each information provider and especially the degree to which they explain and document their thinking.
I give correspondingly less weight to those who simply proclaim that orthodox opinions are factual pronouncements (with the implication that anyone who dares disagree is an idiot that desperately needs to re-educate themselves.) In selecting a balanced array of information sources, I find tools like Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart to be quite helpful.
I don't view any particular source (or even small group of sources) as the definitive statement of objective truth. Rather, I simply use each source to slightly tweak the probabilities in my worldview uncertainty cloud.
For topics that I care most deeply about, I read a lot and, as a result, have a lot of data points that permit me to develop a much more refined worldview. On these topics, I tend to be more confident that the true truth lies within a relatively narrowly defined range. For topics that I spend much less time with, my uncertainty clouds are much less focused and my opinions are correspondingly more tentative.
This way of thinking about objective reality also forces us to recognize that other people (even people with similar motivations and backgrounds) are likely to have formed different uncertainty clouds that lead to sometimes sharp differences of opinion. We start to think of ourselves as part of a community of people with often very different views — a community that functions as a kind of societal level uncertainty cloud. Thoughtful and reasoned debate between people within this community is what refines society's uncertainty clouds in ways that collectively bring us closer to recognizing genuine objective truth. This, of course, is only true for people who open themselves up to this kind of transparent exchange of ideas and evidence.
We should also be clear that we are not advocating a morally relativistic approach in which everyone's opinions are equally valid. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying: "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." I give a lot more weight to those who are disciplined, rigorous, and transparent in their thinking.
As the world struggles with today's daunting array of problems, we should emphasize the enormous power of these collective uncertainty clouds. They are what give free societies with open access to information and the freedom to speak one's mind the collective intelligence needed to figure out how to most successfully adapt to our rapidly changing world. Those who lack or abandon this kind of collective intelligence are going to be at a serious disadvantage
Finally, this way of looking at things also teaches humility and takes us away from the self-righteous belief that we (and our group) are in the sole possession of truth — a misconception that drives most of the world's most destructive conflicts.
———————
Lead Graphic made by ChatGPT
Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!
In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.
About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.
If you like what you read here, please ....
