"Verisimilitude and opinion are an easy purchase; but true knowledge is dear and difficult." -Glanvill

Glanvill was a seventeenth century philosopher, and since I don't count myself a philosopher I'll eschew trying to summarize who he was and let Wikipedia do the better job. But I love this quote because it packs a punch, and seems rather relevant to the early twenty-second century.

The last two decades have seen the rise of the information age, social media and, most recently, large-language models. We are deluged with content 24-7, can doomscroll through endless small or large takes, watch news at any hour. We can immerse ourselves in video games with faithfully rendered three-dimensional worlds. And it often seems as though the opinions section of the newspaper is the most-consumed (well, besides Wordle, of course).

So what strikes me about Glanvill's quote is related something that we all feel: that for all the content we have access to, the 'discourse' has seemed to veer into the, well, stupid. That an ever-greater percentage of what we have access to is just an opinion. It has the verisimillitude, the facade, of reason or enlightenment without actually providing it. From sports pundits to political talking heads, from finance bros on TikTok to those on the business TV channel of your choice, from the prognosticators of your topic of choice on Medium to the endless stream of podcasters having conversations with, essentially, themselves, there is no shortage of opinion.

There is a relative shortage of facts, and a what, in comparison to the volume, seems like an absolute dearth of reasoning. An example of this was the ban on research into gun deaths, only recently and slowly lifting. It was easier to have an opinion of what caused gun violence rather than look at it, and figure out the mechanics of it. It was more politically expedient to pretend all that didn't matter. We see this play out with vaccine skepticism, faith in the promise of crypto-currency or belief in voter fraud. These things can be packaged in a way that seem convincing, mostly because it seems outrageously good or bad, but there is little in the way of evidence, and the reasoning is desperately faulty as a result. (Vaccines work. Crypto is rife with fraud. Voter fraud is basically non-existent, and certainly doesn't affect the outcomes of elections.)

Another quote I love, given to me by a medical student I dated, is "See. Do. Teach." When you're learning a topic, you first have to see it - hear it, or get lectured to about it, read about it or observe it in some fashion. Then you have to do something with it, and when you do something with it you find all those gaps that when you saw it done were not obvious. Where exactly to hold the hammer when hammering a nail. How to find the function you want to call in code. Taking a spectrometer reading and mapping it back to a chemical compound. Following the directions given to you and actually driving to your destination.

This second step can be much harder than the first. Whatever you're trying to accomplish likely wasn't covered exactly by whatever it was that 'taught' you the topic in the first place, and you have to struggle and reason your way to figuring it out. The third step is even harder than that, because you really learn how much or - more often - how little you know a topic when you have to try and explain it to someone else, clearly enough that when they move from step one (listening to you) to step two (trying to use it for themselves) they aren't lost, that they can struggle or reason their way through to success.

That difficulty to really learn and master a subject is talked about endlessly. But if you get up the slope it means you've not only built the skills yourself with the knowledge you were given, but you've seen enough other people building those skills you can anticipate all the different ways simple facts might fall short - and not just for you, but for others.

And this is the 'difficult and dear' part, because it's hard. It's so much easier to stop at the first step, at the verisimilitude of true knowledge. What we see with our content environment is that the economics of our world heavily incentivize the opinion part. The 'Trust me bro university' trap is rife. And it has always been rife, but it's being fed to us through all sorts of automated means now, and if we engage someone gets paid.

A huge trap I see with the LLM-generation of (the inaccurately named) artificial intelligences is this facade of understanding. Regurgitation of knowledge is it's bread and butter, but it's not hard to find edges where it apologies and complains it's still 'learning' because it doesn't really understand. The AI isn't possessed with a goal, it can't do for itself. In some cases it tries to skip right to teaching, but it is only interacting with your text, not with you. Some of those gaps may be closed in coming years, but right now it is giving us the verisimillitude of true knowledge, borne of aping millions who actually had that knowledge and rendered it in a form we could see.

When I look out at the media landscape, or new technological developments, or how we approach politics, I think about this quote a lot. Often in day to day life what is being sold - a politician, a tik tok reel, a Medium opinion or Tweet, an AI agent - is all undergirded not by true, difficult and dear knowledge but verisimillitude and opinion. Maybe, for some purposes, some of the time, that's enough. Yet, when we see prediction fail, or promises fall through, or our pain fails to be relieved, or we simply find ourselves unsatisfied by the empty, sugary meals we have been fed, we should remember that we are, ultimately, getting what we pay for.

Of course, that's just, like, my opinion.