Epistemic uncertainty

The world and human life becomes increasingly better in terms of income, wealth, environment, health, mortality, education attainment, size of homes, etc. And yet we persistently exhibit a negative mental correlation. The better things become, the more anxious we seem to become.

I have usually attributed this to two considerations.

First - As we become richer, individually and a a group, the farther there is to fall. If everyone is at subsistence and there is little or downside potential, the assessed probability and the concern about a possible reduction is mitigated. Things are already hard and they can't become much harder.

Which seems to me to be different from the circumstance where things are very good and they could become much harder. Perhaps demonstrated anxiety is driven by increasing sense of risk exposure. Which is more alarming - missing a rent payment or losing the mansion?

Second - The more prosperous we become, likely the more complex life becomes. Prosperity arises from specialization and complexity. There are more moving parts and more of them are remote and beyond control. That is stressful.

Third - The more prosperous we become, likely the more people we interact with. Human interaction is always fraught with risk and uncertainty. If we have to deal with more and more people, the greater is the risk and uncertainty.

From Highlights from the Comments on PNSE by Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex. He introduces another factor worth considering.

Imagine a doctor told you that repeated trauma can cause a long-lasting state of dysphoric depersonalization. In fact, you don’t need to imagine it – I am telling you now that repeated trauma can cause a long-lasting state of dysphoric depersonalization. How much effort should you put any effort into doubting this? If I say that my evidence is I know a few patients with trauma histories who say they’ve had long-lasting states of dysphoric depersonalization, and that most other doctors I talk to also know some patients, and a couple of small studies have been done on this and say the same thing, are you especially interested in doubting it?

We might call this epistemic uncertainty. In an environment of increasing complexity, the more probable it is that we have to rely on unknown agents for knowledge we cannot easily validate. Complexity is driving increase in anxiety via a higher volume of epistemic uncertainty.

If societal anxiety is indeed rising, perhaps one driver is that more people have to take more knowledge on trust.