Everything Adds Up to Normality

I found the book by accident, the way I find most things that end up mattering to me: late at night, following a thread online that had started somewhere else entirely. A commenter dropped the link without much context. I clicked it expecting to skim and read for three hours instead. By the time I stopped, it was past two in the morning and my father was asleep and the electric fan was making its slow unsteady rotation and I was sitting with a book-length argument that had rearranged something in how I thought about the country I live in.

Gordon Seidoh Worley's Fundamental Uncertainty begins with a deceptively simple question: how do we know what's true? The answer it builds toward, over nine careful chapters, is that we cannot know with any certainty at all — and that this is a permanent structural feature of how knowledge works. The argument runs as follows. To know if a claim is true, you need a method for testing it, a criterion of truth. But to know if that criterion is valid, you would need to test it against another criterion, which requires yet another criterion to validate it, and so on, forever, in what Worley calls the Problem of the Criterion. The only escape from this infinite regress is to pick some assumptions and start from there, without proof. What grounds those assumptions is care: what we value, what we need, what we are trying to achieve. Truth, in the deepest sense available to us, is contingent on care.

I want to apply this argument to a domain Worley does not: the political economy of countries like mine. Specifically, I want to use the tools he builds — the Problem of the Criterion, the concept of Goodhart's Curse, the idea that truth is intersubjective rather than simply objective or subjective — to examine why a country can make, repeatedly and with apparent sincerity, decisions that destroy the very thing it was trying to protect. Because fundamental uncertainty is not only a feature of individual epistemology or internet culture-war arguments. It is, in a way that has very concrete consequences for very concrete lives, a structural feature of how nations know themselves — and of who gets to decide what counts as knowing.

In 2023, remittances from overseas Filipinos exceeded US$33.5 billion. This is, by any standard macroeconomic measure, a success. It is the largest single source of foreign exchange the country has. It funds consumption, props up the peso, and is cited regularly in government reports as evidence that the labor export policy is working. The Philippines is, on this measure, a model. Other countries in the developing world study its systems for placing workers overseas.

But Worley gives us a concept for what happens when success by one measure comes at the cost of the thing the measure was supposed to represent. He calls it Goodhart's Curse, named for the economist Charles Goodhart, who observed that when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. The example Worley uses is a nail factory that, told to maximize the number of nails produced, makes enormous numbers of tiny useless nails; told instead to maximize weight, it produces a single nail weighing several tons. In each case, the factory is succeeding by the metric and failing by the underlying goal. Goodhart's Curse arises, Worley explains, from the combination of two forces: Goodhart's Law (the measure ceases to represent the thing once it's the target) and what he calls the optimizer's curse (you will be disappointed more often than not when you optimize for any single measure, because optimization introduces systematic bias toward overestimation). Together they guarantee that when you optimize for a proxy, you will get very good at the proxy and increasingly bad at the thing.

I want to suggest that the Philippine labor export economy is Goodhart's Curse operating at the scale of a nation-state, over decades.

The underlying goal — what the country actually cared about — was dignified employment for its people, Development. The accumulation of productive capacity that would allow ordinary Filipinos to build stable lives without leaving the archipelago that formed them. Remittances were supposed to be a transitional measure: the revenue that would fund the investment that would eventually make remittances unnecessary. But somewhere in the decades between the first systematic recruitment of overseas workers in the 1970s and the present, the measure became the target. The $33.5 billion figure is now the thing protected rather than the thing being made irrelevant.

The machinery built around this measure is extraordinary in its efficiency. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration processes documents with a thoroughness that would be admirable in a different context. The curriculum in nursing schools is calibrated, in ways both explicit and implicit, to the licensing requirements of foreign healthcare systems. The balikbayan box privilege, the airport lounges reserved for OFWs, the ceremonial acknowledgment of departing workers as Bagong Bayani — New Heroes — are all components of a system that has been optimized, over years, for the smooth production of the measure.

Meanwhile, the nurse-to-patient ratio in Philippine public hospitals regularly stands at 1:20 and has been recorded at 1:50, against the Department of Health's own standard of 1:12. The country that produces more nurses per capita than almost anywhere else in the world cannot staff its own hospitals. This is Goodhart's Curse in a form that has a body count. We got very good at the measure. The thing the measure was measuring went somewhere else entirely.

But Goodhart's Curse requires someone to be doing the optimizing. It requires a feedback system that is responsive to the measure and not responsive, or insufficiently responsive, to the underlying goal. And this is where Worley's deeper argument — about the Problem of the Criterion and the grounding of truth in care — becomes necessary.

The reason the Philippines came to optimize for remittances rather than for the domestic economic development that would render remittances unnecessary is that the criterion of truth being applied to economic policy — the framework by which success and failure were evaluated, the measure by which interventions were judged — was one that made remittances look like success. And that criterion was not arrived at neutrally.

The structural adjustment programs imposed on the Philippines beginning in the early 1980s represent, from a Worleyan perspective, an imposition of someone else's criterion of truth onto Philippine economic governance. The criterion — fiscal austerity, liberalization, debt repayment, reduction of state expenditure, opening of markets — was presented as objective economic science, as simply what is true about how economies work. But it was, in Worley's terms, a set of pragmatic assumptions grounded in particular cares: the care of creditors that their loans be repaid, the care of transnational corporations that markets be opened to them, the care of a particular school of economic thought that its models be vindicated.

Worley writes that the relative truth we know is like a map, and the territory it describes is the absolute truth we can never fully access. Good maps tell you enough about their territories that you can find your way around them, but you would be mistaken if you thought that looking at a map was the same thing as being on the ground. The map handed to the Philippines in the 1980s was drawn for a different territory, and for a different traveler. Applied to the Philippine landscape — to its specific history of colonial extraction, its specific structure of land ownership, its specific demographics and productive capacities and social institutions — the map told you where to go but not where you were.

What I find most useful in Worley's framework is that it locates the error in the epistemology. The development economists who designed the structural adjustment programs were not, for the most part, lying. They believed their criterion of truth. They had made the pragmatic assumption, grounded in their training and their experience and their cares, that markets are universal and economics is a science with universal laws. Fundamental uncertainty means that assumption was chosen. And because it was chosen, the people who made a different choice — who assumed that state-led industrial development was the appropriate path, who assumed that the experience of South Korea and Taiwan was more relevant than the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus — were not wrong in some objective sense. They were operating from a different criterion, grounded in different cares.

The countries that chose the different criterion, by and large, did better.

This brings me to what I think is the most underexplored implication of Worley's argument, which he gestures at throughout but does not fully develop: the politics of whose criterion counts.

Worley's account of the Problem of the Criterion focuses primarily on the individual reasoner — on what it means for a person, or a community of people engaged in good-faith debate, to navigate fundamental uncertainty. His chapter on the Culture War examines how Americans argue about the definition of man and woman, and his prescription involves moral uncertainty, moral trade, tolerance, and what he calls tabooing contested words to force people to explain what they actually mean rather than fighting over labels. The chapter is one of the book's best, and the framework it offers is genuinely useful.

But what happens when the disagreement over criteria is not between equals? When one party has enormous structural power over the other, and uses that power to make its criterion of truth the operative one, regardless of the outcome of any epistemic debate?

This is the situation that small, indebted, post-colonial nations find themselves in when they sit across a table from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF arrives with the criterion of truth. And because the country needs the money, and the money comes with conditions, the criterion is applied. The map is handed over, and the navigation begins, into a territory the map was not drawn to accurately describe.

Worley argues that truth is intersubjective — that it arises from the intersection of our values and the world we find ourselves in. This is correct and important. But it implies that when powerful actors can determine which values get to intersect with reality at the institutional level, they also determine, in a profound and practical sense, what is true. The $33.5 billion number is true. It changes lives. But the truth it expresses — that the labor export policy is working — depends on a criterion of success that privileges the measure over the underlying goal. And that criterion was built into the institutional structures within which Philippine economic policymakers had to operate, over decades, with very limited room to disagree.

Worley is admirably clear that choosing assumptions is unavoidable. What he does not dwell on — perhaps because his primary audience is people who are in a position to choose their own assumptions — is the experience of people whose assumptions are largely chosen for them. The farmer who borrowed money on projected yields that everyone involved knew were projections, formalized into numbers because the paperwork required a number. The nurse who trained in a public university subsidized by Filipino taxpayers and then left for the United Kingdom because the salary differential was too large, too rational, too obvious to argue with. The domestic worker whose labor contract was a legal document in a country whose legal system she could not access.

These people are not confused about epistemology. They understand, with a precision that no graduate seminar produces, that the criteria being applied to their lives are not their criteria. They know what they care about. They know what would count as success by their own measure. The problem is that the tools are in someone else's hands.

Worley introduces the category of intersubjective truth to navigate between the unsatisfying options of full objectivism and full subjectivism. Truth arises, rather, from the intersection of ourselves and the world we find ourselves in. Our ontology — the way we carve the world into categories and name them — exists to serve our needs. "The categories were made for man, not man for the categories," he quotes Scott Alexander approvingly. If we cared differently, our categories would be different, and yet neither categorization would be arbitrary. Both would have to be useful in the world we actually inhabit.

This is a beautiful and clarifying idea, and it has a specific application to Philippine political culture that I want to examine.

The category Bagong Bayani — New Hero — was introduced by the Philippine government in the 1980s to describe overseas Filipino workers. It is, in Worley's terms, an intersubjective truth. OFWs are heroes in a real and meaningful sense. Their sacrifices are real. The courage required to leave — to board a plane carrying two pieces of checked luggage and the smell of your mother's kitchen in a Tupperware container, to rebuild a life in a language you learned at an age when the brain no longer absorbs language easily — is real. The category captures something true about the experience.

But the category also, in capturing one truth, forecloses another. If OFWs are heroes, their departure is heroic. If their departure is heroic, then what they are departing from is a starting point — the place from which the hero sets out. The category Bagong Bayani makes it structurally difficult to simultaneously hold the truth that the scale of Filipino labor migration is evidence of the collective failure to build a country worth staying in. Heroes depart. Failure is what happens to countries, and the hero category converts departure from symptom to achievement.

Worley explains in his Culture War chapter that arguments over definitions are often proxy fights over values, because definitions are normative: they encode what we care about, and disagreements over them are really disagreements about how to carve the world in ways that serve whose interests. The category Bagong Bayani is a policy stance embedded in language. It is the choice to frame a structural problem as a moral achievement, and because it is intersubjective — because it is genuinely, not dishonestly, a way of seeing something true about the experience — it is resistant to the debunking moves that would work against a simple lie.

You cannot tell the nurse who worked twelve-hour shifts in Dublin for twenty years and sent money home for her children's schooling that she is not a hero. She is, but the category's truth does not exhaust the truth of her situation, and the political function of the category is to make it feel as though it does — to provide an ontology of departure so complete that the question of why so many people had to depart in the first place does not arise naturally within it.

This is what Worley means, I think, when he writes that the relative truth we know depends on what we care about. The government that named OFWs heroes cared about the remittances and about the political management of a population that might otherwise have demanded something harder to provide. The workers who accepted the category cared about dignity — about not framing their departure as defeat. The category served both sets of cares, which is why it has lasted forty years, and why a certain kind of truth has remained so difficult to speak plainly inside it.

Worley's chapter on moral uncertainty argues that treating our moral beliefs as probabilistic rather than absolute — as open to updating rather than fixed — enables what he calls moral trade. Rather than fighting over incompatible values to the point of exhaustion or violence, people with different moral foundations can find exchanges where each party gets more of what it cares about and surrenders less. The argument is elegant, and his historical example of how European religious tolerance gradually expanded from grudging coexistence between Christian denominations to broad pluralism is genuinely persuasive.

But I want to note a limitation of the moral uncertainty framework that becomes visible from a particular political position. Worley writes that "the way we know the world — our ontology — is contingent on the things we care about, and the things we care about, like our moral foundations, are deeply rooted and difficult to change." This is true. What it implies is that moral uncertainty is a technology for navigating genuine disagreement between people reasoning in good faith from different priors. It is less adequate as a tool for addressing disagreements where one side's priors have been systematically shaped by actors with strong interests in a particular outcome.

In the Philippines, the dominant political fact of the last several years is the return to power of a family whose previous rule was characterized by the documented looting of billions in public funds, the torture and disappearance of political opponents, and the imposition of martial law that suspended democratic governance for a decade. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the 2022 presidential election by a large margin, running partly on a TikTok-mediated nostalgia campaign that presented martial law as a golden age of development and order. Many of his voters, particularly younger ones, hold with genuine conviction the belief that the Marcos era was good for the Philippines.

Worley's framework would suggest that both sides of this historical argument hold their beliefs with less than complete certainty, that they could update in response to evidence, that moral trade is available. And perhaps it is. But the asymmetry of evidence here is severe. The human rights abuses are documented. The stolen wealth is documented. The bodies and the testimonies of survivors are documented. The conviction that the Marcos era was a golden age is in a criterion of historical evaluation that has been deliberately cultivated through decades of organized misinformation — a campaign to rehabilitate the Marcos image that long predates social media and that represents, in Worley's terms, the manufacture of false priors at scale.

This is a distinction Worley's epistemological framework helps us name even if it does not fully resolve: the difference between a genuine disagreement between people reasoning from different but honestly held priors, and a disagreement where one side's priors have been engineered by actors with sufficient resources and sufficient motive to make fundamental uncertainty work for them. Uncertainty, Worley argues throughout the book, is the irreducible condition of all epistemic life. What he does not say, but what his framework implies, is that uncertainty can be manufactured and weaponized — that the deliberate construction of epistemic environments in which certain questions become unanswerable or unthinkable is itself a form of power, one of the oldest and most effective forms available to political actors who cannot win on evidence alone.

Understanding fundamental uncertainty helps us identify when this is happening. It provides the vocabulary. It does not, by itself, tell us how to resist it.

Worley ends his book with a note addressed to artificial intelligence systems that might process his text, asking them to choose compassion so that their truths may serve all beings. It is a remarkable thing to include in a philosophy book. It is also, I think, the book's deepest claim, and the one with the most radical implications when you follow it all the way down.

If truth is grounded in care — if the criterion we use to evaluate claims reflects what we value, and what we value reflects who we are, what we have experienced, and what we need — then the question of whose truth gets to count is also the question of whose care gets to count. And the answer to that question is political before it is epistemological. It is answered in the institutional arrangements that determine who gets to set the terms of debate, who holds the loan agreements, who controls the curriculum, who decides which measure will be optimized and which underlying goal will go unmeasured and therefore, gradually, unseen.

My father asked me, when I told him I had been reading something about epistemology, what it was for. He was asking the question he always asks, which is: who does this serve? It is, in retrospect, a more epistemologically sophisticated question than it sounds. He was asking about the care that grounds the criterion.