It is mid-July 2016. You are Theo Epstein, president of baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs. You took the job after a similar position with the Boston Red Sox, who, under your leadership, broke an 86-year championship drought known as “The Curse of the Bambino.”[1] Now you have been hired to break an even longer drought, the 108-year old “Curse of the Billy Goat.”[2]

Your Cubs are the best team in baseball, even though it is also the youngest. You have the best record in baseball, and your entire infield started in the All-Star game for the National League. But the team is not perfect. In particular, your “closer”[3] Hector Rondon and setup man[4] Pedro Strop are B+ performers: good but not great. You know that you have the opportunity to trade for Aroldis Chapman, who can throw a baseball harder[5] than any human being alive. However, Chapman will cost you. The Yankees, Chapman’s current team, insist on getting in return Gleyber Torres, the Cubs’ number-one future prospect and perhaps the top prospect in all of baseball. (Torres is currently in the Cubs’ minor league system, and not counted on to contribute to the major league club this year.)

Do you make the deal for Chapman? Let us crystalize the dilemma. First, let’s assume some sort of Faustian bargain made by Epstein: acquiring Chapman guarantees a World Series championship.[6] Most Cub fans would have said “absolutely, make the deal,” and, as we know, Epstein did, and the Cubs did win. But let’s complicate the question a bit. First, assume you also know that you will only have Chapman for the remainder of this season, because he will re-sign with the Yankees. You also know that Torres will be turn out to be every bit as good as advertised, starting in 2018. How does the deal look now? Let’s suppose further than you know (as Epstein could not have in 2016) that Addison Russell, the Cubs’ shortstop who plays the same position as Torres (thus blocking his path to the majors), will fail to live up to his potential and by 2019 will have so many serious personal problems that you’re ready to give him away. Still so sure about making the trade? Then let’s tighten the vise a bit more. It’s revealed to you that Javier Baez, another middle infielder every bit as dynamic as Torres, will turn out to be a keeper, but then in early September 2019, when the Cubs are in a desperate pennant race with the Cardinals and Brewers (their two most hated rivals) will break his hand and miss the rest of the year, starting a downslide that leaves the Cubs out of the playoffs, never having won another championship. Reaching for a second does of Prilosec?

Mr. Epstein, you, sir, are the victim of an epistemological problem. Epistemology studies the nature of knowledge. How do we know what we know? How do we distinguish between facts, and opinions, and beliefs? How reliable are our senses? How reasonable is our reasoning? To simplify the example, we’ve hypothesized away the most basic gap in Mr. Epstein’s knowledge. The real Theo Epstein could not have known that Aroldis Chapman would bring the Cubs a World Series championship. Even with that bit of knowledge, however, Epstein had to make assumptions about the development of future players, especially Torres, Russell, and Baez; he had to assess the value of an immediate championship against the chance to build a dynasty; and he had to determine his chances of winning a championship without Chapman.[7] There is no way to know the correct answer to those questions, which are based on assumptions and values.

This may be a frivolous example (although not to Cub fans) but it highlights a basic problem of human existence. We are forced to make decisions that are potentially life-altering, based on incomplete, misleading, and conflicting information. Life insurance is a perfect example. We buy life insurance precisely because we don’t know when we will die. If we knew that we were going to live to a ripe old age, we wouldn’t buy it. If we knew that we were going to die young, we would buy tons of it. We buy it in order to protect other values, such as family welfare.

We do this as a society, although, unfortunately, not always very well. Climate change, for instance. There is zero doubt that we are in a period of extraordinary warmth; a grade school science project can prove that. Moreover, there is broad scientific consensus, at least 90%, that human activity is at least a contributing factor to this trend. Some people, however, continue to deny that climate change is a real thing, or that humans are contributing to it. There is no doubt that the changes scientists want us to make to ward off what they see as imminent disaster will be profound and expensive. Should we make those changes, based on scientific opinion?

Or take our current politics. It seems more clear every day that the President has done things that deserve impeachment – such as by swapping foreign aid for Ukranian interference in the Democratic presidential primary and then instructing other public officials to thumb their noses at Congressional investigations. But, the argument goes, what if impeachment solidifies his base, makes something of a martyr figure of him, gets him reelected? Better, perhaps, to simply wait for the next election?

Each of these is, in its one way, an epistemological dilemma – a case that demands a decision based on imperfect knowledge. Each of them is hard, but not insoluble. The key to solving them, however, may not be to sharpen our pencils more and more, calculating the odds and weighing cost versus benefit down two more decimal points. Sometimes, the only answer to an epistemological problem is to return to first principles. In the Cubs’ case, the first principle for Theo Epstein was “win now”: not a bad principle for a team in the midst of a 108-year losing streak. For the climate change debate, perhaps the principle is to treat the earth reverently, rather than carelessly. We are stewards of the earth, not overnight guests. After all, if we drive more fuel-efficient cars (or carpool to work), turn our thermostats up, plant a few trillion trees, and stop having bonfires with the rainforest, what’s the harm if it turns out that all those scientists are wrong and we’re just in a warm spell? And with the President, the principle might be that, when a politician takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, we should hold him to it, no matter the consequences. First principles may not always be utilitarian, but they certainly clarify the mind. In First Corinthians, Paul writes “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully.” Undoubtedly. But some things won’t wait.

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[1] The Boston Red Sox won five World Series championships between 1903 (the first year the series was played) and 1918, more than any other team. In January 1920, the team’s owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees (who had not won a single championship) and used the money to finance his Broadway musical No No Nanette.  Ruth, a man-child of enormous abilities and appetites affectionately known as “the great Bambino,” went on to be the greatest baseball player of all time and (with apologies to fans of Michael Jordan and Muhammed Ali) the greatest American athlete of the 20^th Century. The Yankees over the next 86 years won 26 championships, 26 more than the Red Sox.

[2] The Cubs won two of the first five World Series championships. Between 1909 and 1945 they returned to the Series eight times, losing all eight. Billy Sianis the owner of the “Billy Goat Tavern” in Chicago, because his pet goat Murphy, which Sianis had taken to the ballgame, was bothering the nearby patrons. Legend has it that as Sianis and Murphy left Wrigley Field, Sianis proclaimed “them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.” As of July 2016, he was right. The Billy Goat Tavern, a long-standing favorite with newspapermen and downtown businessmen, achieved a second kind of fame on Saturday Night Live.

[3] The closer is the relief pitcher held in reserve to finish a game.

[4] The setup man is the relief pitcher counted on to protect a lead for the closer.

[5] That is, harder and in the strike zone. Perhaps a few other people could throw as hard as Chapman, provided they don’t care where the ball goes.

[6] This was, of course, essentially the plot for the musical Damn Yankees. Perhaps the most interesting plot line, now that the Cubs are done, in this year’s baseball playoffs is the possibility of a World Series between the Washington Nationals, who have never one anything, and those damn Yankees.

[7] We hypothesized that Epstein was told that Chapman would guarantee a championship, not that the absence of Chapman would guarantee failure. However, within a month of the Chapman trade, both Rondon and Strop sustained injuries, so it seems likely that the Cubs would not have won without Chapman.