Kerby Anderson
What are the three hardest words in the English language? Perhaps you have heard that the three hardest words to say in the English language are: I love you. I have also heard some say that the three hardest words are: I was wrong.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner devote a chapter to this question in one of their books. They argue that the three hardest words are: I don’t know. They lament that this is the case because it is impossible to learn everything.
Apparently, our inability to say we don’t know starts at an early age. There is the classic study of British schoolchildren who were given a story and then asked four questions about the story. Two of the questions were unanswerable. There wasn’t any information given in the story. Nevertheless, three-fourths (76%) of the students answered these questions anyway.
It becomes ever more difficult to say you don’t know as you get older. Children expect their parents to know everything, at least until they get to be teenagers. Then their parents are considered very stupid.
Government leaders and recognized experts are not expected to say they don’t know. And we have lived through a pandemic and then a political season where many of our leaders should have merely said: I don’t know.
Instead, they were confident about the value of masks and vaccines. They were confident that inflation was under control. They were confident about their proposed solutions to everything from rising crime rates to rising global temperatures.
Often these were merely opinions. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”
That is why we need some skepticism and biblical discernment, especially when the so-called experts make such confident statements and predictions. Sometimes the best answer is merely: I don’t know.

Kerby Anderson
The term “equity” has caused great confusion, perhaps because many social justice warriors intend it to be ambiguous. Sometimes I have been told by my fellow Christians to stop criticizing DEI and equity because Christians should be for equality. Of course, that is not how the term is used.
We began to see its meaning during the pandemic. Noah Rothman reminds us that some public health experts talked about the notion of “grounding” vaccination access “in equity.” What that meant was to provide vaccinations first to the disadvantaged along with providing it to public servants.
Further back in line would be white people, which would include the elderly, who were at the greatest risk. According to one University of Pennsylvania ethicist, that was fine. “Older populations are whiter” because society “enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
The wildfires in Southern California provided another example. One newspaper editorial criticized the fact that some wealthy residents were able to hire their own firefighters but complained they didn’t suffer the same consequence of others. The real problem was the shortage of fire fighters, water, and common-sense fire management.
Heather Mac Donald addresses the use and misuse of equity in her book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. The subtitle of her book might seem like hyperbole until you dig into some of the stories she tells. The word equity shows up in science, medicine, music, and the criminal justice system.
We have seen this dangerous drift to equity. It is time for it to end.