Segal’s Law is one of those aphorisms or adages or sayings or tiresome tropes or something. It avers that a man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

In its purest sense, it’s a warning against the pitfalls of having conflicting information when you have to make up your mind. Conversely, if you’re a devotee of irony, it’s a warning that a single point of information might be comforting, but if it’s wrong you’ll never know it.

I’ve always preferred the Howard brothers take on the question. What if you had three watches?

The internet is like trying to tell time using a crate of watches. There’s so much stuff on it that you can’t possibly use it to glean dispositive information to make up your mind. There’s always another answer available, and ten people publish another one while you’re reading the last, ill-considered opinion or unfactual fact.

People didn’t used to be so confused about simple things. To return to the watch example, timepieces used to be somewhat rarer than they are now. Everything you own tells time now. A hundred years ago, it wasn’t all that unusual to ask a stranger what time it was if you saw them looking at their watch. But in that scenario, you’re just adding another layer to Segal’s Law. You’re trusting another person to tell you the correct time, and relying on a stranger’s watch in the bargain.

So if you have one watch, the watch might be wrong, and you’ll be misinformed. If you have two watches, they’ll no doubt have conflicting information, and you’ll be unsure which to believe. If you ask another person for the time, you’ll have to trust them, and to trust a watch you don’t own.

So what’s a person to do? You can’t trust one watch, and two is an instant committee, which is a recipe for not deciding anything. How about you try no watch at all?

People used to be much more in tune with the natural world. They were more aware of their surroundings. They noticed things like the sun rising and setting. The movement of shadows on the ground or on a wall as the day progresses. They noticed faraway church bells struck at regular hours. The behavior of animals. They knew their neighbors and could predict their comings and goings with a good amount of precision, because people had much more reliable schedules than we do now.

So people with no watch might not know exactly what time it was, but they’d know if their watch was broken. They’d know the difference between two watches wouldn’t matter much in the grand scheme of telling time. They’d sense if a stranger was pulling their leg when he told them the time. They’d simply laugh at the hoary old vaudeville Stooges joke instead of trying to do Stooges math in their heads. Because they knew the fundamental answer to the dilemma of Segal’s Law is to use your judgment when you hear information. People like that, dead and buried, would know that it doesn’t matter what sort of piffle is rampant on the internet, because more or less you already know what time it is, so to speak, and it ain’t that.