Usually feels like
Open-ended
Nothing in the mechanism sets a ceiling, so no honest band exists.
Nothing can end this one by arriving, because the thing being waited for is not produced anywhere.
The wait, in plain words
Most of the waiting on this site is waiting for a machine to finish. This one is different. It is the wait people are in for most of the time they spend on pages like these: not waiting for a screen, but waiting to feel sure enough to act.
It gets mistaken for a research problem. One more page, one more list, one more comparison, and the feeling will turn up. It does not turn up, and the reason is structural rather than a shortage of effort.
Nobody outside is positioned to know. Not a directory, not a list, not a forum, and not this site. A page can tell you what it was given. It cannot tell you what is true at the far end of a string, who is behind an account, or how a particular exchange will turn out, because it has no access to any of those things. Why there are no numbers is the long form of that argument, and it applies to every page here, this one included.
Underneath, while nothing moves
It helps to be concrete about what a source can and cannot hold. A published address is a string that somebody handed to somebody. Copying it accurately is possible and worth doing carefully. Establishing that it answers, that it answers for you, or that whatever answers is what you assume it is, is not something a page can do at the moment you are reading it. The gap between those two is where the idea of certainty comes apart.
The same holds for people. A vendor page is a set of claims and a history you cannot inspect. A market interface reports on itself. Every source within reach is either describing itself or repeating something it was told, and repetition is not verification, however many times it happens.
There is one more thing the mechanism will not hand over, and it is the ceiling. The other cards in this band have no upper bound because nothing is obliged to end them. This one has no upper bound because the thing being waited for is not manufactured anywhere. You can wait for it with perfect patience and it will still not come.
Behaving, and not behaving
Since certainty is not on offer, the distinction worth drawing is between looking that is doing something and looking that has quietly become the activity.
Checking that is still working
You are looking for agreement between sources that do not depend on each other, and you notice when you get it. A string that appears the same in two places you arrived at separately is worth more than the same string seen twice in the same place.
You decided before you started what would be enough, and you could still say what it was.
Checking that has replaced deciding
Every new source produces a new doubt, and the doubt is about the sources rather than about the thing. The pile of pages you have read keeps growing and the feeling has not moved.
You are reading the same string again, not to compare it against anything, but because reading it has become what you are doing.
The right hand column is not a character flaw. It is what happens when somebody wants a guarantee from a system that does not issue guarantees. It costs real time and some judgement, because tiredness makes people act carelessly in the end simply to be finished with the discomfort.
So the condition that ends this wait has to be one you set yourself. Not a feeling of certainty, which will not arrive, but a rule made in advance: what agreement you would accept, from how many places that do not share a parent, and what you will do once you have it. The pause you add yourself is the same idea applied to a single evening.
Safe to do meanwhile
What is available instead of certainty is a short list of things that can actually be obtained. Taken together they do most of the work the feeling was supposed to do.
- Agreement between sources that do not share a parentTwo places that copied the same string from each other are one place. The value sits in independence, not in repetition.
- A rule for when to stop looking, written before you startSet while the question is still abstract and you are not tired, which is the only time it can be set honestly.
- A limit on what any single decision can cost youCertainty is unavailable. A bounded downside is available, and it does much the same job.
- The addresses as they were suppliedPrinted without ranking, without a claim about which one opens, and with nothing checking them.
- The whole shape of it, if you want thatEvery wait on this site, sorted by how long it lasts.
What makes it longer
This wait has one characteristic failure, which is that effort spent on it eventually produces the opposite of what the effort was for.
- Reading further after the sources have started repeating one another.
- Treating confidence in somebody's voice as information. Certainty is cheap to express and expensive to hold.
- Looking for a page that will take the decision off you. No page is holding one.
- Acting quickly at the end of a long search, mainly to be done with searching.
- Believing that a site which sounds careful, this one included, knows more than it was given.
What this card is not. This card is not reassurance, and this site is not a source of certainty about any string, any person or any outcome.