In Praise of Uncertainty: A Resolution for the Year Ahead
We learn, if we’re fortunate and observant, from the past, even though we can never know precisely what happened in the past. We live, of necessity, in the present. We look forward to the future, often in hope more than fear. We can’t know the future, though. We can only know — to a degree, not completely— the present, this moment in time.
I wish you a happy and healthy 2025, but I can’t guarantee that outcome for you or for me. We must, all of us, live with uncertainty, not only about our understanding of the past, but also about our apprehension of the present, and our best-laid plans for the future. You might think that’s dark, but is it really so bad?
Uncertainty has been described as “the conscious awareness of ignorance.” We are conditioned to view ignorance with distaste. Properly understood, however, ignorance is the starting point for the accumulation of knowledge. History informs us that Socrates proclaimed his own ignorance (“I know that I know nothing”), and that he invoked the interrogative Socratic Method as a means of both exposing spurious beliefs and developing true understanding.
For reasons both reasonable and unreasonable, uncertainty has become a pejorative term, more curse than blessing. I did a search of “uncertainty” through the past year’s news headlines yesterday, the last day of 2024, and I found it nearly everywhere. So many things are uncertain, according to the news, and uncertainty was almost always viewed by the press as a negative.
Among the phenomena afflicted by uncertainty, according to news reports, are the economy, politics, society, personal finance, the arts, culture, geopolitics, various technologies, industries, and a wide range of human relationships. The headlines spanning our contingent universe treat the word uncertainty like an imprecation, something to be dreaded and perhaps, if luck be on our side, to be vanquished.
As humans, we crave certainty. We want conviction, certitude, a sure thing. We look for it everywhere, and though we might think we find it occasionally, we’re more like paranormal investigators chasing ghosts. Our only certainty is uncertainty, but we don’t want to accept it. So, we deny uncertainty, even as live with it each day, continuing our quixotic quest for assurance.
Most of us attempt to deny uncertainty in every aspect of our lives. We like to think that we have absolute knowledge of eternal truths and quotidian events, but we don’t know half as much as we suppose. We are all ignorant, and that’s not so bad. As I said, A recognition of our ignorance is when learning begins.
At this juncture in history, steady advances of science and new breakthroughs in information technology, imparts an illusory, assumed cloak of omniscience. We need to see through the falsity of our hubris, and to realize that we’re just passing another milestone or signpost on the humanity’s journey. In centuries to come, presuming they arrive, our imagined descendants are likely to look back with amused condescension at our primitive implements and technologies, just as we look back with indulgence at the rudimentary technologies of the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. I can wryly imagine such a future, but, as mentioned above, I can’t predict it with any certainty.
What troubles me about now, the time in which we live, is not uncertainty. I can and do live with uncertainty, just as you do, whether you admit it or not. What troubles me is that so many people today, including those in positions of considerable authority and power, have little sense of their own fallibility and imperfection. Many of our temporal leaders believe they possess certainty — about themselves and their self-knowledge, about others, about the world, and even about the universe. They’re living in a mirage of self-importance, of course, and if it were only a matter of their own self-delusion I wouldn’t care. The problem is, these people, in their imperious conceit, are making faulty decisions that affect all of us. I can’t know the future, but I suspect it won’t end well.
Giving Uncertainty Its Due
I’ve been thinking a lot about uncertainty, and I’ve come to accept that it’s not such a bad thing. Our media and our culture have given uncertainty a bad rap, saddled it with calumnies that it doesn’t deserve. If you can accept uncertainty, that this moment does not guarantee the next, and that no prediction is sure to come to true, you might paradoxically achieve a state of relative equanimity, if not grace. I can’t tell you that you’ll be entirely and eternally at peace, of course, because I don’t know what the future holds for you or for me; but it seems to me that acceptance of uncertainty can save us from a lot of unnecessary grief.
Uncertainty encourages humility. I’m speaking here of real humility, not the fake humility of puffed-up humble braggers. If you embrace the concept and principle of unrelenting uncertainty, you have no catapult to propel you toward the mirage of vain arrogance. Without the comfort blanker of false certainty, you are forced to recognize the inherent limitations of your own humanity, which might also encourage greater empathy for others.
The acceptance of uncertainty does not imply that you shouldn’t have goals whose achievement you work toward. Uncertainty doesn’t stop you from living your life to the fullest. If anything, uncertainty allows for greater appreciation of all that life offers, from one uncertain moment to the next. You can plan, too, and you can attempt to execute your plan to its fullest, all in the knowledge that, regardless of how thoroughly or how well you plan, known and unknown contingencies might crash your party.
More than a year ago, I read an article about a sports fan who verbally attacked an NBA player at the end of a basketball game. The reason for the perusal verbal onslaught was that the fan had lost a parlay wager that would have paid out a large sum. The fan ostensibly lost the wager because the NBA player in question failed to score a set number of points. A physical altercation ensued after the player took offense. When I read the article, I was stunned. To explain why, I must make a personal confession.
I grew up around a lot of gambling, and I did more than my fair share of gambling. In my misspent youth, I gambled in pool halls, I gambled at card games, and I gambled at horse races. The thing is, I learned early that losing was always a possibility, often a probability, and that it was always my decision to gamble.
The guy in the article didn’t lose the wager because the basketball player failed to score a certain number of points; the guy lost his wager because he chose to gamble. You can’t blame others for what is essentially your own choice to defy the principle of uncertainty. You live with uncertainty, and that includes uncertainty about events that are beyond your control. The only thing you control, if you allow for a degree of free will, is your decision to throw the dice. Beyond that, there are only calculations of probability, and ultimately . . . well, uncertainty.
I read a book review recently on the subject of uncertainty. I haven’t yet read the book — The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter — but I intend to do so. In reading the book review, I thought about how many of the shrill voices on social media express unqualified proclamations, predictions, and vituperations with the unshakable confidence of false certainty.
An article written by Spiegelhalter and published in Scientific American (by way of Nature Magazine) includes this fascinating excerpt on the vagaries of probability:
What’s more, as emphasized by the philosopher Ian Hacking, probability is “Janus-faced”: it handles both chance and ignorance. Imagine I flip a coin, and ask you the probability that it will come up heads. You happily say “50–50”, or “half”, or some other variant. I then flip the coin, take a quick peek, but cover it up, and ask: what’s your probability it’s heads now?
Note that I say “your” probability, not “the” probability. Most people are now hesitant to give an answer, before grudgingly repeating “50–50”. But the event has now happened, and there is no randomness left — just your ignorance. The situation has flipped from ‘aleatory’ uncertainty, about the future we cannot know, to ‘epistemic’ uncertainty, about what we currently do not know. Numerical probability is used for both these situations.
There is another lesson in here. Even if there is a statistical model for what should happen, this is always based on subjective assumptions — in the case of a coin flip, that there are two equally likely outcomes. To demonstrate this to audiences, I sometimes use a two-headed coin, showing that even their initial opinion of “50–50” was based on trusting me. This can be rash.
Subjective Assumptions and Probability
The point that Spiegelhalter is making is that any calculation of probability involves subjective judgments. When I worked on forecasts at IDC, we began with a set of assumptions that were necessarily subjective, but in formulating those assumptions, we always tried to mitigate risk and to restrain ourselves from taking whimsical trips to the land of make-believe. By recognizing and accounting for the presence of subjectivity, we were in a better position to calibrate and recalibrate our models in service to the objective of accuracy.
Overall, I think we did a good job with most of our forecasts, but we were always cognizant of living in a world of uncertainty and contingency. The only thing you could know was that you didn’t know for sure. Modesty and humility paved the way to relative accuracy. In Spiegelhalter’s opinion piece, he invokes a timeworn aphorism: “all models are wrong, but some are useful;” the useful ones are predicated on subjective but reasonable assumptions.
Too many people today, if social media is any sort of guide (let’s hope it isn’t) seem to be too sure of themselves, certain of their rightness (or their self-righteousness) and others’ wrongness. I can’t help thinking that we might all be kinder to ourselves as well as to others if we could reconcile ourselves to the endless, essential uncertainty of our lives. As Spiegelhalter writes in a column he wrote recently for the Guardian:
Since being uncertain is part of being human, can we learn to live with it? Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman claimed, “I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb”, and was comfortable with not fully understanding things, saying: “I can live with doubt, uncertainty and not knowing.” This sets a fine example for how to deal with the inevitable ignorance in our lives.
Despite the predominance of uncertainty, some among us like to convey the impression that they know it all, or that they know everything worth knowing. They can’t know it all. There are only degrees of ignorance.
For my part, I readily admit to towering ignorance. If Feynman is ignorant, I’m fortunate to be walking upright and speaking intelligibly. I’m trying to learn as much as I can while I’m still here, but I realize I’ll never know more than a small fraction of what there is to learn. That’s okay, though. I’m doing my best — most of the time, anyway — with the assets and tools at my disposal.
If you adhere to the principle of uncertainty, you can't help but come to terms with your own ignorance. Conversely, you understand that those who claim omniscience, or claim unsurpassed knowledge, are setting themselves up for a fall. You don’t want to follow them down to the abyss. Eventually the magic of illusion deserts them and their luck dissipates. It's comedy and tragedy in equal measure.
As we advance into an unknowable 2025, I resolve to remain cognizant of the uncertainty that governs us all. Embracing uncertainty might make me a wiser person, and I entertain the tenuous hope that it might make me a better one, too.