Living with Uncertainty

Uncertainty is the lifeblood of the world. It feeds all growth, all hope, all dreams. The existential novelist John Barth saw life as absurd and unpredictable: it laughs at our plans and carries us along willy-nilly, so all we can do is say “yes to life,” let life take us where it will, and enjoy the ride. And yet uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. “Doubt is not an agreeable state,” Voltaire reminds us. Uncertainty poses urgent questions in daily life. Trust your gut or trust your brain? Live in the present or plan for the future? Be bold, because he who hesitates is lost. Be cautious, because a stitch in time saves nine. What should we do?

Four Flavors of Uncertainty

Uncertainty confronts us in four big ways. Can we know anything for certain? Is nature itself uncertain? How can we deal with not knowing in our daily lives? How should we make decisions when we lack key information?

Descartes thought that our beliefs must be based on what we can know for certain: we should discard what is “not entirely certain and indubitable.” From this foundation of undoubted knowledge we can build up the edifice of our beliefs. Most philosophers have given up this view (called “Foundationalism”) in favor of fallibilism (every individual belief we have might be wrong) and “Neurath’s boat”: our knowledge is like a rickety boat at sea. We can test a belief (a plank in the ship of knowledge) by how well it fits with the rest of the ship, standing up against the sea (the real world). So we can replace a plank with a better plank, but only by keeping enough of the ship intact that it still floats (our picture of the world holds together). What philosophers call “epistemological uncertainty” is just a fact of life.* Even worse, uncertainty lies at the heart of nature itself (“ontological uncertainty“). The universe, says quantum physics, is a bubbling cauldron of possibility stirred by uncertainty. Particles like electrons are really just waves of the probability of finding them in a given location. Until you measure where an electron is, it has no definite location, and the laws of nature don’t dictate where it will be—they only assign a probability of finding it. God really does play dice with the universe, to use Einstein’s metaphor. Many people are familiar with Schroedinger’s cat—a cat in a box with a random, atomic triggering device. The idea is that the cat is neither dead nor alive until you look in the box (take a measurement). (I want to suggest that the cat counts as a measurement, but that’s another story.)  Look up “Bell’s inequality” if you want to learn more.)**

But more immediately for most of us, human life is rife with uncertainty. “Not knowing is the worst part,” we often say, whether we’re talking about a scary diagnosis, the fate of someone we care about, getting or losing a job, or whether we’re about to get busted. It traps us on the tarpaper of uncertainty, denied both relief and acceptance, jabbed both by fear and hope. We long to rub the philosophy lamp and have a Socrates appear. “Tell us how to live with uncertainty and how to make decisions when too much is unknown,” we implore. “The answer to your question,” says Socrates, “is unknown.” Because uncertainty is a brute and inescapable fact of human life, to expect an answer is to misunderstand the question. There can be no answer. But there are hints. I will say something about both questions: how to balance living in the present with preparing for the future, and how to make good decisions when you don’t have all the information you need.

Uncertainty as Worry

Evolution gave us the ability to imagine possible futures and to care about them. As a survival tool, this was invaluable. What might happen if I climb down to that fruit tree or awaken that tiger? As Whitehead said, our ideas die so we don’t have to. But the downside is that we are tortured by possibility. No other animal, as far as we know, suffers from fear that their mate might get sick, that drought may come, that they won’t get invited to the party. We are the species that worries. In many ways, it serves us well. “Live for the present and don’t worry about tomorrow” is a terrible retirement plan. We have a longer timeline and a broader horizon of possibilities than other animals. But the prairie dog who doesn’t plan for the future by burrowing an escape hole becomes badger lunch. We need to care enough about possible futures to take action and make sacrifices today. We need to live our lives joyfully without being paralyzed by fear. It’s a delicate balance.

To handle it, evolution gave us another conflicting pair of strengths. A great human virtue is our need to know, our commitment to truth and the integrity to face reality. But we could not survive without the ability to bracket, to put things aside.  “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die” (Isaiah 22:13). Fear of death is, for most people, overwhelming when the knife is at your throat. But we dance and laugh even though we all know death is inevitably coming. We put that knowledge behind a sheer curtain; we know it’s there, but we don’t see it when we’re not intently looking. How we perform this magic trick of not knowing what we know is an interesting question for philosophers and psychologists, but it is a trick that makes life bearable. A good part of wisdom is knowing what and when to curtain. There are at least two strong reasons for not curtaining off worrying or disastrous possible futures: taking needed steps and emotional processing.

We shouldn’t curtain off taking steps and making decisions that need to be made. Face what needs to be done. As Churchill said, “Let our advance worrying become advanced thinking and planning.”  Ask yourself “1. What needs to be done?” These are things you must attend to now. Next, “2. What is it advisable for me to do?” Don’t put these off too long. Then, “3. What do I need to think about?” These things demand your attention at appropriate times.

In addition, we often need to process and prepare ourselves emotionally. Emotional preparation is sometimes defensive, so you won’t feel overwhelmed and crushed when it happens. But it is also an opportunity. Dying can be an opportunity to heal wounds, forge bonds, and enjoy close moments. You miss that if you just pretend it’s not happening. Finally, we sometimes need to liberate our feelings. Sometimes we need to “put a lid on it” and move forward with life. But if you keep holding down a lid on a pot of furiously boiling water, you get burned. Give yourself time to feel, but don’t move your furniture in.

Worry and living in the present are like our two children: don’t neglect one for the other. Give generous time to each of your children. Don’t be so trapped in the whirlwind of worry that you can’t see the lovely shore ahead. As Samuel Johnson said, “There is little peace or comfort in life if we are always anxious as to future events. He that worries himself with the dread of possible contingences will never be at rest.”

Take what steps you can, because tomorrow is coming whether you ignore it or not. Then, don’t forget you will never get this time again, so make the most of it and live it fully. That may include being open to what you’re feeling and emotional processing and preparation. But it must also include savoring the small and precious joys that life gifts us every moment.

Deciding when Uncertain

Life is like cutting a diamond wearing smudgy glasses: you can sort of see what you’re doing, but information is always missing, and it’s not always obvious what you’re not seeing and how important it is. So we do the best we can. Advice about how to do that is plentiful: trust your gut. Follow your instincts. Use your head. Follow the evidence. Have faith. Be bold—strike when the iron is hot.  Be cautious—a stitch in time saves nine. All of these are right sometimes and wrong other times. So what should we do?

There’s no substitute for judgment, because every case is potentially different. The best we can do is collect adages, and then select the one that best seems to fit the situation. The only rules are rules of thumb, and making smart choices calls for many thumbs (more than the two we’re born with).

Don’t rely on your gut, but listen to it critically. If your gut tells you something is off, there may be several reasons for this. Maybe you are picking up on subtle clues, evidence you can’t articulate clearly. Or maybe he just uses the same after-shave as your crooked landlord (as many very good people also do). Our intuitions can be sharply perceptive or way off, depending upon what is producing them. So, if you have the time, interrogate your intuition. Where is it coming from? What possible reasonable basis is there for it? How strong is your intuition and what is at stake? If your gut is telling you “Danger! Danger! Run!” and the consequence of getting out of there is not drastic, then leave. Better safe at a small cost than catastrophically sorry. But don’t bet the house at roulette because your gut tells you red 7 is a winner. If your gut tells you your fiancé is shady, don’t immediately dump him, but keep a sharp eye out for real evidence. Because marriage is a serious commitment, your feeling is a warning sign, a reason to investigate, to make double sure. It is not, by itself, the kiss of death.

How much evidence is enough? In logic class, we teach fallacies of reasoning. For example, your cousin Alfred says “don’t tell me about union leaders. They’re all crooks. My neighbor Grinko was a union leader, and he was as dishonest as they come.” Generalizing about all union leaders from one example is bad reasoning. Lots of people are dishonest and others are honest.  There’s no more reason to think other union leaders are like Alfred’s neighbor than there is to think all neighbors are dishonest (or everyone named “Grinko”). Even if you’ve met every union leader except Sally, and all the ones you met were dishonest, it doesn’t follow that Sally is dishonest. She could be the lone exception. So it would be unfair to put Sally in jail because those other union leaders are dishonest. But if you’ve bought a Tweety pair of tweezers and they fell apart, it’s not unreasonable to replace them with another brand. Not much is at stake and you’re not treating the Tweety company unjustly, so the one case is good enough evidence. But your one pair of broken tweezers would not be enough evidence to ban Tweety tweezers. On the other hand, if seventeen out of ten thousand users of a pimple cream unexpectedly died of a heart attack, that might be enough to withdraw the pimple cream pending further investigation, since the benefit of a pimple cream is minor and death is quite severe. How much evidence is enough depends on what’s at stake. Consider the real-world consequences (death, using a different pimple cream) and the strength of your conclusion. These are often related. “Mathilda is sick” is a stronger conclusion than “Mathilde might be sick.” It requires stronger evidence but justifies more decisive action.

Sometimes we have few alternatives and have to act fast. You are in a crowd and you hear what sounds like a gunshot. You duck or don’t duck, and you need to decide fast. Ducking ten minutes after the noise is pointless. Follow your instinct or grasp at whatever evidence comes to mind. When you have no real choice, and also when not much is at stake, go with whatever evidence you have, no matter how scanty, because either it’s all you have or it’s not worth agonizing over.

When you do have time, there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of making a good decision.

1) Take feasible steps to reduce uncertainty or risk. Uncertainty is lack of information while risk is the potential harm. For example, your house could burn down. Buying insurance reduces risk but doesn’t reduce uncertainty (it gives no information about how likely your house is to burn). What can you do to reduce either?

 2) Identify your biases and take account of them.

3) Determine which (if any) decision strategy is most applicable: maximin, maximax, minimax regret, average payoff, expected utility, the Laplace criterion, or the Hurwicz criterion.***

Maximin principle: maximize the worst-off scenario. For example, in roulette, the worst scenario is that your number doesn’t land. So don’t bet, because then you lose nothing, while making a bet means that you lose money if your number doesn’t land.

Maximax principle: maximize the possible gain. Bet everything you can on a single number, because if you do win, you win the most.

Minimax regret: minimize the regret you will have whatever happens. (How much will you regret it if you bet everything and lose? How much will you regret it if your number lands but you didn’t bet?)

Average payoff: bet to maximize the average payoff. (Here you must choose between two kinds of averages: the median and the mean.)****

Expected utility: maximize the expected utility, which is the benefit or harm of an outcome multiplied by its likelihood (how probable it is).

Laplace criterion: assume every outcome is equally likely and choose the outcome with the highest average utility.

Hurwicz criterion is a bit complicated. It seeks to average the best and worse outcomes depending on your own aversion to risk. You indicate your aversion to risk by choosing a pessimism co-efficient (PE) and an optimism coefficient (OP). PE and OP add up to one (for example, if PE=.4, then OP=.6). Then, for each option, add (PE X the worst outcome) to (OP X the best outcome). Pick the option with the highest total.

Which strategy fits your case depends on the circumstances. For example, if money is really tight, the maximin principle works for roulette—don’t bet because you can’t afford to lose. If you have just a little extra money to play with, you might bet that extra money using the maximax principle: if you lose, you haven’t lost much, but a big win could make a real difference.

4) Formulate adaptive plans. At the very least, have a plan B. Even better, have a flexible tree of choices. (Here are some things I can do if she goes. Here are some things I can do if she doesn’t go and it’s raining, unless I have an umbrella.) You probably can’t anticipate every circumstance, so there will be holes in your decision tree and possibly rather vague plans. But whatever you do have is better than nothing.

Accepting Uncertainty

When we’ve done everything that should be done, the only recourse is becoming comfortable with uncertainty, because it will always be a big part of life.  Uncertainty is the only certainty. We can control only so much. We can accomplish only so much. Part of our glory as human beings is that we struggle to rise above our limitations. This struggle has given us telescopes and microscopes so we can learn more than our bodies and minds alone could discover. Part of wisdom as a human being is being content with our limitations, accepting that life is flawed, that the world is not ideal, that we and everything we care about will vanish. This tension between struggle and acceptance is the defining dynamic of human life. Painful and difficult it can be, but it is a thing of distinctly human beauty.

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*To learn more about epistemology, look at Jennifer Nagel’s Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction or Robert Audi’s Epistemology at https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~biglars/epis.pdf.

**To learn more about quantum theory, see John Polkinghorne’s Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction and Ben Brubaker’s “How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky action at a Distance’ is Real,” in Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-bells-theorem-proved-spooky-action-at-a-distance-is-real-20210720/

***You may need to choose between Classical (frequentist) probability and Bayesian probability Bayesian probability updates the odds as more information becomes available (it takes account of your prior knowledge).

****To find the mean of a group of numbers, add them together and divide by the number of items you are adding. To find the median, list your items in order from lowest to highest, and pick the middle number.

Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.