The Elephant in Every Room

Or: On Uncertainty

"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." - Voltaire

I grew up in what I thought was a fairly certain world. Of course unexpected things still happened to me, but life felt pretty safe. I went to the same school for 12 years. The information we learned everyday seemed certain. Nobody ever expressed doubt in the content we were being taught. We never really had to question what we were learning. We just had to learn it.

Although it’s preposterous in hindsight I believed that the adults had all the answers. I knew that my parents didn’t have all the answers. But I was convinced that the other adults had the answers to the things that my parents didn’t have.

At university there was drastically more uncertainty. Experienced experts disagreed with each other. Information was a lot more uncertain. On top of that I was studying psychology just a couple years after the replication crisis, so uncertainty clouded a lot my courses. In statistics the more questions I asked the less things made sense. The further I’d go down the rabbit hole, the more uncertainty I experienced. The foundations that look robust from afar aren’t actually that robust when you take a closer look.

University was very different from school.¹

Particularly in my private life I was desperately clinging on to certainty. I searched for definitive answers to ancient questions.

What is the meaning of life? I read the right books. Will Durant’s On The Meaning of Life and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Instead of giving me the one answer I desired, they gave me an abundance of different answers. I found noise in such an important matter unacceptable and opted for the explanation that I initially feared, but allowed for this multitude: life has no meaning, we all make up our own meaning. In the end I had to submit to the uncertainty.

Another question I struggled with was: Who am I? I felt like I didn’t know who I was. I briefly toyed with the idea of adopting Stoicism as a philosophy of life. But I was not prepared to adopt a pre-packaged set of beliefs.² So, in the end I had to ride out the waves of uncertainty.

I’m not quite sure when but at some stage it finally hit me. There’s uncertainty everywhere. It’s just not talked about. And I’m not talking about the butterfly effect flavour of uncertainty where if your grandpa hadn’t chatted to the doorman that one day in October of 1947, then he would have been killed in a car accident, hence you would have never existed. I’m talking about the kind of uncertainty that underlies many of our institutions and daily behaviour.

Elephant in a Landscape by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

Uncertainty is an implicit assumption that I had never really been informed about. Uncertainty is the elephant in every room. Few people openly acknowledge it. Some people will admit it hesitantly. But most people just don’t talk about it all.

Factoring in Uncertainty

I grew up in a culture that avoided uncertainty. Uncertainty was and still is swept under the rug. As a result I felt like I couldn’t deal with uncertainty when it popped up later. And the thing about uncertainty is that if you try to suppress it, it’ll eventually popup elsewhere.³ In my case, drawing strong conclusions about the world in school, led to a very uncertain time in university when I had to re-evaluate a lot of my beliefs. Some of which I will discuss now.

There are no perfect decisions. There are no decisions that can guarantee us good outcomes. In fact, the only reason why we even care about decisions is because we acknowledge that we cannot just have the outcomes that we desire. So, we think that if we just make the right decision we can obtain the outcomes that we desire that way. For example, we want a perfect marriage, but we know we can’t guarantee that so instead we just try finding the perfect partner. For a long time I fell for this thinking, I thought that if I only made perfect decisions then things would be rosy.

That comes with another harsh truth. We are not entirely in control of our own future. You could do everything right (whatever that means) and things may still not work out for you (whatever that means). There are bad outcomes that you just cannot protect yourself against. You can also think you’re doing the right thing, but actually be doing the wrong thing.⁴ We only have access to imperfect information. We don’t even know the extent of the uncertainty. There are always unknown unknowns.

Not only is our own future beyond our control, the future in general is less predictable than we think. This is tough to keep in mind because people in general don’t keep track of their predictions. And even if we do predict the future, it’s very difficult to tell whether we got lucky or whether we actually knew it would happen. It is easy to be fooled by randomness.⁵ On top of that when the hindsight bias strikes things seem even more predictable. “Of course, the UK would vote to leave the EU. I knew it.” “Of course Trump would win again. I knew it.” If you knew it all a long why didn’t you say so?

In fact, it’s difficult to ever prove anything because there’s no higher power saying “getting warmer, warmer, warmer, even warmer, h—ot, hot, you got it!” Just because the sun has risen every single day that you have been alive doesn’t mean that it is guaranteed to rise tomorrow. Just because your partner has been faithful to you so far does not guarantee that they won’t cheat on you in the future. Just because Bitcoin has bounced back every time doesn’t guarantee that it always will.

This is more famously known as the black swan metaphor, which is often told as follows: for a long time we only ever saw white swans so we came to the conclusion that all swans are white. Until one day someone saw a black swan. That instantly debunked the idea that all swans are white. A single black swan can ruin your entire effort of counting white swans. You can go counting millions of white swans but that doesn’t prove that all swans are white.⁶

These are some tough pills to swallow because they paint a very different picture from what I thought the world was like. I find uncertainty deeply uncomfortable. For years I’ve been longing for certainty. In the end certainty is something that we crave but it’s also something that misleads us.

I think decreasing uncertainty is a good thing but aiming for certainty is not. These two things sound quite similar but they’re not. One assumes that certainty is achievable and the other assumes that uncertainty can merely be reduced but never fully eliminated.

Coming to Terms With Uncertainty

So, the world is more uncertain than previously assumed. What now?

It can be easy to get lost in the uncertainty of it all. I’ve been there. I’m still there to a degree. But part of maturing is coming to terms with harsh conclusions. It’s important to understand that things are uncertain, but then we just need to accept it and carry on with our lives.

Despite uncertainty we’ve made it pretty far as a species. We’ve made it from the Savanna to the moon. Despite uncertainty I’ve made it to where I am today (and I’m happy with where I am today). 

Being furious at uncertainty is kind of like being mad at the weather. It’s pointless. You cannot control the weather. But you can decide to bring an umbrella. The weird thing is that in-practice the world doesn’t change whether you acknowledge uncertainty or not. That’s the strange part. Life was always like this. Nothing actually changed about the nature of things since I started acknowledging uncertainty.

The goal is to figure out how to swap your purple sweater for an orange one. Lots of people seem to admire Feynman for his ability to explain or his profound knowledge of physics. What I find most fascinating about him is his seemingly full acceptance of uncertainty. He was an orange sweater fella. It’s easy to get lost in uncertainty, but he seems pretty comfortable with it.⁷

I’m not there yet. My sweater is light blue at most. But I’m on my way.

1. I get that you need some sort of consensus in order to teach kids, but if there is uncertainty and the school system doesn’t allow for that, then we have to adjust the school system not the way we talk about “life.” Even at university I felt like professors often held back when it came uncertainty. It could however also be the case that I tend to view things as less certain than other people (which doesn’t mean that I’m correct). Scepticism isn’t true by default, it also needs to be well-calibrated.

2. “Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.” - Naval Ravikant

3. Inspired by something that Andrew Gelman said in this talk.

4. "There's no use climbing the ladder if you're on completely the wrong wall." - Colin Firth in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

5. Fooled by Randomness is a book by Nassim Taleb

6. This is also called the problem of induction. Also see The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume, and The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper.

7. Feynman on Uncertainty