Yearning for Certainty

Many of us instinctively seek certainty in our lives, especially in a world that feels increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Yet, as the Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey argued in The Quest for Certainty, this desire for certainty can mislead us. Many philosophers, he contends, wrongly equate knowledge with certainty and belief with uncertainty, assuming that true knowledge needs to be grounded in what is permanent and unchanging. This quest for certainty, however, can separate theory from practice and distance us from the real, dynamic world we live in.

Imagine a world in which every decision is made with absolute certainty, where all ambiguity is eliminated. At first glance, this might seem great: a world free from doubt and the discomfort of not knowing. But there's a lot we would lose in the process—creativity, adaptability, and our ability to grow by facing unexpected challenges.

In my latest podcast episode, award-winning author and journalist Maggie Jackson argues for the merits of uncertainty in her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. Nominated for a National Book Award and named to multiple “Best Books of 2023” lists, Uncertain is an official selection of the Next Big Idea Club curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Adam Grant, and Susan Cain.

In her book, Maggie makes a compelling case that embracing uncertainty isn’t a weakness—it’s a superpower. Our conversation explores why uncertainty can lead to greater creativity, resilience, and insight, and why we need to cultivate uncertainty tolerance in today’s volatile world. She argues that our cultural aversion to uncertainty limits our potential for innovation and resilience. Instead of treating uncertainty as a problem to be solved, she invites us to see it as an opening for new possibilities. She also explains why uncertainty does not mean giving up on our convictions.

Maggie makes the case that beauty itself can be a model for embracing the unknown, inviting us to pause, reflect, and find richness in experiences that aren’t easily categorized or understood.

Here are some key takeaways from our conversation:

• Two types of uncertainty—aleatory and epistemic—shape our understanding of the unknown.
• Developing uncertainty tolerance is crucial in a volatile world. Leaders who communicate uncertainty well can foster trust.
• Embracing uncertainty is a hallmark of the adaptive expert compared to the complacent one.
• Uncertainty can lead to greater creativity and adaptability. Improvisation and flexibility can help us thrive amid uncertainty.
• Hidden strengths can emerge from children raised in unpredictable environments.
• Fallow time is essential for creativity and insight.

You can listen to our conversation (Part 1 here and Part 2 here) or watch the full video below. An unedited transcript follows.

Unedited transcript

Brandon: Maggie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Maggie: Oh, it's great to be with you, Brandon.

Brandon: Yeah, I really absolutely loved your book. It was such a delight. I want to ask you a little bit about the other two books as well that have been really quite remarkable that I looked at briefly. But before we begin, I want to ask you, as I do with all my guests, to share a story of a profound encounter with beauty that you had in your childhood, any memory of beauty that lingers with you till today.

Maggie: Oh, wow. That's really interesting. I think that I spent a lot of time in the Adirondacks, in the mountains, literally on top of a mountain, in a kind of rustic cabin that was owned by my father's family, that when we first were living there as a child had no running water. We collected rainwater. There was no bathroom, indoor plumbing. It was a really unusual childhood. Every summer, we would go there. I would say, just being in the woods like that, I remember — there's no one particular moment. But I guess being near the river and hearing the rush of the river. Then from the front porch of that cabin camp really was, we were in the treetops because the front porch was at the top tree level. And so the view and the sounds and the sensory moment, just for me, a little bookworm as a child, reading books on that porch is one of the most beautiful times in my childhood.

Brandon: That's amazing. Wow. It sounds like an incredible series of moments of communion with nature, I would imagine, and yet probably also a lot of uncertainty as you have to collect rainwater. I mean, was that bittersweet? Was it difficult to do that when you would go there in the summers or easy to adapt?

Maggie: I think when you're a child and you don't know — I mean, I knew the other modern life from the rest of the year. My parents were teachers, so they could spend the whole summer there. But we didn't kind of enter in this new world. Where I guess one could say I might not have used the word uncertainty, but I would have talked about it as unpredictability. You never knew what creatures you'd encounter in the forest, including bears. I spent a lot of time out on the mountain by myself, and so the dynamism of life was really apparent. I think that's one of the positive and sometimes overlooked aspects of uncertainty, that it is a basically part of the dynamism of life.

Brandon: Yeah, that's great. I think our tolerance for that dynamism is probably varied. I think it'd be good to hear how we can improve that. So I want to ask you a little bit about your trajectory as a journalist. I mean, what drew you then to pursue a career as a journalist? Say a little bit about the two books you wrote before, Uncertain, the importance of home, and then Distracted. 

Maggie: Sure, yes. I was writing ever since I can remember. Since I was about age five, I always wanted to be a reporter. And so I grew up in the high school and college newspapers, and then I just gave it a whirl. So I was a correspondent in DC and then elsewhere in the United States. Then I went abroad when I was in my 20s to be based in Tokyo for a few years and then in London. But I traveled all over the world as a journalist. So I was drawn to it, I guess, because I just love meeting new people. I love asking questions. I'm naturally curious, and I thought this was just — when you pair that idea of being curious and open with the skill of the learned skill over time of writing, you kind of end up figuring things out. I just love every bit of journalism, and I still do. It takes me to places I wouldn't otherwise go, just like books do and just like our children do. So that's how I came into — I was 40 or something before I wrote my first book. I had been steeped in the journalism, but I also wanted to do something longer and deeper, aka a book.

Now I see that these three books are actually kind of a trilogy. I had been writing as a foreign correspondent and then as a national columnist on work-life balance and workplace issues. I had always been writing about big picture social issues, and so the three books that I've written have really been about aspects of the human condition that are misunderstood or overlooked somehow. The first book was on the nature of home in the digital age. When home is permeable and portable, Starbucks looks like our living room, home and work, the walls have fallen down, where do we find refuge? The second book was about distraction and attention. What does it mean to attend or pay attention again in a technological world? That one was more focused on, what exactly is our technology doing to our skills of attention? And what is attention? Because most people couldn't even define it on the street. I wouldn't have been able to. Then finally, a book on uncertainty, which is, of course, a very misunderstood construct in general. But also, the mindset of uncertainty, our psychological uncertainty, wasn't really studied in many, many disciplines, even psychology, until recently. Because many, many businesses, at least in the West particularly, were very outcome-oriented. So psychologists would put people in a scanner and get the, what happened during the test? Were they successful? Did they see the dot move or not? But they weren't as interested in the process and also what's happening with our brain on uncertainty. So it's a really wonderful time to tackle that particular subject.

Brandon: Yeah, it's very up. Even in your previous book, it certainly was very prescient. I mean, you wrote Distracted even well before the social media craze that has enslaved so many of us and robbed us of our attention. Let's talk about Uncertain then. You start the book making a distinction between two types of uncertainty, and you were mainly dealing with one of those types. Can you tell us a bit about that distinction?

Maggie: Now I'm glad you're asking because it's a good place to start. Because uncertainty seems so monolithic and swampy to people, and so generally we'd still debate. But generally, experts agree that there are two main kinds of uncertainty. In brief, there's aleatory uncertainty which is kind of a shorthand for the uncertainty or what humans can't fully know. We hear that a storm is barreling up the coast. But despite all of the mathematical models, et cetera, we and the meteorologist do not quite know where it'll make landfall or what the damage will be. That's what we can't fully know. But then in complement is epistemic uncertainty. I like to think of it as the human response to the unknown. So when you meet something new, or unexpected, or ambiguous, you gain the chance to — this is the best definition that I've found among all sorts of definitions — you gain the chance to become meta-cognitively aware that you reach the limits of your knowledge. The storm might do damage, or you might have to move. Or it could be this, it could be that. That's being unsure. Basically, you can see that there's multiple possibilities within uncertainty, but you're also caught short because you've reached the limits of your knowledge. So mainly, my book focuses on our response to the unknown. How will we respond in a world that is truly, by many, many barometers, getting more unpredictable in geopolitics, economics, and even job hours among the most vulnerable people, highly precarious? And so how do we respond?

Brandon: It's a very helpful distinction. Yeah, almost that you're situating the book certainly within the locus of our control. Like, what is it that we can do given uncertainty? I think that one of the things you argue here — this is really a striking paragraph. You say that far from automatically admiring us in cognitive paralysis, uncertainty plays an essential role in higher order thinking, propelling people in challenging times towards good judgment, flexibility, mutual understanding, the heights of creativity. It's the portal, you say, to finding your enemy's humanity, the overlooked linchpin of superior teamwork and the mindset most needed in times of flux. So it sounds like a superpower to be able to tolerate and handle and even lean into uncertainty. And yet, you talk about John Dewey who notes that we are on a quest for certainty, right? I mean, it seems like we are yearning for certainty as human beings. That also seems somewhat part of our nature. I don't know if it's just cultural, but it seems like a pervasive human tendency. So how do we reconcile those? How do we reconcile our desire for certainty with this need to tolerate and actually build a capacity for uncertainty?

Maggie: I think that is really, really important. Because the first thing, I would say, is that we dislike uncertainty for natural and very good reasons. We tend to find, as psychologists say, uncertainty aversive. That's because we, as just organisms, need and want answers for survival’s sake. We have to know whether the fruit in the tree is delicious or poisonous, et cetera, et cetera. Even studies by an Australian philosopher, Michael Smithson, show that the metaphors we use in and around uncertainty are usually negative. Knowing is the light, and uncertainty is darkness. They go on and on. But this is one reason why anything that's comfortable, or fluent, or easy, as Kahneman said, brings a smile to our faces. It's the familiar. But we don't want to have limitless uncertainty at the same time. We dislike it. We need to get an answer. But no one would want to remain in uncertainty. So uncertainty has boundaries, has guard rails, I like to think of it. One question I think today is, well, we innately dislike it, but I think we are pushing toward almost an allergy of uncertainty. And we mentioned that a little bit. Therefore, we need and want answers. But everything or many things conspire in our culture to prioritize outcome and lose sight of process and to be allergic to even discomfort and, therefore, raise to answers. Even the epidemic anxiety, which is literally fear of the unknown, clinically speaking, is a little bit of a signal that maybe we've carried our innate dislike too far through contemporary culture and hundreds of years of pushing toward, as Dewey said, the quest for certainty.

So on the way to gaining an answer, that's where we can see the strength of uncertainty. We can see it as a space of possibilities. We can see it as a spur and a provocation. I'm happy to talk a little bit more of that. But it's basically a really important cognitive skill set. It's multiple, not singular. Uncertainty is actually very much a part and parcel of good decision making, understanding the neighbor, whose politics you loathe, opening up your mind. I mean, just to use some big abstract terms, it's highly related to human resilience. Uncertainty is highly related to human adaptability and to curiosity. And look at those qualities. Well, that's what we need in a time of flux. That's precisely what we need. So to lean into, it might be uncomfortable and challenging. Uncertainty is no picnic because we don't want to remain in limbo. But at the same time, are we going to wield and harness this incredible capacity we have and be uncertain? Are we going to retreat into the familiar, the comfortable, and the closed mindedness of certainty? I mean, that's the question facing us today.

Brandon: Yeah, we've weathered a tremendous pandemic which has I think rattled us around the world. A lot of that experience was living through a very difficult kind of uncertainty. I wonder whether you think that that context has — and even just before that, not too long before that, we had this huge, great recession in 2008. And with the AI revolution coming up, it seems like we are in this context where not only have we maybe experienced a lot of intense uncertainty but it fills the future with, are we on the brink of a third World War? In the United States, we've got the elections coming up in a month. I don't know. This episode is probably going to air the day before the elections maybe. What thoughts do you have on just our condition as having maybe been hit by a lot of shocks of uncertainty? Is that partly driving us to try to hunker down towards finding more certainty? Is it possible for us to be open in the ways in which you're suggesting?

Maggie: Yeah, I think very much so. I mean, I think what you're talking about is the extreme volatility and threat that does exist today. And so it's very much, perhaps essentially more uncomfortable to live at the edge of the uncertainty out there, the uncertainty. But at the same time, I think that it's really important again to return to the question of, what can we do? And so on a smaller but no less existential level, multiple, many people have written to me about how uncertainty can be good in conditions such as facing cancer, a cancer diagnosis. So my response is that, again, if we can navigate uncertainty, be skillful in our uncertainty, we are better able to navigate and be skillful in life. It doesn't remove the big, bad wolves at the door to be uncertain. It's not a panacea for making everything right. But when you can, say, calibrate to your environment instead of closing down and being certain in prior convictions that are no longer relevant, when you can learn to be curious and exploratory in the face of even very the most difficult conditions, that's when uncertainty is liberating and strengthening.

In fact, I've interviewed doctors who have been teaching uncertainty tolerance to patients with anxiety to actually treat anxiety. I'll also just explain what I mean. But just the doctors themselves who are teaching people how to navigate uncertainty then say it changes their practice, their lens on the world. They don't have to be quite the authority that they felt they had to be. They're a partner in care. They can be more improvisational, even playful. And so all of the ability to be uncertain skillfully. Many, many people have just used the word liberating. I can say just to get granular, for instance, okay, there is now a lot of attention to a personality trait called tolerance of uncertainty. What I've mentioned is actually a personality treatment. So just like you or I might be more or less shy or conscientious, we also fall somewhere on a kind of spectrum of tolerance for uncertainty. And so during the pandemic, the acute phase of the pandemic, people who were more tolerant of uncertainty were more accepting of the realities of that situation. Now, there were many question marks, and you didn't know everything. But they were more accepting of the good, or the bad, or the changing, understanding of what it was, et cetera. People who were intolerant of uncertainty were more likely to cope by denying, or avoiding the situation, or abusing substances. So from that, you can kind of see when you're tolerant of uncertainty, you see life's unpredictability as a challenge. When you're intolerant, you see it as a threat. That's a huge and foundational difference. And so that's just one aspect of how we approach, having a stance or an attitude toward uncertainty. Beyond that, there's a lot of strategies and different types of uncertainty. We can gain skill in crisis deliberations through wielding our uncertainty, or we can gain skill in creative daydreaming through being more practiced in those what-if questions. There are lots of different types of uncertainty with this stance, this sort of personality approach that we all have. Again, the big news, too, is that it's innate just like our dislike is innate. We all don't like uncertainty. We all fall somewhere on that spectrum. But what's really important is that it's mutable.

So going back to those psychologists who are treating anxiety, now there's a lot of attention to laser-focused treatments for anxiety that are based simply on trying to bolster that tolerance of uncertainty. So what does that mean? Basically, it's kind of like interventions and therapy strategies that are jumping off exposure therapy. I'm afraid of spiders. I'll sit next to a plastic one. Then I'll go outside, and I'll look at a spider from a distance, et cetera. Well, this is exposure therapy to the unknown. So you bite off a little more of the unknown each day by maybe delegating at work or by trying a new dish in a restaurant. I mean, something I kind of laughed at but then I thought, oh, that's actually a little harder than it sounds when you're tired on a Friday night, and you want that familiar food that brings a smile to your face. So I think little daily exercises that boost our tolerance for uncertainty are really hopeful. The fact that they're being used for treatments in mental disorders with proven success, gold standard, longitudinal success, random controlled trial, that's really an important new finding.

Brandon: Wow. Expanding our capacity for uncertainty and reducing the fear of uncertainty seems really critical, right? I wonder if like improv comedy would be another good recommendation for trying to open that capacity up.

Maggie: Anything that's improvisational, yes. It's really working with your uncertainty rather than hiding from it.

Brandon: One of the interesting things we found during the pandemic was that there was a lot of variation across countries in people's ability to tolerate, I suppose, that uncertainty and the role of expertise, right? You say a little bit about the extent to which leaders are trusted when they voice uncertainty. I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about that. I have some questions for you on that theme. How can uncertainty be either helpful or challenging? Because it seems like when we're in difficult times, we want our leaders to be really strong and certain.

Maggie: Yes, exactly. I mean, we want, of course, to move toward answers. We want our leaders to usher us and work with us to getting answers. But the difference is, do we want the first answer? When we're coming up with, again, something new, complex, and ambiguous, really, do you want the first answer that crops up, the rush to judgment? Or do you want to invest in the better answer, which is skillful uncertainty?

One study I really love kind of speaks to this. Again, it was a gold standard, award-winning longitudinal study of CEOs in the middle of a long-term crisis. In this case, they were European CEOs who were facing an expansion in the EU. Therefore, a big, big, big change in the marketplace. Well, in short, the ones who were briefed before the expansion were sure — we know this is going to be good or bad for our company, or they felt in control — were the ones who during and after the expansion did almost nothing at all to respond. They stuck to the tried and true. Whereas the CEOs who were ambivalent, who weren't sure whether it's good, or bad, or what might happen, dug in, and they were more inclusive. They sought multiple perspectives, and they were more resourceful. They did inventive things to respond, like open up a new factory or what have you.

So that's a perfect example of two things. One is that uncertainty is a space of possibility and then, second, of something called adaptive expertise. There have been lots of studies over a great deal of time about how we accrue expertise by those 10,000 hours or what have you experienced and practice. Then your knowledge becomes second nature, which is good. That's important. Because the doctor who hears somebody say chest pains thinks heart attack. That's important because he is applying what he's learned in the past to a recognizable situation. But the trouble is that people grow complacent. They keep fighting the old battles. They slide into what's called carry-over mode and then keep applying the old, heuristic thinking and mental models to those new complex problems. That's when they get in trouble. So years of accuracy are only weekly or not correlated at all with — I mean, I'm sorry. Years of experience are hardly correlated in multiple different disciplines with skill and accuracy over time. I mean, whatever field we're in, I think we all can recognize that complacent expert in contrast is the adaptive expert who spends more time diagnosing the problem than even beginners. They inhabit the question.

Even I went up to Toronto and I embedded myself in operating rooms, which was quite amazing. I was just feet from the patient with my tape recorder, seeing these amazing things. I could see one surgeon in particular acting like the kind of expert we adore — all know how, swaggering, efficient, et cetera — until he came to this horrific near miss that could have killed the patient. He really was being the routine expert. Whereas the adaptive expert is the one who calibrates to the situation. That only can take a few minutes of thinking and testing and questioning and widening their options, et cetera. So it's very much uncertainty in action, a mode of uncertainty in action, is what I call it.

Brandon: How much is this related to something like humility? It seems like that there's a connection between what you're talking about and a kind of disposition of humility and being comfortable with not knowing and willingness to admit one's limitations but also a willingness to know, to accept what one does know, right? There's almost a balance, where you can't have a humility that says, "Well, I don't know anything." So what does that look like in practice for you?

Maggie: I think humility might be a individual, sort of personal, centrist idea of the world. In other words, intellectual humility is to know the limits of your knowledge. Humility as maybe a moral stance is to ratchet back the idea that you are the center of the universe and allow for other opinions and things like that. Uncertainty is, you can be humble and not be uncertain. Uncertainty is a overlapping and complementary mindset or a set of mindsets that equips you to be open to the world to think about, be open to others' perspectives, to think twice, to reflect, et cetera. So I see them as very connected but different things.

Brandon: So I want to ask you. I mean, the context of the pandemic was, one of the things that it seemed people were constantly looking for was certainty. Once you hear scientists, for instance, change their minds about something, then people don't want to accept that, right? And so I wonder if you have — let me just give you another contrast. So in Denmark, I have some colleagues there who tell me that their scientists during the pandemic were treated like celebrities. They were treated like heroes. You don't question anything they say, et cetera. Whereas in the US, really, there's a lot of pushback against scientists and a lot of sense that we can't trust you. You keep changing your minds, et cetera. There was also some research that was done — again, this has not been replicated sufficiently to say with certainty. But we had, I guess, colleagues who did some citizen science experiments where in one group, you had scientists working together with the public on a tried-and-tested experiment — where the scientists had done this many times before and then the citizen participants participated in it and replicated the expected result — and another one in which the scientists were doing something new. They'd never done this before, and then they had the citizens join them in discovering something that actually was a new discovery. At the end of these experiments, they found that the citizen participants in the first group, where they had replicated an existing experiment, expressed more trust towards scientists than the people in the second group. So it seems as though we want our leaders to be really sort of like high priests and dogmatic. When they express some vulnerability, if they change their minds or if it seems like they don't quite know what we expect them to know, we trust them less. I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on these cases.

Maggie: Sure. Well, I don't know all of the details of either case. But I would say in the first case of our treatment of science during the pandemic, again, of course, that was a situation of extreme vulnerability and volatility. So we're talking about the levels, high levels of threat and vulnerability for everyone. But I'd say it's still really dangerous to either put the scientist on a pedestal, as may or may not have been the case in Denmark, to treat the expert as the all-knowing authority. I think that's the idol that we've gotten wrong in terms of expertise. That's the person who is more likely to be the routine expert. To be fluent, and swaggering, and all efficient, and to know just what to do is the wrong idol on the altar of expertise. In our traditionally common binary way of seeing things, maybe the other flip side is to treat the expert as the villain. Someone who's changing their mind is wrong. Therefore, I guess that does look back to venerating this hero. I mean, in medicine, it shows that there has been a change in what patients want. They no longer want as much that all-knowing authority. I'll say also here that there's a difference between conviction and certainty. Certainty is closed-mindedness. Conviction is, of course, really important for social change, for being an authority but not the only authority. So I think that we need to bolster our very insufficient vocabulary in and around concepts like expertise and uncertainty. Because no one probably would want a doctor, or a surgeon, or an accountant, or a general to say "I don't know" and leave the room. That's not what I'm talking about. That's not what strong uncertainty is, beneficial uncertainty is.

Studies really show that uncertainty is persuasive and useful when it's linked to potential. For instance, I'm not quite sure at this moment, but I will be investigating. I'm not sure about how I'm going to handle this M&A at this company, but we're going to bring in outside perspectives and get the best possible package for you all. I mean, these are kinds of communications of uncertainty that are wider, more nuanced, allow for other perspectives. So I think we need to, first of all, create a better vocabulary in and around. One very granular way we can do this is to not be afraid of using hedge words, which are words like maybe, possibly, sometimes. Those get a really bad rap in many professions. And yet, actually, linguistically, if you use the word 'maybe' instead of slamming down the conversation like "Therefore, you're wrong," et cetera, hedge words like 'maybe' actually linguistically signal that there's something more to know, which is very useful, and then signal that you're receptive to others' opinions.

Then studies show that executives are not seen as weak when they use these words in high-stakes situations, but they're seen as not only more receptive but more professional. So there's lots of clouds of misunderstanding. I mean, even in politics, J.S. Mill, the great thinker, talked about the need to affect social change through following the lead of the partisan, the person he called the one-eyed thinker, the person with tunnel vision, wanting to lead the charge, going for that goal. But at the same time, people shouldn't forget the benefits of the moderate, the people we call the "fence sitters," who actually studies now show, led by Diana Mutz at the University of Pennsylvania, that moderates are no less disengaged from politics. It's just that they are thinking and aware of other's positions. They might engage in a different way. But we need both types in our society. We need scientists who are more skilled in — or we all need to, including scientists, gain more skill in communicating uncertainty, in describing and understanding uncertainty, the frameworks, the differences between two different kinds of uncertainty. We also need to have people become more open to something less than that authority on the Olympics or the person who speaks in categorical language that doesn't allow any other points of view. That's not going to get us ahead.

Brandon: It is a challenge, it seems to me. If you can think about, assuming with hedge words, there is some research showing that there's a gendered effect, that we are more likely to see males who use those words as being more thoughtful and deliberative. But when it comes to female leaders expressing the same kind of language, they're seen as being not very confident and not very capable. It's the same, I think, in politics as well. And if you could imagine just with our current political, with the elections coming up, I think if any leaders on either side, either party in the US were to express I think the reason the thoughtfulness that uncertainty requires, they would not be seen favorably by their constituents. They would be lambasted as being, you know, how dare they say I don't know. They're not competent, et cetera. I just wonder. Like culturally, there's one thing to say there are gains to be made for the subject, for the person who's embracing uncertainty. But what about the recipients of the messaging? How could we get society to be more accepting and see the value of uncertainty? And if it's a company, how can board members start to get over the biases we have towards uncertainty?

Maggie: Well, I think that the new science of uncertainty is really upending our misunderstandings and our insufficient understanding of uncertainty. So we need to heed the studies that I've been mentioning all along. I actually did a deep dive into hedge words. It's a real common mythology that they're used according to different genders. I've actually found the opposite in the latest research, so that's worth another look. Mainly, I think that we have to start somewhere. Look at where we are. If we're going to continue to use binary, closed language, if we're going to continue to think of certainty as the pathway to a better democratic society, we're really badly mistaken. I mean, the ideal of certainty and the denigration of uncertainty, unsureness, et cetera has really pushed us onto the path of polarization and lack of scientific understanding on the public about what science truly is, which is uncertainty in action. Even at the granular level science education, there's someone at BU who's studying this very thing, Eva Menz. Science education for children has now been reduced to just doing cause-and-effect experiments, in which that unknown and that curiosity and that uncertainty has been removed. And so that's something that she's trying to work with teachers to do, to allow discovery to be curiosity, let not formulaic and recipe like. That's an actual problem for quite a bit of science now. Grants are made to people who incrementally confirm what came before, maybe push the envelope a little bit, curiosity-led science. You can see people talk about this constantly and do studies about this curiosity-led science.

So there are huge cultural obstacles, you might say. But I mean, just as we are working toward equality in our society, just as we are working toward removing the boundaries between genders and accepting a spectrum of identity, we need, I think, really urgently to create a new kind of understanding of uncertainty. Basically, the benefits very much are there. It's time to each in our own little ways — I came from this background of writing about work-life balance and workplace issues and discrimination and DEI and et cetera. One of the main findings is that change can be incremental. Each and every one of us is accountable for using the word "maybe." Maybe being subtle about it, maybe being strategic about it but not being afraid to use the word maybe. That's a little step. Just like delegating a little at work or trying a new dish in a restaurant are incremental, small steps that we can take forward. I think the costs are really steep. Uncertainty isn't a panacea, but it's very much I think an aspect of the human condition that's been misunderstood at huge peril.

Brandon: I think it becomes especially challenging at the level of the general public, because you talk about a lot of the biases that we have and the ways in which embracing our capacity for uncertainty can help us overcome biases. Could you say a little bit about that?

Maggie: Yes, I think that, yes, we innately just — it's very complicated, but I'd say we innately are stereotyping organisms. Again, we need to know if that's a friend or a foe walking down the dark alley. We need to know if that fruit in the tree is delicious or poisonous. So we need to constantly make assumptions, which are stereotypical, based on signals and cues. That's all part and parcel of what scientists now call predictive processing — the idea that we go smoothly sailing through our days, recognizing that much of our environments in life, as it is, is routine and familiar. You know how to make a cup of coffee. You know that your driveway or your front door hasn't changed the next time you come home. So that's really important. And yet, those stereotypes, of course, when applied to social situations are rapid and often unfair.

Just on the level of facial recognition, it's really fascinating. Because we immediately, looking at a face, make an instant judgment on whether they're like us or not like us. Are they in group or out group? Once you make that innate, unconscious assumption or categorization, then you — for instance, if the person is out group, you don't really look at their eyes. You don't look at their face heulistically. You see them as less worthy of your attention. Therefore, that's why "they all look alike." That's the root of that kind of stereotyping. But there are amazing things, simple things we can do that are kind of based on jolting our assumptions, therefore creating a little deliberative uncertainty. So, for instance, you can see someone as an individual, someone who's homeless on the street or who's walking in maybe a hoodie, and they look threatening on an evening. You try to see that kind of person as an individual that ratchets back the stereotype. Because they become a person of complexity just like you. Or I wrote quite a bit about perspective taking, which is just your grandmother's wisdom. It's basically saying to yourself when you see someone who's stereotypical or hear of someone who's maybe a convicted felon moved in next door, and you have these stereotypes, you think, what's the world like from their point of view? This is not empathy I feel for them. It's, what is the world like through their eyes? That alone helps you engage with them, study shows, get closer to them. It's difficult the higher your prejudices are. But it's very powerful and actually lowers prejudice. It's being used by activists in political situations as part of their conversations with opposing voters. It's actually shown to raise tolerance of the opposing voter to gay peep citizens. Or on the part of the activist, it lowers the bias of the activists against the opposing vote. It's a two-way street. That's just a leap of imagination. Because if you think what's life like there through eyes, you really don't know. I mean, there's no right or wrong answer. It's a leap of uncertainty that unhinges or stops in its tracks that stereotyping, which leads to dehumanization and violence and all sorts of discrimination, et cetera. So there's a very small uncertainty and action strategy that we can all do, and that's pretty simple and yet very powerful. And so there are many strategies. Uncertainty is, and can be, a kind of open-mindedness, especially if used strategically. So I think that's very hopeful.

Brandon: You have a great example of Darwin when you talk about how, just to quote your book, you say, by stepping back from the onslaught of the day and relinquishing expectations of an instant answer, we can find brilliance and delay and suspense. Then you talk about the role of delay in Darwin's own scientific work and also his golden rule, which also relates to uncertainty. Could you say more about this example of Darwin?

Maggie: Yeah, I love that. I love this example for multiple reasons. I think that this points too in your question. It points to different modes of uncertainty in action that I've been talking about. I mean, I have eight different modes in tolerance of those. We loathe, crisis, deliberation. And so the idea of what I call fallow time as being really important for memory and meaning making and creating identity. It's a time when, of course, answers are neat and instant, coming from devices. But just in general, the pundit who answers immediately and who doesn't stop to think or the leader is seen as the better one. I think that there's a temporal side to uncertainty in that it offers us a space of deliberation but also of suspense. You're literally withholding action, so you can think it out.

But what's fascinating is, even if you are pausing — that's briefly, or through a night's sleep, or a bit of a delay — and doing nothing at all, it's an incredibly important tool for gaining insight or meaning. That's why when we might wake up, we come up with an insight. Or that's why five-minute pause after learning new information actually leads to a memory boost of 20% later for that information. Well, this is something, as you mentioned, Darwin seemed to really know well. I mean, he was such a genius on so many different levels. But he has been, in modern times, criticized for taking 20 years to write the Origin of Species. He would take up a certain topic of scientific study and then lay it aside, both involving natural selection and then all of his other many, many fields of endeavor. Then he'd come back to it. But the studies show that actually his pausing, his delays, were actually the root. They preceded his greatest leaps forward, his invention. He was kind of giving his mind time to percolate, time to assess. That wasn't conscious deliberate time. It was a whole other order of business. This is what modern neuroscience and psychology shows as something called spacing. In other words, students who cram might do well on a test. But they have very little memory for what they learned later because their mind couldn't assimilate it. Then students who take time and space out their learning are able to remember what happened in the fall when they returned for the spring.

So the other really interesting thing about this — and this links to polarization — is that our memory is in its slowness, in its complexity. As we're assimilating information into this branching knowledge, networks that we have, we are actually slower to learn and remember contradictory information. So Darwin's golden rule was to write down, without fail, any evidence or information that was contrary to his theory. In other words, he knew that that was the information. The information that challenges us is the one that's more likely to evaporate. Hence, confirmation bias. Hence, we live on our assumptions. So I was thinking very theoretically, I don't know whether this — you should do an experiment here, Brandon. I think that if we can pause, or delay, or sleep on a problem, or use spacing more often, we might actually be countering the echo chamber nature of our minds. Because whatever we agree with slips into our mind. Whatever we disagree with or challenges us takes more time and maybe more effort. So isn't that a wonderful, insidious secret way to counter this echo chamber nature of our culture and help ourselves, just through doing nothing, become more open to opposite points of view?

Brandon: I think I'd be really interested to see if that could work. I know that there's some research on exposing people to opposite perspectives, and it's backfired. I think this was done by the Polarization Lab at Duke — I think this was on Twitter five or six years ago — where they were able to sort of control the feeds that people would get for a small sample of people. They found that exposing people to the tweets from people on the opposite side actually retrenched their hatred of the other. I think it was for, conservatives became more, I think more distanced from progressives. And progressives, I think there was no effect at all. But I don't think there was any sort of attempt to build in that kind of distancing that you're talking about in terms of spacing, right? So what if people could be more reflexive about what they had just encountered and have an occasion to think about what they had just seen, what it meant?

Maggie: Yes, and there's other research that shows, out of the University of Regina, that allowing people when exposed to misinformation to just pause and reflect. A minute pause actually enables people to discern what misinformation is. I mean, an experiment based on Twitter is, by nature, I would imagine, quick and immediate. That's exactly the kind of encounter with information that seems to confirm our biases. So maybe we need to think about a fallow time as a counter to polarization. The way I put it is putting time on your side.

Brandon: Yeah, that's great. Say more about how that fallow time is related to epistemic uncertainty. I mean, are we sort of trying to distance ourselves from taking for granted what we've learned? What happens there? How does it build our capacity for uncertainty?

Maggie: Well, I would say that, first of all, it's just great to recognize that uncertainty is all around us. It takes these different forms. And so when you are sleeping on a problem, which is maybe more rare, I don't know. We're so outcome-oriented and so immediate. But sleeping on a problem, you are, in essence, wading into uncertainty. You are not coming to an immediate answer. So I think that's very much a type of uncertainty. And so I think maybe that's not answering your question. But I think that fallow time is very much a form of uncertainty that allows us to understand what it means to withstand the urge to come to an instant answer. Then to understand, I think it's also one of the most important aspects of this kind of work is that it shows that knowledge is not set in stone. Because when people experience some kind of fallow time — that might be pausing or resting, napping, sleeping, whatever — those kinds of quiet time that are really, really important for memory are also very important for meaning making. I mentioned the insight, the gaining the insight. But what happens is that your mind, that's the time when your mind is best at abstracting information. So people who are, for instance, taught the layout of a virtual town in an experiment, and they know the town pretty well. Well, those who immediately have to find their way to a new spot in the town do pretty well if they act immediately on their knowledge. Those who sleep on and come return to the lab the next day actually are far better at finding the better shortcuts, or the hidden routes, or the hidden knowledge there. That's because their mind abstracted. Instead of just knowing A and B, they found a hidden C or something. It's really important to be able to generalize and to abstract higher order rules. These kinds of studies have been done with mathematics and language as well. So this time that we treat in our contemporary society as nothingness is actually a time when we realize that information might be beyond the first, the quick glance. Information might come in ways that we don't expect it. Information is constantly dynamic, and wisdom is. It reminded me at the very end of the line. As deep diving into this idea of fallow time and the science of it, it reminds me that my brain is not a computer. The metaphor might have been useful for a while. It's now outdated, and we are seeking new metaphors to relate to the network nature of the brain. But we are suffused with this idea. We're hardwired for this, so you download this, et cetera. Memory is a file cabinet. Basically, it is as much on living, natural, changing organism as anything else in nature. So therefore, we evolve. Our information and memory evolves. We can't expect it to stay the same, and we can't expect it to be instant.

Brandon: Yeah, that's really critical. Yeah, fallow time is also very helpful before writing back and ask to email to someone or responding to your journal reviewers, for taking some distance. It's always good for those things.

Maggie: Yes, I did that this week.

Brandon: You talk a bit about kids growing up with chronic unpredictability, being in a highly stressful environment. I'm familiar with some of the research on sort of adverse childhood experiences. That the more adverse childhood experience you have, the worse your outcomes on a range of different indicators. But you also find some research that talks about hidden talents among kids who grew up in such environments. Can you talk about that?

Maggie: Yes, I think it's very important. Because in much of cognitive psychology, the emphasis has been on the deficits that children accrue after being raised, particularly in unpredictable environments. So while there's always been an emphasis on different types of challenges, lower economic status, or even adoption, or alcoholism in the family, a lot of focus now is on just the idea that the unpredictability might be one of the most important characteristics that shape children. People who are raised in precarious environments tend to score less well on certain tests in school, or their language might be not at the same developmental stage as others who are more affluent, et cetera. But there's been such an emphasis on deficits that the idea that one can gain strengths or have strengths emerge in those same environments has been lost or overlooked. Now, this bottom-line emphasis is that no one wants anyone to be in a precarious environment. That's one of the other limits of uncertainty. We don't want uncertainty be indefinite, and we don't want uncertainty of one's survival, of the next meal. And so that's categorically the bottom line.

At the same time, it's dehumanizing to portray and to treat children who've grown up in precarious environments as deficient and without recognition of their strengths. For instance, Noni Gaylord-Hayden in University of Texas now has done studies of urban black young teens who have been able to be exposed to less violence in their neighborhoods through their ability to be highly attuned to their environment, which is one of the most striking hidden talents. I mean, the scientists who I talked to call this a form of street smart. And so when you are facing something new and unexpected and ambiguous, that unease that we've talked about is actually a kind of good stress. It's actually known as arousal by scientists. You're getting a lot of different stress responses when you face something new. It's distinct from fear, but it kind of wakes up your brain and your working memory and your receptivity. That's heightened when you really live in a precarious neighborhood or home with a lot of upheaval. But that protects you. It might not be this edginess that's not tolerated in society, might not be good in school, and you need other skills. But at the same time, that is truly a kind of adaptability. And so I think that uncertainty can, throughout human history, produce skills as well as decrements in people cognitively. That's something that's gaining a lot of attention now, the hidden strengths or hidden talents movement, among researchers. I think that it's really important. We're just on the cusp of learning more about this and understanding what children who don't know what's going to happen the next day or that evening how they adapt. I also think that, hey, we're all living in an unpredictable world increasingly. And instead of disparaging people who are highly adapted to that, as painful as it can be, we also can learn from them.

Brandon: Yeah, that's really important. I was surprised to read about the work you've done in your book about building uncertainty into our AI projects. I mean, it's commonplace to talk about the emergence of AI systems as another form of uncertainty. But then there's the role of uncertainty in these technological innovations as well, in trying to imagine the future of AI. Can you talk about what you've seen scientists are trying to do?

Maggie: Yes, I've been following the idea of unsure AI, or I call it the 'I don't know robot.' I've been following this idea for quite a few years. It's now fully out in the world. In fact, dozens of laboratories led by some of the greatest pioneers of AI are now working quite urgently to redesign robots and models to be unsure of their aims. And so what does that mean? Well, generally, AI has been created and founded upon rationalist ideas of intelligence that mean you're smart if you get your goal, if you achieve your goal, however you can. That's why AI robots and models are very focused on the most reward-based efficient ways, routes to doing something. The housekeeper robot who fetches you a cup of coffee is going to just do it the most efficient way, despite the fact that you might want a cheaper cup of coffee farther away from your neighborhood, et cetera. And so this is one reason why AI is so tone deaf to humans. Because they're not able to be trained, or improvisational, or even to take new needs and wants of humans into consideration. This is a huge problem, not including the fact that this is one reason why AI is thought to be probably potentially unstoppable and so highly risky to human's future.

The new and incredible push to make AI unsure is to help redesign robots and models to be unsure in their goals. Therefore, a robot that's I'm sure, in its aims, knows what the ultimate goal is but yet is interruptible, it might ask you through a kind of a scenario film on its body or through different kind of codes, it might ask you for more information. You can interrupt it. It can be trained on the fly. And so beta testing of these robots and models, particularly robots, shows that people think they're more smart and they're more cooperative. And you can see why. I mean, if I was married to someone who really thought that they needed to get something done while barreling through whatever I wanted, well, then I would think of them as not either smart or cooperative. And the opposite is true. I went down to Virginia Tech at one of these leading labs run by Dylan Losey and kind of beta tested a robot arm that would be used for manufacturing. It could inflate these various bubbles on its arm to signal to me, to ask me. Did I want the arm to be drawing a line closer to the table, or did I want it to be doing x or y? Then I could funnel information back, and we could calibrate and work together. So it's really has a stupendous potential. This story isn't being told. People are more interested in the cataclysmic or the euphoric panacea models of of AI, just as we were with technology ever since the days of the telephone or the telegraph. We need to have a more mature, nuanced, complex conversation about AI, not throw up our hands and say it's the worst or unthinkingly adopt it as is so easy to do with all the assistance out there. I've been writing about technology since the mid-90's, and this was the most hopeful trend I've ever investigated. I can't wait to see what'll happen. I think it's really exciting.

Brandon: Yeah, well, I for one would welcome our uncertain robot overlords.

Maggie: Exactly.

Brandon: So let me ask you a fun question. Do you think encountering beauty can open us up to this positive uncertainty that you're advocating for?

Maggie: Yes. I mean, I think that if beauty — I think it often does if we are open to being curious about beauty. I think the central connection between beauty and uncertainty perhaps is undiscovered beauty. Because when you're less sure, you can then see the multiple inherent sides, the complexities, the other perspectives that are waiting beyond our first initial glimpse of whatever we think is beautiful. A symphony, a painting, the ocean on a dawn morning, all of those things we can see is beautiful. But I think that when we can be uncertain skillfully, or productively, or just lean into uncertainty instinctually, then we might gain deeper hidden layers of beauty. I think that that's, isn't that really what life is? Also, the second invitation that uncertainty offers vis a vis beauty is to understand what we might think of as ugly maybe beautiful on the inside. And if we could apply that to our relations — to not see someone because they work at Walmart as not being wise, to not think that the guy with the ex-political sign on his lawn is a nobody or someone I won't need to engage with just because of that sign — there's beauty all around us. And so much of it is hidden. Uncertainty, I think, seems to be a possible pathway to finding that beauty.

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. Maggie, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. I've learned so much from your book. It's such a real wealth of stories and wisdom. Is there anything else on these themes? We're trying to understand, are you yearning for certainty, as well as the role of beauty in relation to the kind of uncertainty you're talking about? Anything else that you might want to add?

Maggie: No, we covered so much ground. I thank you for your incredibly good questions. I think just the idea that uncertainty is not tantamount to fear, the unease of uncertainty as a gift, that trying on, seeking the discomfort zone incrementally. I mean, I'm never going to be a bungee jumper. But at the same time, I can try that new dish in a restaurant. I think that step by step, we can understand, which many cultures before us have, that uncertainty is an invitation. It's not an abyss.

Brandon: Yeah, and I think that we mean also it's not opposed to conviction, as you mentioned, right? Uncertainty doesn't mean we are just sort of going to sit on defense and not make decisions and not be decisive. So I think that's really critical, and it comes through very clearly in the book. It's such a pleasure, Maggie. Thank you so much again for being on the podcast.

Maggie: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a wonderful conversation. I appreciate it.

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