Question Assumptions and Learn to Love Uncertainty

Uncertainty makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Acknowledging what you don’t know can feel like a personal failing.

Unfortunately, failing to recognize those unknowns is also risky. You might miss something important by blindly moving forward.

My work on www.meta-problem.com doesn’t leave a lot of room for definitive answers. As long as we care about multiple things, we have to balance them.

Should I spend this evening reading a book, writing a blog post, or watching a movie? Each comes with a different mix of joy and effort. They also have different effects on the future world.

Decisions are simple when your priorities are clearly defined. If I want to do the most worthwhile thing possible, writing is the obvious choice. The real world doesn’t typically have clearly defined priorities though. Even something as simple as “companies should maximize profit dollars” gets incredibly hairy the second you ask “over what time period?”

My solution is to embrace the unknown. I don’t presume to know how to balance my competing priorities. Instead, I turn it over in my mind. I imagine a future where I’ve chosen to write, or read, or watch a movie. Do I have the energy to follow through with that choice? How would I feel about it tomorrow or next month or next year? How do I feel about each option in the moment?

These questions help me get comfortable with not knowing an answer. I can explore before I commit to a certain path. It’s not that I should feel bad for not knowing something, it’s just that I haven’t discovered it yet.

Problem-solving being a discovery process also makes it considerably less onerous. It takes something that could be unpleasant (sitting with your perceived “weaknesses”) and turns it into an opportunity (to learn something new).

In addition to the joy of discovery, embracing the unknown can also help you get much better answers.

When we make the mistake of assuming certain priorities just so we can get a definitive answer, the decision becomes more a reflection of those assumptions than what’s actually best. A decision to maximize positive impact on the world might ignore the fact that all I am able to write today is meaningless drivel. A decision that I don’t have the energy to write might ignore the fact that some topics generate more energy instead of depleting it.

Once you have decided a certain thing is a problem, it can be hard to re-examine the assumptions that got you there. Talking with others gives you an outsider perspective, as long as you’re willing to listen. Or you can try re-walking your mental path and asking yourself questions as you go.

Each question you ask is an opportunity to identify an assumption you made that might not hold water. Each assumption you recognize is a chance to ask yourself “what if this wasn’t true?”

Why is it worth spending all this effort when often the answer seems obvious? With the advent of AI, Cassie Kozyrkov has been sharing the message that “answers are cheap” while imploring us to focus on asking good questions.

For me, there is joy in the adventure of asking questions. It’s a puzzle to discover what you care about and what you’re willing to spend to get it.

But even if that doesn’t resonate, there are still situations where the decisions are not clear, yet the wrong choices could have a dramatically worse impact on the world. If you haven’t been practicing when the stakes are low, how would you like to make a mistake when they aren’t?

I leave you with my own request: Examine the unknown and remember Tolkien’s advice that ”Not all those who wander are lost.”