
Library member Maggie Jackson is the author of Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure (2023). She spoke on the book in the Members' Room in November 2023 - video here.
Pull out almost any book from the stacks and you’ll likely find a story of uncertainty. Novels are populated with characters grappling with baffling twists of fate. Scientific memoirs tell of discoveries made by wielding doubt to explore the unknown. Guidebooks offer slices of provisional knowledge for travelers operating on the outer frontiers of what they know.
Uncertainty is deeply woven into the fabric of life, and yet it’s something of an enigma. Scientists call uncertainty a “space of possibility,” a realm that hints of multiple options and what is otherwise. At the same time, unsureness is commonly seen today as synonymous with weakness and inertia, studies show. In an instant-answer age, our natural unease with not-knowing has burgeoned into an allergy. Entranced by these paradoxes and complexities, I spent nearly a decade writing a book on the ins and outs of uncertainty, only to emerge from the trenches of this endeavor to find the idea in the news as perhaps never before.
I hadn’t intended to fall in love with the topic. After writing a book on distraction, I set out to explore what it means to think well in a digital age. The first chapter of my new work focused on uncertainty as a state of perplexity to be eradicated as soon as possible. Then I discovered a wealth of new research revealing unsureness as an unexpected driver of adaptability, creativity, curiosity, and resilience, especially in times of flux. I realized that many of our popular assumptions about uncertainty are wrong.
For centuries, uncertainty largely has been treated as a state of the world – the uncertainty, or the unpredictability of life – to be mathematically tamed. The new science of uncertainty is discovering the intricate workings of our psychological uncertainty, i.e., how pausing furthers learning or how shared unsureness sparks better teamwork. In other words, we now have the chance to expand our often-narrow understanding of how humans respond to a changeable world. We can choose not just to tame chance or retreat into certitude, but to wield our unsureness skillfully.
In tackling a big messy book topic, I cast a wide research net brimming with detours and dead ends, then prioritize and frame the essence of all I discover. Ultimately, I focused Uncertain on eight modes of what I call “uncertainty-in-action,” from inhabiting a question in order to resolve a crisis to leaning into the "good stress" of uncertainty to perform well. Over time, I embedded myself in operating rooms, neuroscience labs, robotics centers, artist studios, and, with equal excitement, many library stacks, especially at the remarkable NYSL. Here are a few books from the collection that offer intriguing starting points for discovering the gifts of being unsure: