Reading Up On Uncertainty

By:
Maggie Jackson

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:

Cover of John Dewey's THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

Reading the work of the brilliant 20th-century psychologist-philosopher John Dewey feels to me like sitting down for a chat with a wise uncle. Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation Between Knowledge and Action (1929) argues that unsureness is not just an inner brake on our propensity for snap judgement, but the foundation of in-depth thinking. Too often, “thought hastens toward the settled,” he writes, and “uncertainty is got rid of by fair means or foul.” Complex situations, in contrast, demand “active questioning” and “productive use of doubt.” His point is crucial. Leaning into, not retreating from, our unsureness when we encounter anything new, ambiguous, or unexpected is the key to adaptability.

Cover of Helga Nowotny's THE CUNNING OF UNCERTAINTY

Uncertainty is a needed antidote to our entrancement with the faux control and predictability offered by big data and algorithmic living, writes social scientist Helga Nowotny in The Cunning of Uncertainty (2016). Uncertainty “lets in the unexpected” and is a “guide to seeing potential,” she writes. Nowotny, former president of the European Research Council, buttresses her argument with compelling stories of scientific and tech enterprises that flourished by wielding uncertainty well or that fell into the trap of certitude. Look for her fascinating tale of how the vaunted Google Flu Trends tracker “grossly … overestimated” the prevalence of the illness for years. 

Cover of Stuart Firestein's book IGNORANCE: HOW IT DRIVES SCIENCE

Stuart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science (2012) lauds ambiguities and contradictions in knowledge as the underestimated fuel of scientific discovery. “We put too much faith in answers,” writes Firestein, a Columbia University neuroscientist. “The known is never safe – it is never quite sufficient.” By definition, ignorance involves blank-slate knowledge gaps, while uncertainty entails partial knowledge, i.e., operating at the edge of what we know. Yet the line between these realms is naturally fuzzy. Like many great works on uncertainty, Ignorance raises crucial questions about how we can expand the horizons of our knowledge. Firestein is a great storyteller, and his delight in “mucking about in the unknown” is infectious. 

Cover of Benjamin Labatut's book WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

Try pairing Ignorance with the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s acclaimed genre-bending When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), a sometimes surreal account of the obsessive scientists whose discoveries of quantum mechanics and other life forces raised as many questions as answers – a result to celebrate, not lament.

Cover of the book THE UPSIDE OF UNCERTAINTY by Nathan Furr an Susannah Harmon Furr

How-to books aren’t for everyone, but a cogent guide to productive uncertainty can help us practice not-knowing each day to better contend with rising flux. In The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown (2022), spouses Nathan Furr (a business school professor) and Susannah Furr (a designer) offer a cornucopia of anecdotes, exercises, and pep talks to help people gain skill at being deftly unsure. For example, they urge readers to try treating a project as an experiment or look out for the “adjacent possible,” i.e., the hidden potential in a challenging situation. “Even in despairing situations, there are new possibilities that can emerge and old hopes that can be salvaged when we learn to navigate the unknown,” they write. 

Cover of Eric Sundquist's book KING'S DREAM

History is replete with achievements that quietly emerge from, not despite, unsureness. Martin Luther King, Jr. forswore pat answers and inflexible agendas. Social revolutions are not “neat and tidy,” he wrote. In the hours and even minutes before he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, he was still courting others’ perspectives and rethinking his remarks. Then ten minutes into the speech, he set aside his text and sketched a dream of equality whose lasting power ultimately lay in its indefiniteness. King responded to the challenges of his day with what I call “the courage of a maybe.” To learn more, read Eric Sundquist’s King’s Dream (2009) and Taylor Branch’s epic Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988). 

When signing copies of my book, I like to add, “Uncertainty Rocks!,” meaning unsureness is positive and helps shatter our assumptions. I hope these books whet your appetite for learning more about the timely wisdom of uncertainty.