Uncertainty
What is better; being unsure what is next or dealing with people who are absolutely sure what is next?
My headline for this missive is inadequate. Uncertainty is a big deal; a big deal for individuals navigating life and a big deal for businesses and other organizations attempting to guide themselves into the future. Very significantly, it is a very big deal in science; in understanding the workings of the world and even the universe.
In something of a parallel universe, it’s a big deal in marketing, sales, and politics, too.
Yet, for all the importance that uncertainty and its polar opposite, certainty, play in our lives, we don’t do the best we can to prepare young people for coping with it via their education.
A Podcast About Uncertainty
I’ve thought about uncertainty in the past; perhaps more about certainty and the role it plays in political discourse.
The reality for most people is that uncertainty makes us feel, to some degree, uncomfortable. In low-stakes matters such as the outcome of a big game you care about, it may just be some nervous energy that enhances the experience if you are watching or listening to a live broadcast. If it’s a more important matter (is your home in the path of a major hurricane) the worry and anxiety are much more palpable, causing you to batten down the hatches or even flee your home and hope for the best.
In politics, it seems that no one running for office is allowed to be uncertain about anything. The talking heads offer bland statements that avoid details as much as possible and, at the same time, assure anyone who hears them that they are absolutely positive that they (and only they) have the answer. They are certain! Anything less than absolute certainty condemns them being labeled as “wishy-washy”—a sin for which they will be shamed relentlessly.
The Essence of Science is Uncertainty
This week’s Sunday subscribers’ edition of Numlock features an interview with science journalist Christie Aschwanden. The interview focuses on a new podcase she has done in cooperation with The Scientific American on the subject of uncertainty.
<ASIDE: Numlock is a free, week-daily news brief by Walt Hickey. It is brilliant, must-read every morning stuff for me. The daily edition is free. Click here for more info or to subscribe. END ASIDE>
When I was in school, I learned that the scientific method was an exercise in trying to understand something—to create a mental (and sometimes physical) model for understanding a subject—so that you could say “this is how I think this works.”
One of the most important things about this idea about a scientific method was that it was always subject to revision, updating, and refinement as new information became available. Looking back to the teaching of science a half-century ago, I learned that we were never “certain.” We were taught “this is what we think right now.”
Ms. Aschwanden’s podcast dives deep into science and uncertainty. Here’s a quote from her interview with Hickey that will give you a little bit of a feeling for where she is going. Ms. Aschwanden is speaking:
The other thing that's happened — and I actually wrote a piece about this when I was at FiveThirtyEight, with the headline “There's No Such Thing as ‘Sound Science’” — is that we're living in an environment where we have nefarious interests who are weaponizing uncertainty, and they're really turning it against science. Basically, the idea here is that they tell people, well, scientists aren't sure. Therefore, they don't know, and therefore we can't know anything. A lot of times, this is a delay tactic. It's about undermining the things that we do know. It's about undermining trust in scientists and science.
One of the things that I explore in the podcast is this paradox that science always has an element of uncertainty. If something is absolutely certain, it's not science. Uncertainty underlies everything. At the same time, it's still possible to know things. In fact, science is the very best way that we have to know things and to understand the world. Making sense of that paradox was really my ambition with the podcast, and what I hope that people will take away from it.
This all sounds fascinating and important to me and I plan to tune in. Here’s a link to the podcast via the Scientific American website.
Uncertainty, Certainty, and Probability
All of this brings me to another “peeve” of a sort.
Back in my school days, I was pretty terrible at math. I was bad at algebra, worse at trigonometry, and fared miserably when confronted with quadratic equations. (Oddly, I aced plane geometry and scored 714 out of 800 on the math SAT. Go figure.)
In all my math education, I never spent any serious time studying the most useful part of the field for most people: probability and statistics.
Think about it. Think about how much recreational time and energy is put into various forms of gambling, from lotteries to casinos to online gaming. What underlies all of that? Probability and statistics. How much of our civic/political discourse is devoted to political surveys and forecasts? More probability and statistics. Buying insurance? An exercise in probability and statistics. How about investing—trying to figure out what to do with your 401(k) allocations? Probability and statistics.
My pitch, simply, is that all school math programs should make probability and statistics a central feature of their curricula. Here’s a Ted Talk that makes the case eloquently for how to make math education more relevant today.
Anon.
Ridge